The other day I suggested that liberal contempt for Bush distils to two things: His Christian faith and the threat his strong pro-life inclinations pose to Roe v. Wade. The Belmont Club has a slightly different take:
The particular venom with which the Liberals regard President Bush is at heart a reaction to what they perceive as a coup d'etat directed against the carefully constructed edifice of their historical achievements. To understand why the President and individuals like Paul Wolfowitz are described as "illegitimate", one should not, like the man who doesn't get the reference, look to the Florida chads or US Supreme Court decisions. Liberals are not talking about that kind of statutory legitimacy. Rather they are referring to what is perceived as a brazen attempt to negate the cultural equivalent of the Brezhnev doctrine, the idea that certain "progressive" modes of behavior, once attained, are irreversible. In this view, an entire set of attitudes, commonly referred to as "political correctness" and their institutional expressions, like the United Nations, have become part of a social contract, part of an unwritten constitution....James Lileks described the intensity of the revulsion at the barbarians at the gates; not Osama Bin Laden, but rather someone else:
"I ask my Democrat friends what they'd rather see happen -- Bush reelected and bin Laden caught, or Bush defeated and bin Laden still in the wind. They're all honest: they'd rather see Bush lose."
This is surely symptomatic of mental illness. It's a form of insanity that has gripped the left which they seem unwilling and unable to shake off. How else to describe people who would rather see the perpetrator of the 9/11 massacre go free to commit more such crimes if it means the political defeat of George Bush. It's reminiscent of the cry of the mob in Jerusalem two thousand years ago to "Give us Barabbas!" Sick.