Peter Berkowitz, in the Wall Street Journal, describes a personal encounter with the hydrophobic Bush-hatred infecting America’s chattering classes.

This distinguishing feature of Bush hatred was brought home to me on a recent visit to Princeton University. I had been invited to appear on a panel to debate the ideas in Princeton professor and American Prospect editor Paul Starr’s excellent new book, “Freedom’s Power: The True Force of Liberalism.” To put in context Prof. Starr’s grounding of contemporary progressivism in the larger liberal tradition, I recounted to the Princeton audience an exchange at a dinner I hosted in Washington in June 2004 for several distinguished progressive scholars, journalists, and policy analysts.

To get the conversation rolling at that D.C. dinner—and perhaps mischievously—I wondered aloud whether Bush hatred had not made rational discussion of politics in Washington all but impossible. One guest responded in a loud, seething, in-your-face voice, “What’s irrational about hating George W. Bush?” His vehemence caused his fellow progressives to gather around and lean in, like kids on a playground who see a fight brewing.

Reluctant to see the dinner fall apart before drinks had been served, I sought to ease the tension. I said, gently, that I rarely found hatred a rational force in politics, but, who knows, perhaps this was a special case. And then I tried to change the subject.

But my dinner companion wouldn’t allow it. “No,” he said, angrily. “You started it. You make the case that it’s not rational to hate Bush.” I looked around the table for help. Instead, I found faces keen for my response. So, for several minutes, I held forth, suggesting that however wrongheaded or harmful to the national interest the president’s policies may have seemed to my progressive colleagues, hatred tended to cloud judgment, and therefore was a passion that a citizen should not be proud of being in the grips of and should avoid bringing to public debate. Propositions, one might have thought, that would not be controversial among intellectuals devoted to thinking and writing about politics.

But controversial they were. Finally, another guest, a man I had long admired, an incisive thinker and a political moderate, cleared his throat, and asked if he could interject. I welcomed his intervention, confident that he would ease the tension by lending his authority in support of the sole claim that I was defending, namely, that Bush hatred subverted sound thinking. He cleared his throat for a second time. Then, with all eyes on him, and measuring every word, he proclaimed, “I . . . hate . . . the . . . way . . . Bush . . . talks.”

Read the whole thing.

John Hawkins went touristing over in the fever swamps of Daily Kos, and has returned with reports of the toll George W. Bush has wreaked upon the private lives of its contributors.

Examples:

angrybird: I wrote a diary a short time ago about how the Bush administration helped ruin my marriage. It wasn’t because my husband was a Bush supporter or anything…it was because of all the stresses from job loses, living without health insurance and getting sick, to my husband being forced to take a job where he wasn’t home much that helped ruin my marriage. ...

begone: Before my head began exploding a few years ago in response to Busharama, I’d exercise a lot… I mean, almost daily, joyous-type exericising. Now I come home with a slight frown on my face and come here to hear the news & be a mojo-mama even if too tired to comment, and hang for hours here and on other blogs, as if the light will shine again and I’ll be present to hear the BREAKING news about that. Bush, I blame you for my new-ish extra 20 pounds….

delphine: I haven’t had a relationship since he took office. But I can say that I’ve been trashed by potential online dating partners for stating I couldn’t date anyone who thinks bush is a good presznit….

meldroc: Bush has also damaged my mental health.

The Kos consensus is that the current president is so totally diabolical that, even from his Oval Office location many miles away, he can literally drive moonbats mad.

Of course, that is frequently a very short trip.

Read the whole pity party, and laugh.

The Daily Mail gleefully chronicles Mr. Morgan’s inevitable rebuke for hubris.

If he didn’t believe in karma before, Piers Morgan must surely do now.

The ex-newspaper editor, now a columnist for The Mail on Sunday’s Live magazine, took great delight in making fun of President Bush for falling off a Segway – the two-wheeled, motorised, gyroscopically balanced scooter that, its makers promise, will never fall over.

His paper, the Daily Mirror, ran the headline in 2003: “You’d have to be an idiot to fall off, wouldn’t you Mr President.” It added: “If anyone can make a pig’s ear of riding a sophisticated, self-balancing machine like this, Dubya can.” So, it seems, can Mr Morgan.

