Charles Krauthammer, December 2003:
Diane Rehm: ``Why do you think he (Bush) is suppressing that (Sept. 11) report?''
Howard Dean: ``I don't know. There are many theories about it. The most interesting theory that I've heard so far -- which is nothing more than a theory, it can't be proved -- is that he was warned ahead of time by the Saudis. Now who knows what the real situation is?''
-- ``Diane Rehm Show,'' NPR, Dec. 1
It has been 25 years since I discovered a psychiatric syndrome (for the record: ``Secondary Mania,'' Archives of General Psychiatry, November 1978), and in the interim I haven't been looking for new ones. But it's time to don the white coat again. A plague is abroad in the land.
Bush Derangement Syndrome: the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency -- nay -- the very existence of George W. Bush.
How quaint! A passing comment made by a prominent politician becomes the hook for Krauthammer to hang his novel diagnosis on. And the rest of his column? His densely-packed demonstration of pervasive delusion?
Aside from feeble pokes at Cynthia McKinney and Barbara Streisand, there really wasn't much of anything aside from this:
It is true that BDS has struck some pretty smart guys -- Bill Moyers ranting about a ``right-wing wrecking crew'' engaged in ``a deliberate, intentional destruction of the United States way of governing'' and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, whose recent book attacks the president so virulently that Krugman's British publisher saw fit to adorn the cover with images of Dick Cheney in a Hitler-like mustache and Bush stitched-up like Frankenstein. Nonetheless, some observers took that to be satire; others wrote off Moyers and Krugman as simple aberrations, the victims of too many years of neurologically hazardous punditry.
Well, Moyers was right, naturally. Taking us to war without a formal declaration, after promising to get UN approval, and then not doing so, thus making the war both unconstitutional and illegal under international law, and doing all of that based on phony intelligence? That more than qualifies as proof of what Moyers said. And Krugman? Krugman is deranged because his British publisher wanted to sex up his cover art? Couldn't Krauthammer come up with even one deranged statement by Krugman?
Well, no of course he couldn't. Krugman was not then, and never has been deranged. But what to say now about Krauthammer's conservative brethren? We're not talking passing comments, or foreign book covers here.
We're talking 28% of Republicans so deluded that they think Obama wasn't born in Hawaii, 30% who aren't sure, and an entire GOP congressional delegation that does not dare to simply say that this is just plain foolish. (Not to mention the 17% of Republicans so deluded that they still think Obama is a Muslim.) They pushed a wave of "tea parties" to protest tax increases that didn't exist, and now they're forming mobs, and making not-so-veiled threats, just short of rioting over dire threats in Obama's health care plan that also don't exist.
So, first we had "Bush Derangement Syndrome"--a syndrome curiously lacking in definable symptoms. And now with Obama we have symptoms of derangement out that wazoo. But thank God it's not a syndrome, or else then we'd be in real trouble!
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