Self-Destruction and Hatred

I recently visited the Chatterbox Chronicles and left some comments regarding her post. In the process of my response I realized: there's a reason for all this recent nonsense, and it's very simple. The question is: why?

First, to what nonsense am I referring?

The continued (and thoroughly entertaining!) self-immolation of the Democrats via their self-destructive, based-in-emotion and logic-lacking pandering comments -- see my previous post, for last Monday's wonderful examples. Or Miss Chatterbox's comments. Or Fetching Jen's comments. Or Hugh Hewitt's General Zod comments. Powerline had this comment. Revka's Take posted this. Texas Fred made this salient note.

In my opinion, the rise of stupid, thoughtless comments from the Left has been stunningly geometric in, say, the past month -- and even moreso the past week or two. It's as though they're building up to a purposeful crescendo. But it's a crescendo that isn't leading to an insightful epiphany -- it's leading to a political downfall and its backpressure and rain of fallout is hurting the country, plain and simple. One Democrat has recently written about this fallout: former New York Mayor (1978 to 1989) Edward Koch.

Politics are politics. I understand that -- most everyone else does too. But what is the point of attempting to eviscerate one's country with a suit by the ACLU on behalf (of all people) of Christopher Hitchens and James Bamford who both -- get this -- think the NSA tapped into their phone conversations. They say the US must -- get this -- prove it didn't. Oh so easy, yes, to prove a negative?

What is the point of objecting to the protection of one's country? What is the point of objecting to ensure another 9-11 does not occur on domestic US soil? What is the point of objecting to the US taking the fight to the enemy -- an enemy whose stated goals are no less than the Islamization of the entire planet, the eradication of America, of "Zion," and the suppression and/or outright deaths of those who would disagree with radical Islam.

And yes, sometimes things really are that basic.

That's the self-destruction part. Here's the hatred part:

It's all about the hatred of George W. Bush.

First, the Left believes GWB "stole" two entire elections. They believe it with all their hearts. And therein lies the elemental rub and major difference between the two parties and philosophies. It is no surprise that the truism is this: Democrats and liberals are driven by emotions; Republicans and conservatives by facts, history and reality.

Jonathan Chait in the 09-29-2003 issue of The New Republic made some rather prescient, back then, observations, admitting that GWB was not his best friend:

I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it. I think his policies rank him among the worst presidents in U.S. history. And, while I'm tempted to leave it at that, the truth is that I hate him for less substantive reasons, too. I hate the inequitable way he has come to his economic and political achievements and his utter lack of humility (disguised behind transparently false modesty) at having done so. His favorite answer to the question of nepotism--"I inherited half my father's friends and all his enemies"-- conveys the laughable implication that his birth bestowed more disadvantage than advantage. He reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school--the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it. I hate the way he walks--shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks--blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo-populist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. I hate his lame nickname-bestowing-- a way to establish one's social superiority beneath a veneer of chumminess (does anybody give their boss a nickname without his consent?). And, while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more.

Mr. Chait continues:

Have Bush haters lost their minds? Certainly some have. Antipathy to Bush has, for example, led many liberals not only to believe the costs of the Iraq war outweigh the benefits but to refuse to acknowledge any benefits at all, even freeing the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein's reign of terror. And it has caused them to look for the presidential nominee who can best stoke their own anger, not the one who can win over a majority of voters--who, they forget, still like Bush. But, although Bush hatred can result in irrationality, it's not the product of irrationality. Indeed, for those not ideologically or personally committed to Bush's success, hatred for Bush is a logical response to the events of the last few years. It is not the slightest bit mystifying that liberals despise Bush. It would be mystifying if we did not.

Mr. Chait then gets down to the meat of his article:

But Bush is never called to task for the radical disconnect between how he got into office and what he has done since arriving. Reporters don't ask if he has succeeded in "changing the tone." Even the fact that Bush lost the popular vote is hardly ever mentioned. Liberals hate Bush not because he has succeeded but because his success is deeply unfair and could even be described as cheating.