He broke three ribs after falling off the Segway at 12mph in California – just three days before he was due to make his biggest TV appearance to date, as a judge on the grand final of reality show America’s Got Talent. ...

He had to be taken to hospital to be patched up, but despite his misfortune, Morgan made it to the TV studio. His celebrity friends have been chortling at his expense. Simon Cowell has urged people to make Morgan laugh because ‘it causes Piers absolute agony’.

Writing in Live magazine this week, Morgan is rueful about the comments on Mr Bush. He says: “Since only he and I appear to have ever fallen off one, I think the makers of the Segway can probably still justifiably claim the machines are “idiot-proof”.”

video

CNN’s technical staff miscaptions this image of his successor Gordon Brown and outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

What a typical piece of leftist infantilism! They can’t even think clearly enough to remember that if Bush resigned, Dick Cheney would become president, which they wouldn’t like one bit.

Of course, you don’t have to travel all the way to Kurdistan to find superstitious savages, you just need to locate a few democrats.

Rasmussen Reports:

Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent (35%) of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know, and 26% are not sure.

I read this kind of paranoid lunacy on my class list from time to time. “Republicans wanted a war, so the Military-Industrial Complex would get rich, and to benefit the oil companies.” I’ve frequently suggested that if my classmates really believe this stuff, they should go out and buy stock in the relevant companies, and become fabulously wealthy.

Take Halliburton. Dick Cheney is obviously looking out for them (any leftist believes). Why, in November of 1997 (during Clinton’s presidency) Halliburton’s stock was at $31.62, and after 7 years of Dick Cheney conspiring for their benefit, in yesterday’s trading session that same Halliburton stock closed at $32.28.

The Anchoress has written a moving tribute to President Bush, titled The President of All the People, which views his failures to respond more vigorously and effectively to his opponents as explicable in religious terms.

Who knows? Maybe she’s more correct than most of the rest of us as to what really makes George W. Bush tick.

Don Surber shows a wonderful picture of President Bush, helping Democrat Sen. Robert Byrd walk as they gather to confer a congressional Gold Medal to the Tuskegee airmen who served in World War II.

Sen. Robert Byrd is, of course, ... as partisan a Democrat as one may find. In the picture, Bush holds Byrd’s hand with great gentleness and compassion, in no way demeaning Bryd or taking away his dignity. But you can see that he is firmly grasping the old man’s hand; Bush is concentrating entirely on serving him safely to his seat.

Surber says that the picture didn’t get picked up by many papers and suggests that it’s because the press is reluctant to remind people that President Bush is an utterly decent, humane and gentlemanly man. Nothing good is permitted to be shown of President Bush, these days. Doesn’t fit the “Bush is evil and moronic” template. I more than suspect that Surber is correct.

It’s been that way for a while, actually. I recall that a year after 9/11, President Bush’s poll numbers were still in the stratosphere; they were very high heading into Iraq. They were still pretty high during the “cedar revolutions” and the “orange revolutions” – the so-called “Arab Springtime” during which time Democracy seemed to be threatening to break out all over the world. It was all happening under Bush’s watch, and Bush was dancing with these folks as they demonstrated their hopefulness.

That was only in two years ago, in May, 2005. Feels like half an age, doesn’t it? ...

President Bush drives us crazy. We want him to fight back. He won’t. We want him to “save” himself. He won’t. He won’t “save” his presidency, either. He won’t “save” his party. He won’t “save” his legacy.

President Bush is doing what is unthinkable – he is staying true to the task laid out before him, to serve all the people. He is remaining faithful to that and he is counting on his God to do the rest, as his God has promised.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Terrye.

says Gerard Baker in the London Times, who also echoes the Jonah Goldberg thesis that it would serve the democrats right to win in 2008. The theory that the burden of responsibility would sober the democrat leadership is an interesting one, I think, but it is obviously not necessarily right.

Somewhere, deep down, tucked away underneath their loathing for George Bush, in a secret place where the lights of smart dinner-party conversation and clever debating-society repartee never shine, the growing hordes of America-bashers must dread the moment he leaves office.

When President Bush goes into the Texas sunset, and especially if he is replaced by an enlightened, world-embracing Democrat, their one excuse, their sole explanation for all human suffering in the world will disappear too. And they may just find that the world is not as simple as they thought it was.

