Calling the ding-a-lings together, Bush sketched out the “existential threat to the United States from a nuclear Iran,” as Max Blumenthal explains it. “I was invited to go to Washington DC to meet with President Bush in the White House along with 12 or 13 other leaders of the pro-family movement,” James Dobson, chairman of the board of Focus on the Family, told his radio audience. “I heard about this danger [from Iran] not only at the White House but from other pro-family leaders that I met during that week in Washington,” he said. “Many people in a position to know are talking about the possibility of losing a city to nuclear or biological or chemical attack. And if we can lose one we can lose ten.”

I’m experiencing that old déjà vu feeling again. Iraq has nukes or biologicals. Saddam is Hitler. Saddam and al-Qaeda will unleash a fury against the United States. Kindergarten children and old ladies will suffer and die. We have to do something. We have to mass murder a whole lot of people. Turn the place into a glass parking lot.

It’s not just Iran this time, though. “If we can lose ten we can lose a hundred,” warned Dobson, “especially if North Korea and Russia and China pile on.” Of course, this is imbecilic, as China, Russia and especially North Korea are not about to nuke anybody, but as we know this sort of inanity works like a charm, as a few million Iraqis can attest.

During his radio show, Dobson discussed this Iran bad hallucination and “existential threat” with “prophecy expert” Joel Rosenberg, a novelist who likes to speculate that the “crisis” in the Middle East is a prelude to the end of the world. For Rosenberg, it’s all about Gog and Magog and the end times, the sort of mental flatulence neocons love. “The world looked at Hitler and just didn’t believe him and tried to appease him the way we’re hearing in Washington today,” Dobson said. “You know, the President seems to me does understand this, as I told you from that meeting I had with him the other day, but even there it feels like somebody ought to be standing up and saying, ‘We are being threatened and we are going to meet this with force—whatever’s necessary.’”

Once again, Hitler is dragged out on the set like a bad character actor appearing in a series of B-movies, repeating the same predictable and inane lines over and over. You’d think these guys would find another villain to exploit, maybe Stalin or Pol Pot, but no, we have to endure the Hitler and Neville Chamberlain comparisons again. How soon we forget, or maybe we never bothered to take note in the first place.

“Some of our listeners might not like that but I tell you, if we didn’t stand up to Hitler, we’d be speaking German today,” Dobson continued, exhibiting the intellectual clarity of a schizophrenic. Nazi Germany, of course, never invaded the United States, or was such realistic. In fact, there was no shortage of bankers and industrialists supporting Hitler before the war, including members of the Bush family. US senator Prescott Bush, Dubya’s grandfather, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany and his assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act.

Dobson’s “existential threat to the United States from a nuclear Iran” comes a few days before U.S. and Iranian officials hold meetings in Baghdad. In order to set the correct tenor, Dick Cheney stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis parked in the Persian Gulf and rattled his saber. “With two carrier strike groups in the Gulf, we’re sending clear messages to friends and adversaries alike,” Cheney declared. “We’ll keep the sea lanes open. We’ll stand with our friends in opposing extremism and strategic threats. We’ll disrupt attacks on our own forces. We’ll continue bringing relief to those who suffer, and delivering justice to the enemies of freedom. And we’ll stand with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region.”

Of course, Iran is not a maritime threat, and it does not pose “strategic threats,” especially not against the armada of U.S. war ships in the neighborhood. In fact, if we are to believe Seymour Hersh, the Pentagon has “been on the ground inside Iran” for some time. “This is a war against terrorism and Iraq is just one campaign,” Hersh quoted a former U.S. intelligence official as saying. “The Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next we’re going to have the Iranian campaign.”

Back in January, Bush “made it clear that Iran was also a key concern by ordering a second aircraft carrier strike group and Patriot missiles to the Gulf while promising to disrupt the republic’s activities in Iraq,” MSNBC reported. “The diplomatic community in Washington suspects that escalation is what Dick Cheney, the vice-president, wants. But with the recent departure of several leading ‘hawks’ from the administration—and the guilty verdict against ‘Scooter’ Libby, his former chief of staff—Mr. Cheney’s powers are not what they used to be.” Substitute “hawks” for chicken hawk neocons, who are determined to make Muslims everywhere suffer, and you have a more accurate description of the situation. Regardless of what Guy Dinmore writes for the Financial Times, it should be obvious Cheney’s powers are not diminished, as there is no shortage of neocons shuttling through the revolving doors at the White House and Pentagon.

“There is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush’s ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change,” writes Dana G. Smith for the American Chronicle. “There is no doubt that this President and those who share power with him, surely will go to war. They have invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran is on the marker.” Smith cites intelligence analyst Vincent Cannistraro, who told the Guardian: “Planning is going on, in spite of public disavowals by Gates. Targets have been selected. For a bombing campaign against nuclear sites, it is quite advanced. The military assets to carry this out are being put in place…. We are planning for war. It is incredibly dangerous.”

In preparation, Bush calls James Dobson to the White House, as Dobson’s radio program, Focus on the Family, reaches more than 220 million people in 164 countries. Dobson, however, is not alone. Pastor John Hagee, the founder of Christians United for Israel, told AIPAC last month that “Iran poses a nuclear threat to the State of Israel that promises nothing less than a nuclear Holocaust” and, sticking to the shopworn script, “Iran is Germany and Ahmedinejad is the new Hitler.” Bruce Wilson, the co-founder of Talk To Action, told Bill Berkowitz: “Hagee’s appearance at AIPAC indicates the growing organizational strength of the Christian Zionist lobby for apocalyptic war and the rise of corresponding Jewish factions both within AIPAC and within Israeli politics that are pushing for dramatically expanded war in the Mideast.”

As Joel Rosenberg views it, the coming “War of Gog and Magog” will go down this year, as “time is short, and the stakes are high.” Iranian Christians, according to the Ezekiel entranced novelist, “see a showdown with Iran coming, and they feel passionately about reaching their fellow Iranians with the good news of Christ’s love.”

Rosenberg’s strange love of Jesus is apparently connected to the Christian Zionist belief that Jesus cannot return until Israel and the United States kill millions of heretical Muslims. “The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West… a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation… and [the] Second Coming of Christ,” Hagee declared last July. “Every Christian should remember the debt of gratitude the Christian community owes to the Jewish community. The Jewish people do not need Christianity to explain their existence or their origin. But Christians cannot explain their existence without Judaism.”

Naturally, all of this nonsense works dandy for the neocons, determined to attack not only Iran but Syria and in fact undermine the whole of the Muslim Middle East. If it takes absurd radio broadcasts by fanatical Christian Zionists and prophesy-reading novelists to push their mass murder message, so be it.

In the demented realm of Bushzarro world, where up is down and black is white, it is all good.