John McCain has gone so far around the bend that he appears to fully believe his own lies, as is chillingly demonstrated in his Sept. 30th interview with the editorial board of the Des Moines Register.

The way McCain insists, with barely contained rage, that he is and always has been an honest man, pure and unsullied in his truth-telling -- which is tantamount to claiming that he has never told a lie in his entire life -- is a clear sign he is utterly disconnected from reality. It's sad that McCain's torturers in Vietnam broke him; it's sadder still that he remains broken. His rage coupled with the profound shamelessness of his lying clearly demonstrate this. He is a tyrant in waiting; his is the incipient psychosis of the profoundly megalomaniacal.

I do not say these things lightly. I used to have a lot of respect for McCain. But his hiring of the very people who smeared him out of the 2000 race for the Republican nomination and his use of those same smear tactics against Obama made me lose a lot of the respect I once had for him. McCain was a different man as recently as the primaries, but ever since he hired Karl Rove's cronies to run his campaign everything has gone rapidly down hill. The Register interview made me realize that I was seeing a man who lives entirely in a reality of his own invention, a man full of wrath and with no sense of proportion or humility, a man who is borderline psychotic. I wish it were not true, but I am dreadfully afraid it is.

McCain could have used his own brokenness as a source of positive power and vision, a source of compassion and understanding, but instead he has allowed its darkness to overwhelm him, its hunger for aggrandizement to seize him for its own ends.

God help us all.