It’s been a great ride for the past six years, hasn’t it? George Bush and Dick Cheney and all those pantomime villains that succour him — the gay-bashing foot soldiers of the religious Right, the forktailed neoconservatives with their devotion to Israel, the dark titans of American corporate boardrooms spewing their carbon emissions above the pristine European skies. Having those guys around for so long provided a comfortable substitute for thinking hard about global challenges, a kind of intellectual escapism.

When one group of Muslims explodes bombs underneath the school buses of another group of Muslims in Baghdad or cuts the heads off humanitarian workers in Anbar, blame George Bush. When Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, denounces an imbalanced world and growls about the unpleasantness of democracy in eastern Europe, blame George Bush. When the Earth’s atmosphere gets a little more clogged with the output of power plants in China, India and elsewhere, blame George Bush.

Some day soon, though, this escapism will run into the dead end of reality. In fact, the most compelling case for the American people to elect a Democrat as president next year is that, in the US, leadership in a time of war requires the inclusion of both political parties, and in the rest of the world, people will have to start thinking about what is really the cause of all our woes.

Ben Stein had a moment of satori during the State of Union speech.

So there I was, lying in my bed in Malibu with my dogs, watching Mr. Bush’s State of the Union speech. I thought it was darned good. Realistic, gracious, modest, sensible. I happen to think we should get out of Iraq yesterday, but I thought Mr Bush put forward his case well. And Congress responded graciously and generously on both sides of the aisle.

Then, whaam, as soon as the speech was over, ABC was bashing him, telling us how pathetic he was, how irrelevant he was, how weak he was, how unrealistic he was.

Right after that, Jim Webb gave a very short speech biting Bush’s head off—but not making any concrete proposals about anything. No network person mentioned how simple minded and unrealistic he was.

Then, tonight, the next night, I walked into the kitchen where my wife had left the radio going with NPR to amuse the cats. NPR was having a call-in show talking about the State of the Union. The first speaker I heard was a country music legend, Merle Haggard, who said he had never seen things so bad in this country. Then a legion of anonymous callers chimed in with similar thoughts.

And suddenly it hit me. The media is staging a coup against Mr. Bush. They cannot impeach him because he hasn’t done anything illegal. But they can endlessly tell us what a loser he is and how out of touch he is (and I mean ENDLESSLY) and how he’s just a vestigial organ on the body politic right now.

The media is doing what it can to basically oust Mr. Bush while still leaving him alive and well in the White House. It’s a sort of neutron bomb of media that seeks to kill him while leaving the White House standing (for their favorite unknown, Barack Obama, to occupy).

Today’s Washington Post opinion section serves up in the guise of analysis pure leftist partisanship from such sources as radical historian Eric Foner.

Foner would really fit in among the radical wing of the Republican Party in 1859, or possibly among the Parisian tricoteuses of the French Revolutionary Terror.

His editorial notes a current near unanimity of academic opinion on just who the good and the bad presidents were, which is hardly surprising in an era in which former 1960s radicals typically monopolize university history departments. The “great” presidents, if you’re a Marxist, are those who most dramatically expanded the powers of the state: Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Wilson, Lyndon B. Johnson.

The worst presidents, from the Bolshie perspective are all the pre-Civil War presidents who failed to make war on the Southern states on behalf of the Negro, all the post-Civil War presidents not keen on continuing to punish the South, the interloping 1920s Republicans, and the diabolical Richard Nixon.

Foner adds President James Knox Polk to his personal worst list. Polk annexed Texas, balanced the federal budget, negotiated a settlement with Britain securing the Oregon Territory, defeated Mexico, and acquired California and the territories of today’s Southwest United States, all in a single term.

Obviously, George W. Bush ought to be flattered at being compared to Mr. Polk.

John L. Overland, Jr., Esq.

Even as I write this I know that people smarter than I will have written their own concise and analytical commentaries as to what went wrong for Republicans during the mid-term elections of 2006 and for me, that’s OK. My intent is not to analyze what went wrong for us but to express my own appreciation to a man often belittled, often maligned, and often unjustly so. That man is my President, George W. Bush, and right now I sincerely believe that the President needs some kind words. He has received damned little in the course of his Presidency. Instead, throughout his Presidency and certainly in the last week he has suffered the most vicious attacks, consistently from the Left but lately even from certain of us on the Right, and it’s time to provide an honest appraisal.

