This arti­cle first appeared on Informed Com­ment.

People called 'hawks' in Washington, a euphemism for 'murderous maniacs,' often get supported one way or another by the arms industry.

John Bolton helped lie our coun­try into an ille­gal war of aggres­sion that killed sev­er­al hun­dred thou­sand Iraqis, wound­ed over a mil­lion, and dis­placed 4 mil­lion from their homes, helped deliv­er Bagh­dad into the hands of Iran, and helped cre­ate ISIL, which blew up Paris. In a just world, Bolton would be on tri­al at the Hague for war crimes. Instead, he has been pro­mot­ed into a posi­tion to do to Iran what he did to Iraq.

He is also in the back pock­et of the MEK Iran­ian ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion, which despite its vio­lent and smelly past has proved so use­ful to those plot­ting the apoc­a­lyp­tic destruc­tion of Iran that the Wash­ing­ton elite decid­ed to take it off the list of ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions in 2012.

The accept­able polit­i­cal spec­trum inside the Belt­way in Wash­ing­ton DC is a mar­vel to behold. Bernie Sanders, a long-serv­ing sen­a­tor and pub­lic ser­vant won 13.2 mil­lion pop­u­lar votes to 16.8 mil­lion votes for Hillary Clin­ton (i.e. he was backed by 43% of one of the two major par­ties in the coun­try). But Sanders was vir­tu­al­ly blacked out from cor­po­rate tele­vi­sion cov­er­age dur­ing his impres­sive pres­i­den­tial bid, while Jeff Zuck­er turned CNN over to Trump every night at 7:30 pm through­out the sum­mer and fall of 2016 and just let him talk, or what­ev­er he does, for an hour with­out even a sem­blance of jour­nal­is­tic analy­sis. Sup­pos­ed­ly left-lean­ing MSNBC did the same thing.

America’s cor­po­ra­tions love the fas­cist side of the spec­trum, which is obvi­ous from the way they pro­mot­ed Trump and Trump­ism. Zuck­er also hired Cory Lewandows­ki, who was at the time con­trac­tu­al­ly oblig­at­ed to avoid crit­i­ciz­ing Trump, as a CNN com­men­ta­tor. Fas­cism after all favors big cor­po­ra­tions and vil­i­fies and pun­ish­es work­ers and the poor. Under Mus­soli­ni, the Ital­ian poor were plunged into much deep­er poverty.

Tele­vi­sion news also loves the mani­a­cal side of the spec­trum. You sel­dom see nor­mal peo­ple as com­men­ta­tors on cable news, and much of the com­men­tary is polar­ized and super­fi­cial and often sim­ply incor­rect on the facts of the mat­ter. Some­times it is even just a crim­i­nal con­spir­a­cy. Dur­ing the Iraq War, the NYT revealed that the Pen­ta­gon suc­cess­ful­ly pressed on CNN a gag­gle of for­mer gen­er­als, many of them active­ly mak­ing mon­ey off of the Iraq War through con­tract­ing while they were pro­mot­ing it on tele­vi­sion. They pre­sent­ed an Alice in Won­der­land view of the bru­tal US occu­pa­tion of that coun­try as a shin­ing suc­cess. Tom Fen­ton, a career tele­vi­sion jour­nal­ist, once wrote a book sug­gest­ing that tele­vi­sion news is so bad that it is actu­al­ly a stand­ing risk for US secu­ri­ty, since an unin­formed or mis­in­formed pub­lic can­not play the demo­c­ra­t­ic role of watch­dog and is not being alert­ed to gen­uine threats. Maybe the mani­acs draw eye­balls and increase adver­tis­ing dol­lars. Maybe Wall Street doesn’t see peo­ple as mani­acs as long as they advo­cate giv­ing bil­lion­aires more money.

The fas­ci­na­tion with the far right wing and with the mani­a­cal dove­tails in the per­son of Bolton, now Trump’s Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Advis­er. Jesus said that if the blind leads the blind, both will fall into a ditch. The ditch in this case could well be a ruinous war with Iran.

In an sane soci­ety, peo­ple like Bolton wouldn’t be allowed on tele­vi­sion, much less put in charge of Amer­i­can security.

Bolton has assid­u­ous­ly tried to do the same thing he did to Iraq to Iran. Big cor­po­ra­tions like wars. Wars mean you have to man­u­fac­ture more shiny chil­dren-mur­der­ing weapons and bombs, the ulti­mate in planned obso­les­cence. No war, and the fac­to­ries fall silent and the mon­ey-count­ing stops. Peo­ple called ​“hawks” in Wash­ing­ton, a euphemism for ​“mur­der­ous mani­acs,” often get sup­port­ed one way or anoth­er by the arms indus­try. Some­times it is direct and their bank accounts should be examined.

Iran has nev­er had a nuclear weapons pro­gram, and as long as the nuclear deal holds, it has no oppor­tu­ni­ty to devel­op them. It has no heavy water reac­tor. It has a lim­it­ed num­ber of cen­trifuges. It destroyed its stock­pile of ura­ni­um enriched to 19.5% for its med­ical reac­tor. It is being active­ly inspect­ed. No coun­try under active UN arms inspec­tions has ever devel­oped a bomb.

Bolton wants to bomb Iran so bad­ly that he does not care about these facts. He want­ed to bomb Iran him­self if he could, sort of like Slim Pick­ens in Dr. Strangelove. If not he want­ed to have the Israelis do it.

He has a list. He’d like to bomb nuclear-armed North Korea, too.

The Bul­letin of Atom­ic Sci­en­tists that keeps that clock show­ing how many min­utes the world is away from a nuclear mid­night can put it away. With Bolton’s appoint­ment, it is past midnight.