Deconstructing Delusion

If there was such a thing as "Bush derangement syndrome," as defined by Fox "news" tool and former shrink Chas. Krauthammer, then what to call the right's reaction to President Obama?

I've never denied my powerfully negative thoughts about the Bush presidency, but I can reel off a long list of things he actually did to win my solid disapproval. With teabaggRs, and their soon-to-be nominee, the picture they draw of Obama has nearly nothing to do with what, in the world of reality (not a familiar place to them, I'll warrant), he has or has not done. No one needed to lie about George Bush's devastatingly damaging presidency to hate what he did. Not so, when it comes to the right and our president. I've listed their departures from factuality too many times here to repeat them now. Suffice it to say: it encompasses pretty much everything they say or believe about him (or, in the case of Mitt Romney, likely doesn't believe but says anyway).

I just read something that helps explain the disconnect.

From Andrew Sullivan's site, a comment from a reader, who points to this quote from James Baldwin:

"An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger: the stranger's presence making you the stranger, less to the stranger than to yourself."

Makes sense.

Hate For Hate's Sake

From the fetid swamp:

...if you’re going to put the head of state on TV to announce it himself, it would have been better to have been all brisk and businesslike – “At 0800 hours American military assets entered an address at 27b Jihadist Gardens, etc” – and finish off with a bit of Churchillian sober uplift about it not being the end or the beginning of the end but maybe the end of the beginning.

Instead, as Stephen Hunter, the novelist and Washington Post film critic, writes:

Any joy one might feel in the intelligence of our analysts and the bravery of our door kickers was significantly diminished by Obama’s malignant narcissism. The first part of the announcement, evoking 9/11, was vulgarly overwritten as per Obama’s view of himself as some kind of gifted orator. The adjective bloated compote was unworthy of the subject, banal and self-indulgent.

I was, I confess, a little stunned by the first part of the President’s speech. It was, as Mr Hunter says, overwritten. It managed to be both overwrought and generic – all that telepromptered overload about cloudless Tuesday mornings was not only tackily over-prettified but came over as unfelt and hand-me-down, like a course exercise in some third-rate creative-writing school’s Soaring Oratory class.

On the other hand, little Billy and Lizzie didn't mention the president at all.

And I'm sure I could post shit like this all day. But you get the idea.

Insight

I just read a good explanation of why this guy I know thinks Obama hates America and is deliberately trying to destroy it -- he's a Republican:

President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican from the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.

If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a health-care plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal coverage; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans staked out in the early ’90s — and often, well into the 2000s.

Well, that, and the fact that it's what I've been saying about his moderation ever since Obama came onto the scene. This guy I know wouldn't take my word if I told him Easter comes on a Sunday.

But they are serious points: both the article and my essay about the crazy. There are many things Obama has done and not done about which there are justified disagreements, from the left and from the right. But there's nothing -- NOTHING!! -- that justifies the paranoid and insane hatred of the man. The swallowing whole of the laughable internet rumors, the taking of Foxobeckian RWS™ lies as hallowed truths. Not based on his presidency, anyway.

Of course, there IS an explanation for that stuff, too...

Thought For Food

I believe it was Charles Krauthammer, former psychiatrist and current non-stop denouncer of Barack Obama, who coined the term "Bush Derangement Syndrome" to describe the criticisms of George Bush coming from the left. Unlike that good doctor, I've actually seen occasional positive in things Bush did, and have said so. Things like funding efforts against AIDS in Africa (although they were too attached to abstinenence education), and what I thought, at first, was a fairly rational stand on stem cell research, given the whackness of his base. I never criticized his invasion of Afghanistan, and was glad he did it using the plan developed by the CIA under Clinton. Wish he hadn't cut back and run to Iraq.

I wonder how Chucky would distinguish his and the RWS™ constant criticism of literally everything Obama, from an equivalent "derangement." For example, I'm thoroughly convinced George W. Bush was the worst president ever visited upon us, the truth of which will only get stronger as time passes.

But I've never criticized his choice of hamburger condiments.
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