I have a few problems with Gerge W. Bush myself, but I always reconsider when I reflect upon his ability to drive the lefties right around the bend. Nobody who affects leftists the way the crucifix affects vampires can be all bad.

The Anchoress is moved to justified indignation by the discreditable behavior of certain people at the Toronto Film Festival, celebrating and applauding a film made entirely for the purpose of dramatizing the assassination of President Bush.

(Ths kind of fantasy) makes me realize that this Bush hate on the left is not about Bush. It’s not about Iraq, it’s not about the war on terror, it’s not about tax cuts…it’s not about Bush. It’s about the foot-stomping tantrums of the perpetually adolescent who – even before the 2000 elections – could not bear even the idea of their side being out of power in congress and out of the White House. It has never been about Bush. They’d hate any Republican in that White House just as roundly and completely, on any pretext.

All this time, we thought it might be about something. Now, we realize, all this hate is about nothing but them, and what they want and their childish angst. It is about the delay to the coup they had in place and their frustrations at having to wait and in some cases, rebuild.

I’m beginning to think they deserve the world they want. But I surely don’t, and neither do my kids. Neither does the rest of the world.

Jonah Goldberg suggests that criticism of Bush could be sometimes (just a trifle) exaggerated.

LORD KNOWS I have my problems with President Bush. He taps the federal coffers like a monkey smacking the bar for another cocaine pellet in an addiction study. Some of his sentences give me the same sensation as falling backward in one of those “trust” exercises, in which you just have to hope things work out. Yes, the Iraq invasion has gone badly, and to deny this is to suggest that Bush meant for things to turn out this way, which is even crueler than saying he failed to get it right.

But you know what? It’s time to cut the guy some slack.

Of course, I will get hippo-choking amounts of e-mail from Bush-haters telling me that all I ever do is cut Bush slack. But these folks grade on the curve. By their standards, anything short of demanding that a live, half-starved badger be sewn into his belly flunks.

Besides, the Bush-bashers have lost credibility. The most delicious example came this week when it was finally revealed that Colin Powell’s oak-necked major-domo Richard Armitage — and not some star chamber neocon — “outed” Valerie Plame, the spousal prop of Washington’s biggest ham, Joe Wilson. Now it turns out that instead of “Bush blows CIA agent’s cover to silence a brave dissenter” — as Wilson practices saying into the mirror every morning — the story is, “One Bush enemy inadvertently taken out by another’s friendly fire.”

And then there’s Hurricane Katrina. Yes, the federal government could have responded better. And of course there were real tragedies involved in that disaster. But you know what? Bad stuff happens during disasters, which is why we don’t call them tickle-parties.

The anti-Bush chorus, including enormous segments of the mainstream media, see Katrina as nothing more than a good stick for beating on piñata Bush’s “competence.” The hypocrisy is astounding because the media did such an abysmal job covering the reality of New Orleans (contrary to their reports, there were no bands of rapists, no disproportionate deaths of poor blacks, nothing close to 10,000 dead, etc.). It seems indisputable that Katrina highlighted the tragedy of New Orleans rather than create it. Long before Katrina, New Orleans was a dysfunctional city in a state with famously corrupt and incompetent leadership, many of whose residents think that it is the job of the federal government to make everyone whole.

The Mississippi coast was hit harder by Katrina than New Orleans was. And although New Orleans’ levee failure was a unique problem — one the local leadership ignored for decades — the devastation in Mississippi was in many respects more severe. And you know what? Mississippi has the same federal government as Louisiana, and reconstruction there is going gangbusters while, after more than $120 billion in federal spending, New Orleans remains a basket case. Here’s a wacky idea: Maybe it’s not all Bush’s fault.

Then, of course, there’s the war on terror. Democrats love to note that Bush hasn’t caught Osama bin Laden yet, as if this is the most vital metric for success. Yes, it’d be nice to catch Bin Laden — no doubt Ramsey Clark, the top legal gun for both LBJ and Saddam Hussein, will be looking for a new client soon. But even nicer than catching Bin Laden is not having thousands of dead Americans in New York, Washington and L.A. Contrary to all expert predictions, there hasn’t been a successful attack on the homeland since 9/11. Indeed, the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly contains a (typically) long, exhaustively reported cover story by James Fallows about how the U.S. is in fact winning the war on terror, thanks largely to Bush’s policies (though Fallows works hard not to credit Bush).

