That way madness lies . . .

My father had a favorite phrase when coming upon people and situations that defied all common sense. “Cloud cuckoo land,” he’d say, nostrils arched upward in anger, usually looking up from a newspaper or listening to a television news report.

I think of him and of his phrase often these days, which seem at times to honor both clouds and their cuckoos.

Yesterday, I heard a NATO spokesman bitterly complain about the increase in Russian cyberattacks on Western institutions and infrastructure. These laments seem to come on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on the state of the Ukraine war, now in a deeply delicate phase.

The key word in the sentence above is “war,” and it is that word that qualifies NATO’s rage as coming squarely from cloud cuckoo land.

In case the spokesman missed it, NATO and Russia are at war, albeit indirectly. Massive European and American help to Ukraine has put the two opponents back on familiar sides of the Cold War fence. Russia’s enlistment of North Korea as an ally — interesting since Moscow refused to openly assist North Korea during the Korean War — makes the enmity obvious. Add long-range missiles and land mines to the mix, and the scope of the war only expands. All that’s missing is the presence of European and American combat troops, whose boots, if ever deployed, would make for a third world war.

So to whine about Russian cyberattacks is pure cloud cuckoo land. Of course Russia is high on hackers. It lacks the troops to make more traditional incursions into the Baltic States, for example. NATO at times behaves as if bad old Russia had suddenly taken to doing mean things.

So to whine about Russian cyberattacks is pure cloud cuckoo land. Of course Russia is high on hackers. It lacks the troops to make more traditional incursions into the Baltic States, for example.

Poppycock.

One more time for good measure: A war is raging, and Russia is visibly battling the West. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, cloud cuckoo land whining set aside.

But these are not the only clouds and cuckoos.

From time to time an Israeli figure, perhaps a rabbi, is assassinated in an Arab country, most recently in the United Arab Emirates.

Israel and the government of Benjamin Netanyahu immediately become bitterly agitated, arguing antisemitism as if the event occurred in a vacuum. Its spokesmen, like those of NATO, flaunt their outrage. This may be even more cloud cuckoo land-ish than anything regarding NATO and Russia.

Israel, using the pretext of a more than year-old terrorist attack, has been savaging Gaza, and now Lebanon, in Blitzkriegs, sparing no innocents and bombing civilian facilities at will. Soon, the Palestinian death toll will reach 50,000.

Yet Israel cries foul over occasionally murdered rabbis.

Please.

Never have the gates to my father’s land been swung so open. As with NATO, the matter of an existing war — not a minor skirmish — is indignantly set aside. As always, one dead Jew equals a huge quantity of Arabs, since they belong to a lesser god.

So be it, no matter the harm, no matter the pain. In cloud cuckoo land, anything goes, and all statements by anointed good guys are indelibly right.

I can see my father on his favorite couch, putting down his paper and shaking his head at me. Can what I am saying be even mildly true?

Yes, father, they are, just as some of the noble defenses were true when it came to burning up civilians during Vietnam. Protective reactions, the Pentagon called these horrors.

Cloud cuckoo land then as now, Barbara Tuchman’s “March of Folly” with it.