by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
This series written for\u00a0Private Papers\u00a0<\/em>will appear in four parts.<\/p>\n Part One<\/strong> The American Left has become increasingly hysterical since September 11th. The symptoms of a new, disturbing extremism are manifest in a variety of forums that transcend legitimate political opposition to the war or grassroots politicking to vote out an incumbent party. Last year the comedian Rick Hall played to full houses abroad, performing his newest composition, \u201cLet’s Get Together And Kill George Bush.\u201d As the Republicans assembled for their August national convention in New York, a pacifist group known as \u201cUnited For Peace and Justice,\u201d nevertheless announced its sponsorship of a rather violent-sounding, off-Broadway \u201cguerilla comedy\u201d entitled, \u201cI\u2019m Gonna Kill the President.\u201d<\/p>\n The 2002 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Nicholson Baker, just published\u00a0Checkpoint<\/i>. It is an extended dialogue about killing (in a variety of strange ways) George Bush. Jay, the protagonist of the novel, characterizes the potential targeted President as a \u201cdrunken oilman.\u201d Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld are portrayed as \u201cbog creatures\u201d with \u201cgrubs scurrying out of their noses.\u201d Such venom filters down. Sue Niederer, the mother of a soldier recently killed in Iraq, recently scoffed in an interview: \u201cI think if I had him in front of me I would shoot him in the groined area. Let him suffer. And just continue shooting him there.\u201d<\/p>\n Currently in Britain there is released a made-for-television movie of the 9-11 mass murdering\u2014but told from the point of view of one of the 19 suicide-murderers, one Ziad Jarrah who took the controls of Flight 93 and crashed the plane and its occupants into a Pennsylvania field, when the brave passengers aborted his effort to incinerate either the U.S. Capitol building or the White House. The show\u2019s producers\u2014British television\u2019s Channel 4\u2014assure that their \u201cwhole ambition was to find out what makes these people tick, rather than to be judgmental.\u201d And being non-judgmental is apparently assured when you hire an ex-terrorist, the IRA convicted murderer (later freed on appeal) Ronan Bennett as the drama\u2019s chief writer.<\/p>\n There are always extremists, Left and Right, here and abroad. Yet, what is now different is that the public and unabashed fantasy of liquidating a sitting President, whether in comical or allegorical fashion, does not earn much censure from the mainstream Left. Instead, it seems to understand why some would wish George Bush dead. To the new critics of American conservatism, such public detestation is not an outrage, but seen as valuable and legitimate discourses of dissent against the \u201cdominant paradigm.\u201d Alfred Knopf, for example, is promoting Baker\u2019s book as a\u00a0cri de coeur<\/i>\u2014\u201cin response to the powerless seething fury many Americans felt when President Bush decided to take the nation to war.\u201d<\/p>\n Michael Moore was seen on television at the recent Democratic convention, prominently seated next to the party\u2019s elder statesmen\u2014like ex-President Jimmy Carter. Democratic legislators were said to have delayed their Congressional votes to have attended the Washington D.C. screening of Moore\u2019s\u00a0Fahrenheit 9-11<\/i>, a film whose litany of distortions and creative editing puts it into the same genre of propaganda as Leni Riefenstahl\u2019s\u00a0Triumph of Will<\/i>.<\/p>\n Moore\u2019s rhetoric is far beyond the pale, and in its vehemence firmly entrenched in the American demagogic tradition of Huey Long, Joe McCarthy, or Jerry Rubin. Americans shuddered when after September 11th Moore lamented that those who perished in the World Trade Center at Ground Zero were primarily Democrats, and thus not all that suitable targets for the sworn enemies of George Bush. Recently, Moore, the self-proclaimed populist and favorite of the \u201cpeople\u2019s party,\u201d scoffed of Americans that, \u201cThey are possibly the dumbest people on the planet,\u201d emphasizing that, \u201cOur stupidity is embarrassing.