What it is about antisemitism -- today usually couched as "anti-Israel-ism" which usually goes hand in hand with so many other derangements, and an apparently inability to do even the most basic research?

Paul Craig Roberts was once apparently a normal conservative:

Dr. Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury in the Reagan Administration. He is a former Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal, a 16-year columnist for Business Week, and a columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service and Creator’s Syndicate in Los Angeles...

He is also a professor, and held various academic positions in esteemed colleges and universities.

But these days, he's writes stuff like this which appears on illustrious websites like "InfoWars" (home of Alex Jones, founder of the "9/11 Truth" movement, and who today was seen in Denver imploring the crowd to kill Michelle Malkin).

A few snippets:

Thinking about the massive failure of the US media to report truthfully is sobering. The United States, bristling with nuclear weapons and pursuing a policy of world hegemony, has a population that is kept in the dark--indeed brainwashed--about the most important and most dangerous events of our time.

A lot of people -- including myself -- think the media does a poor-to-awful job of covering issues of major importance. But we often disagree in the particulars. In this case...

The power of the Israel Lobby is an important component of keeping Americans in the dark.

... Paul Craig Roberts sees a Jewish conspiracy, where I would point to things like economic ignorance, and too much cheerleading for Obama.

As a result of the US media’s one-sided coverage, few Americans are aware that for decades Israel has been ethnically cleansing Palestinians from their homes and lands under protection of America’s veto in the United Nations.

"Ethnic cleansing" usually means removing or killing a disfavored group. In contrast, the "ethnic cleansing" in Jerusalem and Palestine, oddly, somehow seems to involve the exact opposite: "Jerusalem’s Palestinian growth rate has been high. Jerusalem’s Arab population is growing by 3 percent a year. In contrast, Jerusalem’s Jewish population is growing by a little over 1 percent a year... After the 1967 war, Jerusalem’s population was 74 percent Jewish and 26 percent Arab. 40 years later, in 2007, Jerusalem’s population is 66 percent Jewish and 34 percent Arab." And: "The Palestinian territories have one of the fastest growing populations in the world, with numbers surging 30% in the past decade..."

If that's "ethnic cleansing" it's the strangest example of it I've ever encountered.

Most Americans know of the 2000 attack by Muslim terrorists on the USS Cole in Aden harbor that resulted in 17 dead and 39 wounded American sailors. But few have heard of Israel’s 1967 attack on the USS Liberty that left 34 American sailors dead and 174 wounded. Pressured by the Israel Lobby, President Johnson ordered Admiral McCain, father of the Republican presidential nominee, to cover up the attack. To this day there never has been a congressional investigation.

First, if Israel values the US as an ally, then why attack a warship apparently sent out to support them? Second, why does PCR have to go back over 40 years to find his "smoking gun"? Third, contrary to his assertion "there never has been a congressional investigation", Wikipedia lists seven official US investigations, two of which were done by Congress. Fourth, it's rather astounding to see him morally equate an apparent friendly-fire incident during wartime allies (and he gives no evidence to the contrary) with a deliberate, premeditated attack during peacetime. (Simpleton that I am.)

And regarding Georgia, Putin is a truth-teller; everyone who disagrees with Putin's official line is lying:

The failure of the American media is again evident in the coverage of the Georgian-Russian conflict. The US media presented the conflict as a Russian invasion of Georgia, whereas in actual fact the American and Israeli trained and equipped Georgian military launched a sneak attack to kill and to drive the Russian population out of South Ossetia, a separatist province.

Russian peacekeepers, together with Georgian ones, had been stationed in South Ossetia since the early 1990s. On orders from Mikheil Saakashvili, the American puppet “president” of Georgia, the Georgian peacekeepers turned their weapons on the unsuspecting Russian peacekeepers and murdered them.

Well if the Kremlin says it, it must be so! No doubt Paul Craig Roberts was equally trusting of Russia press releases during his tenure under Reagan? The US media can't be trusted, but Vladimir Putin speaks unvarnished truth!

To the contrary, Michael Totten has been on the ground in Georgia, and has turned up considerable evidence that (shock! amazement!) Russia simply lied: "The South Ossetian militia started it on August 6 when its fighters fired on Georgian peacekeepers and Georgian villages... At the same time, the Russian military sent its invasion force bearing down on Georgia from the north side of the Caucasus Mountains... This happened before Saakashvili sent additional troops to South Ossetia and allegedly started the war." Furthermore, most Georgia has most their military (and all their elite divisions) in Iraq helping the US -- a rather odd military posture for a tiny nation allegedly desiring a premeditated war with a far greater military power. (Who, oddly, just happened to have an overwhelming force amassed at the border at that moment. Just sightseeing, I suspect.)

Most the mainstream media took a "well, both sides are at fault" stance. Yet Roberts unabashedly sides with Putin -- demanding Putin go ever further and directly depose and kill "Mikheil Saakashvili, the American puppet `president' of Georgia" (note his use of scare quotes) -- because Georgia is corrupt by dint of being associated with the United States of America.

