My geeky political friends will get a kick out of this: Democrats.com is sponsoring a petition to have George Bush declared insane and removed from office under the terms of the 25th amendment, which allows the vice president and a majority of the cabinet to remove the president from office.

The petition cites a number of Bush’s public statements as evidence that the president has lost his mind. Perhaps the most egregious among them is this one, in which he claims that we invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein refused to admit U.N. weapons inspectors (a statement that is a clear example of the president practicing the very same “revisionist history” he claims to dislike so much).

“The fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power…”

Could Bush possibly have forgotten that the inspectors left Iraq on his orders? Doesn’t he remember defying the U.N., insisting that the inspections had failed? (Pardon me for pointing out that the Coalition Provisional Authority hasn’t done any better. Has it failed, too, by Bush’s definition?)

In another statement, Bush claims that God told him to start wars:

“God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did…”

That’s very interesting, in part because it clashes so strikingly with the opinion of an acknowledged expert in the interpreting-messages-from-God field, namely the Pope. (“The Vatican has already made it amply clear that it opposes the US administration’s plan for war against Iraq to remove President Saddam Hussein from power.”)

Okay, you can argue that Bush is not Catholic, so the Pope’s opinion doesn’t matter to him. That may be true, but even the head of Bush’s own Methodist church opposed the war. (“President George Bush’s own Methodist church has launched a scathing attack on his preparations for war against Iraq, saying they are ‘without any justification according to the teachings of Christ’.”) Apparently, Bush thinks he is a better Christian than anyone else alive, for only he can hear what God is really saying. Is that it? Seeing as how Bush has trouble interpreting messages from his own staff (Tenet, Hadley, etc.), I would be a little skeptical of his ability to decipher messages from a Higher Power.

And then, of course, there is also the infamous “Bring `em on” remark, which is an incredibly bad thing for a president to say.

The Democrats.com petition itself requires a fairly heavy dose of wishful thinking (I strongly doubt either Bush or Cheney would ever invoke the 25th amendment for reasons of insanity), but it is interesting to see that people are beginning to think that Bush might actually be insane, in the clinical and legally actionable sense of the word. (A British friend of mine has been suggesting as much for quite some time now.) Personally, I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say the president is insane, but I have long held that his approval ratings have been about 60 percentage points too high for his entire presidency.

Given his imperial designs, though, it does seem somewhat appropriate that the Democrats.com petition likens Bush’s imperial presidency to The Madness of King George.

Sign the petition if you think Dick Cheney would be a saner president. Personally, I don’t, but the petition itself amused me.