\u201d<\/p>\n Moore furthermore declared of the insurgents who blew up and beheaded Americans in Iraq, \u201cThe Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or ‘The Enemy.’ They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow\u2014and they will win.\u201d Again, what is different about such boilerplate extremism is the near absence of censure from the mainstream Democratic leadership whom Moore embraces. Unlike the John Birchers of the 1950s who were chastised by Republicans or the Yippies of the 1960s who were kept out of the 1968 Chicago Convention, Moore is praised and brought into the fold\u2014witness Wesley Clark\u2019s recent Presidential bid\u2014precisely because of the utility and resonance of his weird pronouncements and political propaganda. Thus the Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe gushed of\u00a0Fahrenheit 9-11<\/i>, \u201cI think anyone who goes to see this movie will come out\u00a0en masse\u00a0<\/i>and vote for John Kerry. Clearly the movie makes it clear that George Bush is not fit to be president of this country.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet such rhetoric emboldens rather than embarrasses Moore\u2019s sponsors. If we examine the vocabulary of the stalwarts of the Democratic party\u2014a Tom Daschle, Howard Dean, Al Gore, Tom Harkin, Ted Kennedy, or Terry McAuliffe\u2014then we learn that the current President or Vice President of the United States is at various times to be labeled as \u201ca traitor,\u201d \u201ccoward,\u201d \u201cdeserter,\u201d or \u201cAWOL.\u201d To Al Gore, Bush uses \u201cdigital brownshirts;\u201d for Michael Moore the President is a \u201ca drunk, a thief, a possible felon, an unconvicted deserter, and a crybaby.\u201d<\/p>\n Adjectives like \u201cworst\u201d color their speeches, as in \u201cworst\u201d administration or \u201cworst\u201d decision or \u201cworst\u201d example\u2014often amplified by tacking on \u201cin history.\u201d Bill Moyers says the Bush presidency means \u201cthe deliberate, intentional destruction of the United States of America.\u201d Sometimes a Ted Kennedy assures us that Mr. Bush has simply reopened the Abu Ghraib prison \u201cunder new management\u201d to continue the mayhem, torture, and killing of Saddam Hussein. Janet Reno evokes the holocaust at Dachau to warn us of the new Bush Gulag\u2014a term coined from Al Gore. And the ubiquitous Terry McAuliffe rants about the President\u2019s \u201cdictatorial approach;\u201d meanwhile Julian Bond assures the nation that Bush is from the \u201cTaliban wing\u201d of American politics.<\/p>\n Both Left and Right have discovered the paperback pulp market that offers big print invective and crackpot conspiracy theory. But the anti-Bush genre is singular for at least two reasons\u2014the sheer number of titles and authorship by mainstream Democratic journalists, television talking heads, Clintonites, and public figures. Examine a sampling of the often hysterical titles:\u00a0Worse than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George Bush\u00a0<\/i>(John Dean);\u00a0Big Lies<\/i>, (Joe Conason);The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (<\/i>David Corn); Big Bush Lies: The 20 Most Telling Lies of George W. Bush\u00a0<\/i>(Jerry Barrett);\u00a0Warrior King: The Case for Impeaching George Bush\u00a0<\/i>(John Bonifaz);\u00a0The I Hate George Bush Reader: Why Dubya is Wrong About Absolutely Everything\u00a0<\/i>(Clint Willis);\u00a0American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush<\/i>(Kevin Phillips);\u00a0Bushwhacked: Life in George Bush\u2019s America<\/i>(Molly Ivins);\u00a0Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy\u00a0<\/i>(Robert Kennedy Jr.);Cruel and Unusual: Bush and Cheney\u2019s New World Order\u00a0<\/i>(Mark Crispin Miller).*<\/i><\/a><\/i><\/p>\n Why does the Left hate Bush so? Some answers tomorrow when \u201cThe Perfect Storm\u201d continues in \u201cPart Two: Why the new hysterical hatred?\u201d<\/p>\n
\nThe new candor about killing George Bush<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n