I had no premonition of my ESP. I'd never thought of myself as extraordinary. Back in 2002, I thought millions of others who also foresaw a calamitous quagmire in Iraq were just regular people, like me. I thought we'd simply drawn some sensible conclusions and then taken a principled stand.   But according to charming child of privilege Chelsea Clinton, we were all much more special than that.

Has your mother shown any remorse for the fact that her vote cost Iraqis a million of their lives?" a student asked Chelsea Clinton on Monday at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Ms. Clinton replied: "She cast a vote based on the best available evidence. Perhaps you had clairvoyance then, and that's extraordinary.

You have to wonder why they're keeping such a warm and engaging person away from the media. She could have been sarcastic, flippant, condescending, impatient and dismissive in response to a challenge from an obnoxious peasant. Instead this warm, open and humble young lady chose to suggest that anyone capable of out-thinking her mother in 2002 was gifted with psychic powers and very special indeed. Some people are just givers.

I  rustled through the files and take a look at what I was saying back then-- and it's scary how right Chelsea Clinton is about me... and millions of other people. The following is  excerpted from a Boston Phoenix piece I wrote the very month Hillary Clinton tossed the keys of the armory to George W. Bush. (It references the then recent death of my dear friend, Chris Bracken.)

My current hound, Lloyd, and I now wander the New York countryside that I left lush and green in July but that had time-lapsed into a dry and multicolored burst of wildflowers and leaves during my absence. Fall is ripe with melancholy this year. I walk back inside, turn on the computer or worse, the television, where the cable news networks clamor for war in hopes of a payoff during October ratings sweeps. There are heartening amounts of broad-based opposition to W's bloodlust for Iraq, but the Democrats look like they aren't about to do much to represent that widespread view. After attending to some mere formalities at the UN, where the rest of the world has clearly taken up Bush's offer to decide if it was "with us or against us" by choosing the latter, he will unleash holy hell on the Iraqi people. It won't matter that he has been caught in lie after lie while rattling his red-white-and-blue saber. He has his heart set on war, and like the spoiled rich brat that he is, he'll whine until he gets his way.

We all did everything we could to save Chris Bracken, but sadly, his death was unavoidable. Right now, in far-off Iraq, thousands face even more senseless deaths as the United States prepares to set a synthetic grim reaper in motion. And good people, who just happen to speak a different language, wear different clothes, and live under a different illegitimate leader than did Chris Bracken, are going to die. The ripple  

effect of those deaths will bring unavailing grief to their loved ones, just as grief engulfed Chris's survivors. And they will hate the United States as Chris's survivors hate liver cancer. The only difference between their grief and ours is that liver cancer, the cause of our anguish, couldn't have been stopped if the American people rose up and spoke out against it with righteous indignation.

And so, at the end of heartbreaking and weary months, I sit and wonder when it will be that my country will gather the courage to become morally superior to liver cancer. As it stands, it would be a marked improvement if the USA were merely to become its moral equal. As we sat at that memorial service in Vermont last summer, we didn't have to worry about liver cancer returning and carpet-bombing those of us who survived its cruel theft of life.

Liver cancer may have destroyed the dream Chris had of moving into his new house with Amy and Hali, but it didn't destroy the house, much less all the other houses and towns and cities in the area. But make no mistake, that's exactly what George Bush is asking us to endorse: the massacre of innocents and the destruction of all that people need to get by each day. He'll tell us that we must strike to keep Hussein from using chemical weapons. He won't mention that the United States will surely destroy Iraq's sewer systems, thus causing cholera and other epidemics and many more horrifically painful and needless deaths. He will invoke 9/11 and a commitment to fight terrorism, while surrounding himself with retro-terrorist bureaucrats like Richard Armitage (deputy secretary of state and current roving minister of doom), Elliott Abrams (who has some bogus National Security Council title concerning democracy), John Negroponte (UN ambassador), John Poindexter (who came and went from his job at the now officially defunct but definitely looming Total Information Awareness project), and so many more who engineered the United States–backed death-squad activity that lethally intimidated the peasants of Central America back when Bush's poppy was vice-president. He'll wrap his intentions in the flag as he wipes his ass with the Bill of Rights. He'll tell us the sky is about to fall unless there is a regime change, and he'll equate Saddam Hussein with Hitler. But   he will be the one who has sent troops all over the globe, driven by dreams of world domination. That thug Hussein would love to do the same, but as a world-beater he's a piker compared to Bush and his carnivorous handlers.

It's almost as if someone else typed those words! I mean if superior people like the Clintons, who so graciously give of their lives just so they can be in charge of ours, didn't see  disaster coming and I did, well there just can't be an earthly answer.  

This goes far beyond me. Millions spoke out against this war before it even started. Where did this wide-scale, other-worldly vision come from? Could it be other worlds? Are peace activists unwitting extraterrestrials? Is Chelsea Clinton telling us we are wasting our time concerning ourselves with electoral politics? Does she understand that her mother is only human and therefore unable to help the few, the clairvoyant, the extraordinary? Would we be better off studying Tom Cruise's beliefs than Hillary Clinton's voting record? Is that what Chelsea Clinton is trying to tell us?

We'll never know until we can get a little more access to the delightful and generous young hedge-funder that is Chelsea Clinton.