But the corruption extends beyond the usual meaning of a dysfunctional moral compass to include the incapacity for intelligent reasoning and self-reflection. The political class of most powerful country on earth has been so over-indulged in arrogance and hubris that it is no longer able to realize how ridiculous it appears to the rest of the world. In short, criminal insanity seems to be the condition of US rulers and their puppets, including those in the mass media.

The American president and his cronies on Capitol Hill preen and talk as if into a charmed mirror that reflects loveliness to the beholder, yet the rest of the world sees ghastly, frightening clowns, loaded up on self-righteousness, delusion, inordinate firepower and a reckless ease for squeezing the trigger.

Indeed, such is the ridiculous posing by Washington that the US – the world’s number-one terrorist state – seems to have added a new weapon to its arsenal of planet-destroying armaments – one that induces uncontrollable laughter in victims to the point of death from asphyxiation or from a busted gut.

President Barack Obama may have been testing out this new “mass laughter” weapon last weekend when he announced that he was seeking approval from Congress to launch military strikes on Syria. This was after his administration accused the Syrian government of “murdering over 1,000 of its own people” with chemical weapons in the suburbs of Damascus on 21 August.

The death of hundreds of innocent civilians, including women and children, is certainly no laughing matter. But it is a cruel mockery to their memory that the US president should try to use these deaths as an excuse to escalate his transparent and criminal agenda for regime change in Syria.

While the Americans huff and puff that they have “high confidence” in their secret allegations against the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad, the rest of the world is more convinced that it is the US-backed mercenaries who committed mass murder with chemical weapons supplied by Washington’s ally Saudi Arabia.

So out-of-control is the delusional US president that it took his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to make a telephone call and remind Obama that he is a Nobel Peace Laureate and should act accordingly instead of playing with fire that might engulf the region and the entire globe.

“I would like to address Obama as a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. Before using force in Syria, it would be good to think about future casualties,” Putin said, as if he was addressing an imbecile, which he was. “Russia is urging you to think twice before making a decision on an operation in Syria.”

Apart from the world’s most reactionary and lawless regimes, Saudi Arabia and Israel, the rest of humanity is also urging the American government to think twice before it murders countless more people in a region already teetering on the brink of conflagration. Even the normally gung-ho British have backed away from such reckless adventurism.

Obama says that he “only” intends “limited missile strikes” on Syria as a “punitive” measure to deter the future of chemical weapons.

In his address from the White House Rose Garden on Saturday, Obama spoke with words scented with cloying hypocrisy. “What message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no price? We are the United States of America, and we cannot and must not turn a blind eye.”

This is from the leader of the same terror state that supplied former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein with chemicals weapons and the coordinates to gas thousands of Iranians and Kurds during the 1980s; it is the same United States of terror that dropped white phosphorus on the Iraqi city of Fallujah and others in 2005-2006 during its genocidal war of illegal occupation; it is the same terror state that poisoned Iraq and generations of children with depleted uranium; the same terror state that supplies Israel and other allies such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain with a plethora of toxic chemicals that are then fired into civilian homes every day of the week.

Nobody in their right mind believes a word that the US rulers are saying about chemical weapons in Syria. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov noted how the US says it has “super convincing” evidence that the Syrian government is responsible yet the Americans won’t present the supposed intelligence.

Lavrov also hinted at the lunacy of official American thinking by pointing out the contradiction in Washington’s claims to support the elusive peace conference in Geneva but not before unleashing a blitzkrieg on the country.

“And after they bomb Syria, they will be ready for convening the conference called Geneva II,” said the Russian diplomat, as if describing a bloodthirsty psychopath, which is actually appropriate.

The US stands virtually alone in the face of humanity with its self-righteous regard to bomb any one it wants to based on its own outrageous self-serving lies. Even its plaything puppets like UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, Canada’s Prime Minster Stephen Harper, the pathetic Arab League and NATO’s Anders Fogh Rasmussen have all distanced themselves from the proposed US military attack on Syria.

“I’m comfortable going forward without the approval of a United Nations Security Council that, so far, has been completely paralyzed and unwilling to hold Assad accountable,” said Obama.

Comfortable? With committing a war of aggression by launching hundreds of cruise missiles on a sovereign country that has not and does not threaten the US?

What Obama means by the UN Security Council being paralyzed is that it refuses to bend over backwards to satisfy Washington’s criminal bloodlust and state terror.

Part of this terrorism is to put a gun to the head of Syria and the rest of the world as the next few days go by waiting for the US Congress to deliberate on whether or not to grant itself the right to bomb another country – premised on its arrogant delusions of grandeur and raving fabrications.

To this end, Obama said: “Our military has positioned assets in the region. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs [General Martin Dempsey] has informed me that we are prepared to strike whenever we choose. Moreover, the Chairman has indicated to me that our capacity to execute this mission is not time-sensitive; it will be effective tomorrow, or next week, or one month from now. And I’m prepared to give that order.”

Such crazed, self-indicting ranting would be funny, if it weren’t so appallingly criminal.