Now if you enjoyed that, then you'll enjoy this next bit:

But perhaps most infuriating of all is the fact that liberals do not see their view of Bush given public expression. It's not that Bush has been spared from any criticism--far from it. It's that certain kinds of criticism have been largely banished from mainstream discourse. After Bush assumed office, the political media pretty much decided that the health of U.S. democracy, having edged uncomfortably close to chaos in December 2000, required a cooling of overheated passions. Criticism of Bush's policies--after a requisite honeymoon--was fine. But the media defined any attempt to question Bush's legitimacy as out-of-bounds.

Yes, you read it correctly -- as I expressed in one of my recent comments on another blog -- the Left think the MSM or DEM actually gives Bush a "pass" for excoriation. Can you possibly feature that? The Left-driven MSM "looking the other direction" with regard to any issues involving George W?

There really appears to be little remaining of their collective Left realities.

Victor Davis Hanson has a great article about the issue from 2004 and reflected:

Let's start with the admission that much of the invective is irrational, fueled by emotion rather than reason. Thus the black leadership uses slurs such as "Taliban" and "Confederacy" against Bush, even though no other president has selected an African-American secretary of State and national-security adviser or pledged so many billions for AIDS relief in Africa. Liberals talk of social programs starved, but domestic spending under Bush increased at annual rates greater than during any Democratic administration in recent history. Just read howls of conservatives who worry about Bush's Great Society-like programs.

Mr. Hanson distills it down further: Bush is a conservative southerner with a drawl. He is a "bible thumper." Bush is a Manichaeist -- he breaks life down into black and white, Good vs. Evil. And he is a renegade aristocrat -- not a blueblood easterner.

Further, Michael Novak from National Review Online wrote in a July, 2004 article:

Nevertheless, George W. Bush has been re-conceived and re-wrought into everything that the sophisticated Leftist absolutely hates about Americana: Its innocence. Its boyishness. Its Christianity. Its unpretentiousness. Its heedlessness of all the shibboleths the Left most highly values.

And, in addition, the president exercises unsuspected political skills. The man has actually won most of the political fights he's taken on. And he has turned the country in a far more Reaganite direction than anyone ever imagined under that anodyne term, "compassionate conservatism."

Personalizing Social Security? Cutting the teachers' unions out of total control of the schools? Supplanting the governmental plantation with private charitable initiatives, which actually show better success rates than the welfare state? The handwriting is on the wall, piercing through the dreams of the big-government Left, foretelling the end of the social-democratic illusion.

How did this hick have the nerve to be so radical in government — he who so barely won the election of 2000? (Stole it, the most bitter partisans still say, despite all the studies disproving it.) How did he have the nerve?

The Right tends to think that the Left is stupid — never learns, keeps repeating the same old errors. The Left is different. The Left tends to think that the Right is mean, narrow, selfish, evil (on top of being stupid). I once had a professor at Harvard who was trying to explain what it was like for Immanuel Kant, the greatest philosopher of his time, to have succeeded in winning a teaching position only in Konigsberg, far from the glittering list of leading universities in Germany. That would be, he said, like winning tenure at . . . at . . . at Ohio State. (So superior do Harvard professors feel toward Middle American universities.) In this spirit, the Left also thinks the congenitally evil, conservative Bush is also stupid and second-rate.

Who is Bush to drive the last nails into the coffin of social democracy, and all those big-government dreams? The Left can feel the demography slipping away from them, and the strong currents of the future, too, and the bilious taste of failed ideas rising in their throats. It is now or never for the Left. It is desperation time.

In an August 2004 issue of Newsmax, Youngstown Mayor George McKelvey was quoted as telling Ohio's cheering Republican delegates at a breakfast that "the left wing hates George Bush the most because he believes in God, and you better believe that."

You know, it could be that simple, too.