Bush Derangement Syndrome

Jason Lee Steorts has written an article that supposedly explains how McCain lost the election but really covers and is entitled Bush Derangement Syndrome. For those unfamiliar with this affliction, it is applied to people who opposed the President and his policies. Or rather that was the old definition of it. The new definition of it, put forward by Steorts, are those who looked at Bush's foreign policy screw-ups with insufficient charity.

That the influencers tended to see Bush as a jingoistic, fundamentalist idiot rather than a worthy adversary with whom they had profound disagreements inevitably influenced their presentation of his policies. They are supposed to specialize in nuance and subtlety; the assessment of a war fought against an appallingly cruel autocrat, on the basis of flawed but sincerely believed intelligence, would seem to cry out for such virtues. Their narrative instead combined the nuance of an infomercial with the subtlety of a morality play.

Oh my heart bleeds. Poor Bush. He was just doing his best; why couldn't we see him as an intellectually flawed but ultimately good guy?

I suppose it might have had something to do with him and his administration's tendency, particularly in 2004 and 2002, to portray everybody who disagreed with him as a traitor or a dupe. Bush got off light compared to what he and his followers tried to do to liberals. And now, that his moronic plans have failed, his followers still want to pretend that it's all due to the hated liberals.

For the record, that's also why we weren't too impressed with Sarah Palin. Yeah it'd be nice if she learned to speak a bit better, but our real problem with her was that she promised a continuation of the same Rovian politics that had poisoned our political discourse.