When President Bush came in and started acting all crazy, shaking his multi-trillion-dollar GI Joe set at Afghanistan and then Iraq and Iran and North Korea, many of us out here in reality-land were horrified. And at the same time curious. It all looked so crazy -- and yet these are smart, educated, non-self-destructive people who are doing this. So maybe it's not nuts, we said. Maybe they know something I don't know. Maybe they have a plan. In arguments with those who supported the war(s), this was what I heard every time. They wouldn't do this all for spite. They aren't that nuts. They aren't that dumb. They don't hate America.

Wrong. As Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Fitzgerald knock down and splinter the Administration's cheap facade of invicibility, one militaristic, pro-American right-winger after another wanders from the wreckage to tell us what we feared all along. They are that nuts. They are that dumb. They do hate America. The latest is here (abridged version follows) -- from Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff for former Secretary of State Colin Powell:

Foreign policy had been usurped by a "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal," and President Bush has made the country more vulnerable, not less, to future crises.

Secrecy, arrogance and internal feuding had taken a heavy toll in the Bush administration, skewing its policies and undercutting its ability to handle crises.

"I would say that we have courted disaster, in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita - and I could go on back," he said. "We haven't done very well on anything like that in a long time."

"If something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence."

Mr. Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and former director of the Marine Corps War College, said that in his years in or close to government, he had seen its national security apparatus twisted in many ways. But what he saw in Mr. Bush's first term "was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberration, bastardizations" and "perturbations."

"What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues," he said.

The former aide referred to Mr. Bush as someone who "is not versed in international relations, and not too much interested in them, either."

So we're not crazy. They're not informed. They really are nutso.

Update October 26: More evidence from A Tiny Revolution.