To the editor:

The Bush administration, with plenty of help from other Beltway comedians, is rapidly moving the heretofore storied “American dream” further from reality.

They have convinced themselves that returning to 1890 is a good idea. That was when children were allowed to work for below-subsistence wage in horrific conditions, families lived in unrelieved squalor, etc. — you know, the “good old days.”

In addition, they are beginning this return to unrepentant wage slavery by “liberating” Iraq’s oil and people so Halliburton and other friends of the “commanders-in-chief” (I include Cheney) can raid the public treasury.

All this liberating has become more dubious with the revelation that Iran and North Korea probably are very close to possessing nuclear weapons. And you thought the danger of nuclear war was over with the fall of the Soviet Union. Now, more than ever, nukes are likely to fall into the hands of people willing to use them.

In any case, incompetence, cynicism and, yes, fascism dominate the current administration in Washington.

Bush, like yet another incompetent president (who was actually elected), Richard Nixon, has surrounded himself with criminals and allowed them to loot, pillage and make a shambles of what was once the great potential for human good that existed in the United States.

The lunatics in charge of the asylum? I think a better phrase is the criminals are in charge of the public treasury.

Doug Harvey,

Lawrence