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Monday, May 23, 2011

The Phony Parity of Anti-Presidential Derangements

Lefties like me hated Bush because he stole an election (he did, you know, it still matters), he lied us into a ruinous illegal immoral war of choice, and he smashed the budget to give mounds of money to his billionaire friends, not to mention the fact that he was a mean spoiled palpable idiot, er, was "incurious" as the pundits liked more gently to put the point.

To recognize these facts and register one's disapproval of them was to exhibit "Bush Derangement Syndrome" according to many Beltway pundits at the time, especially Republicans who were busy joyfully wallowing in ballooning deficits and corpses and smacking their lips smashing civil liberties while we "deranged" ones looked on and protested in helpless dismay and hopeless despair.

Many a right-wingnut now hates Obama and loudly insinuates that our president is a Kenyanazislamosocialist and so repudiate policies they once advocated the moment Obama proposes them because either they are racist assholes or because they know their Base is full of racist assholes and they are well pleased to pander to such evil idiocy since, whether they are racist or not themselves, they too are assholes.

Sometimes these people are now said by punditocratic wags to be exhibiting "Obama derangement syndrome," and to the extent that these folks also often traffic in climate-science, evolutionary, and macroeconomic denialisms there is indeed something quite literally crazy in their belligerent embrace of such willful ignorance.

But calling both of these heated modalities of Presidential disapproval, of both Bush and of Obama, whatever the circumstances that prompt them and the facts or fancies that underlie them, "Derangement Syndromes" may provide pampered punditocratic incompetents a congenial pathologization as universally deranged the whole body of the politically involved populace who happen not to live inside the beltway (literally or imaginatively) as they do, and thus confirm them in their comfortable complacent misplaced sense of superiority, but that is far from making their proposal of a equivalence of derangements true or, indeed, for that matter, anything but a deranged proposal itself.

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