Political dissatisfaction with the president rests entirely on Iraq and overall Bush fatigue. The rest amounts to little more than Iraq-motivated brickbats gussied up to look like free-standing complaints. That’s how hate works: It looks for more excuses to hate in the same way that fire looks for more stuff to burn.

That’s why Bush’s Democratic critics flit about like bilious butterflies, exploiting each superficial or transient problem just long enough to score some points in the polls and then moving on. Bush’s Medicare plan was an egregious corporate giveaway, they cried, until seniors overwhelmingly reported that they like it. And the Patriot Act? Can anyone even remember what the Democrats were whining about? I think it had something to do with libraries that were never searched.

Look, things could obviously be a lot better. But they could be a lot worse too. John Kerry could be president.

Keith Olbermann put “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” on his stereo, turned the volume up on high, and proceeded to explain to MSNBC’s viewers that Donald Rumsfeld was being McCarthyite by criticizing defeatism, and that Rumsfeld’s urging courage and endurance made him like Neville Chamberlain, while persons outside government, demanding appeasement, retreat, and surrender in the face of militant Islam were really all courageous Churchills.

Rick Moran already has performed the obligatory task of shredding Olberman’s nonsense in detail.

I will just observe mself that Olberman’s rant was delivered in a tendentious and partisan tone, and included insolent rhetoric, absurd allegations and expressions of wildly subjective opinion utterly and completely incompatible with the role of a supposedly objective commentator.

For example:

Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his own standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to flu vaccine shortages, to the entire “Fog of Fear” which continues to envelope this nation – he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their cronies, have – inadvertently or intentionally – profited and benefited, both personally, and politically.

And yet he can stand up in public, and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask just for the receipt for the Emperor’s New Clothes.

The spectacle of another empty-suit talking head climbing atop his electronic soapbox, and striking heroic poses, while insulting a variety of individuals in the current administration who left seven figure jobs heading up major business organizations to work in government as “profiting and benefiting, both personally and politically” from a syntactically confused melange of leftwing paranoid fantasies was particularly contemptible.

Orin Kerr, at the Volokh Conspiracy, responds to the left’s most dishonest blogger’s rantings over criticisms of Judge Anna Diggs Taylor’s NSA opinion by the Washington Post (and others), observing:

the Administration is giving the program only a very partial defense in its public documents, so there is a lot more that we don’t know. (For example, I teach and write in the area of the Fourth Amendment, and my view is that I don’t know enough of the facts to know if the program violates the Fourth Amendment.

Professor Kerr has identified the most interesting feature of the NSA flap. The December 16, 2005 New York Times leaked NSA story accused the Bush administration of “monitoring,” a term subsequently rhetorically upgraded to “spying,” and ultimately to “eavesdropping,” on international phone calls and email messages “within the United States” without warrants.

The Bush Administration’s accusers knew that they were taking a very serious step by divulging the existence of one or more top secret National Security programs, and they not surprisingly chose merely to apply partisan and inflammatory characterizations without ever specifically describing what it was that they were pointing to with feigned outrage.

Since all this is secret, no one outside certain intelligence agencies and the upper reaches of the US Government really knows who is doing what, when, or to whom. It is really as if all it required was for Messrs. Risen and Lichtblau to write a story saying “the Bush Administration is secretly violating the law,” some unidentified persons said “by doing bad things,” and the left faithfully falls into zombified lockstep, and begins shouting cries of pain and outrage in chorus.

A key problem is no one has ever been identified anyone who has ever experienced a known wrong, or a perceived consequence of any kind, from whatever it is that NSA might, or might not, be doing.

Can the Constitution really be violated, or the law be broken, by persons unknown secretly peforming unknown acts devoid of discernible effect?

The left obviously thinks that George W. Bush is just intrinsically unconstitutional, and that he breaks the law just by being in office, and their grasp of so much of the MSM allows them to create an echo-chamber alternative reality in which the liberal articles of faith which everybody knows seem very real, however tenuous their relationship to mere diurnal reality.

The Australian reports: Addressing an audience of schoolchildren in Brisbane, Australia, 1976 Nobel Peace Prize winner Betty Williams, suffused with indignation at the violence in the Middle East, confessed, “Right now, I would love to kill George Bush.”