This action by Saakashvili, elected with money from the neoconservative National Endowment for Democracy, an election-rigging tool of US hegemony, was a war crime. In truth, the Russians should have hung Saakashvili, as he is far more guilty than was Saddam Hussein.

Saddam Hussein murdered millions, and tortured millions more. He created and filled "children's prisons" with the offspring of those he wanted to control. He invaded two of his neighbors, and threatened to attack Saudi Arabia. He dropped missiles on Israel, and attempted to assassinate a sitting US president.

What has Saakashvili done which is comparable to or worse than that? The worst allegation Roberts' can come up with is that he might have accepted some campaign money from the US Congress. Yes, that is worse than anything Saddam Hussein ever did, apparently.

And we see Paul Craig Roberts cheering for Russia's invasion of another nation, and demanding that they hang her freely-elected leader -- but it is others who are the warmongers???

But it is Russia, not Saakashvili, that the US media has demonized.

Yeah, that Putin guy is a regular pussycat compared to Saakashvili, who is currently meekly pleading with an apparently unconcerned world for help. But in not Paul Craig Roberts' universe. No, in that universe, the US media is just begging us to go to war with Russia.

The bits of his article I've omitted so far are just dripping with contempt for ordinary Americans (including Christians) ...

... the propagandistic version delivered by US media and evangelical pulpits...

Yeah, every time I go to church (which is apparently in synch with CNN!) I hear a discussion of geopolitical situation around the Black Sea. It just sounds like a discussion of the Book of Romans, and the importance of living with integrity, but really, its a coded set of subliminal signals which turn parishioners into slavering, racist warmongers.

The November election is perhaps the last chance to avoid nuclear war. But the opportunity might already have been missed. The Republicans have chosen as their candidate one of the most ignorant warmongers alive. The Democrats’ choice was between one of the most divisive women in America and a man of mixed race with a funny name. Considering American’s taste for war, the Democratic candidate could fail to defeat the GOP war candidate.

Russians and Putin are cheering the attack on Georgia. In contrast, Americans sat around watching the Olympics and (now) the DNC convention. Bush and Rice have signed an utterly toothless ceasefire agreement which is being broken at the very moment, while the administration shows no signs of life on this issue, and is ardently insisting we're not helping Georgia militarily at all.

But that's my reality -- not Paul Craig Roberts'.

And in his reality, opposition to Obama can only be explained by American racism -- even though the numbers are the same as for Kerry, who was white but shared a similar voting record.

Many Americans will vote against Obama because he is black. Why does mixed ancestry confer the black label? If America’s population was predominantly black, would Obama be considered white?

Race and propaganda are more likely to determine the outcome of the November election than any awareness or consideration of real issues by voters.

("Real issues" being, of course, "the Israeli Lobby". No racism here, right Paul?)

But Americans have war, which lets them take out all their frustrations, resentments, and disappointments on “Muslim terrorists” and “Russian aggressors.”

Why, YES, all around me my associates are blaming Putin every day for their problems. (Haha! Just joking. My associates are blaming "the rich" (despite their being upper-class) "corporations" (despite their own corporatism) and the "Christian right" for their problems -- and demanding "change.") I'm one of the few people I know who seem troubled by Russia annexing Georgia -- which, I know, is odd that I should care about at all, apparently. (Who CARES if Russia annexes a few small nations, really? There's no legitimate reason at all that a US citizen should be troubled by such a development.)

So what's up with Dr. Paul Craig Roberts? This is going to sound cruel, but I mean it utterly seriously: Did a blood vessel burst in his brain, causing unnoticed brain damage? Are we witnessing the early stages of a mental illness? I mean, how do you come up with the narrative that Georgia's democratically-elected president is far, far worse than Saddam Hussein? I can usually just chalk up most political differences to differing facts and values, but that's all just a bit too over the edge.

And he didn't even draw a line connecting the "Israel Lobby" and the "nuclear war" we're now going to have because we are too racist to elect Obama. He just seems to haphazardly toss the spectre of Jewish control into the narrative, as though his readers will just understand it somehow all relates: There's an "ethnic cleansing" in Jerusalem ... forty years ago there was a wartime incident .... and somehow that, uh... leads to nuclear war with Russia over Georgia! (I get the impression he could just as easily work "the Israel Lobby", somehow, into a complaint about the quality of McDonald's burgers.)

Sadly, this probably isn't a form of mental illness, because we've seen it before (in Europe) and we're seeing it among many, many others. Ordinary people are reading this material -- or some of the same memes, more dilute -- and buying it. People like Ron Paul and my co-workers would undoubtedly agree with a number of statements, even if they would object to others.

No conclusion, no neat moral lesson here, other than a general concern things are getting weird, and a case study of how a fixation on "the Israel Lobby" seems to go hand-in-hand with America-hatred, reflexively siding with guys like Putin, and living in a bizarre alternate reality which seems wholly unsupported by any facts I can discover.