Paul

Ibrahim

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September 8, 2008

Pitying Obama’s Bush Derangement Syndrome

It is a terrible mental and emotional disease first diagnosed by Charles Krauthammer, conservative commentator and Harvard-educated psychiatrist who has identified psychiatric syndromes in the past.

It has been observed and discussed extensively, and increasingly, over the past five years. It has spread from anti-social college tree-huggers, to left-wing bloggers, to liberal columnists, and on to Democratic politicians. There is a Wikipedia entry for it. And unfortunately, it has even infected the Democratic presidential nominee himself.

It is Bush Derangement Syndrome.

Krauthammer defines BDS as follows: “The acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency – nay – the very existence of George W. Bush.”

A top entry in the Urban Dictionary does an excellent job expanding on it:

“BDS is a loss of the capability for rational thought. This loss is often displayed over a period of hours, days or even months and years. The sufferer in all cases blames President George W. Bush for any and all types of disasters, human maladies, etc., despite abundant evidence of contrary causal effects. BDS is also manifested in many sufferers by a determination to label President Bush as the greatest single threat to democracy and freedom in the United States since the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts during the presidency of John Adams.”

Indeed, the intertwined nature of the leftist movement, which is completely plagued with BDS, has led to a constant revolving of repeated rhetoric in a circle made up of Daily Kos, MoveOn, the Huffington Post and the Obama campaign. And indeed, when you surround yourself with only those who agree with you, you are bound to trust that the majority of the world believes the same things you do.

This has led Barack Obama and his campaign staffers to convince themselves that most of the nation suffers from BDS (as opposed to mere dissatisfaction with the administration’s policies), and that the only way to defeat John McCain is to pretend that he is actually George W. Bush. Since Bush is the devil incarnate, and McCain is actually Bush, naturally no one will vote for McCain.

This is why every sentence mentioning McCain must also mention Bush. It is quite remarkable actually – as if someone sent a memo. Well, they must have. It’s their only line of attack. Barack Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention mentioned McCain and Bush in the same sentence five times, and Biden’s four times. They each made a reference to a mythical “Bush-McCain” creature. At one point, Biden actually said “George . . .” before stopping to realize he was supposed to say “John McCain.” Biden called it a “Freudian slip,” evidently unaware of the extent of BDS symptoms.

Poor Sarah Palin is also apparently George W. Bush in a woman’s costume. As Obama said, “[McCain] chose somebody who may be even more aligned with George Bush – or Dick Cheney, or the politics we’ve seen over the last eight years – than John McCain himself is.” Never mind that eight years ago, Palin was Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, a fact that Obama is, on every other occasion, all too happy to point out. No, Palin was clearly pulling the strings in the Bush-McCain-Cheney sacrificial dungeon.

In fact, a memo had apparently gone out before McCain’s VP selection, instructing everyone to refer to the prospective VP as either “Bush” or “Cheney.” This resulted in everything from routine declarations to simply bizarre statements from the Obama campaign, such as: “It won’t make much of a difference to struggling American families who John McCain chooses to be the next Dick Cheney if he continues to insist on being the next George Bush.” Seriously. You can’t make this stuff up.

Ads have been trying to paint McCain and Bush as something like genetically identical twins, and claim that McCain has voted with Bush 90 percent of the time. (According to FactCheck, by that same standard, Obama has voted 97 percent of the time with Senate “9 percent approval” Democrats, such as Harry Reid, who declared the Iraq War “lost” when we were beginning to win it).

McCain, however, with his maverick tendencies, is probably the last Republican who can be painted as a party loyalist. And if Obama thinks McCain is so much like Bush, then one can only imagine what he would say about any other Republican nominee, who almost certainly would be more like Bush than McCain. Inevitably, the Obama campaign would have shouted: “Mitt Romney is more like Bush than Bush himself!” Or, “Fred Thompson actually voted with Bush more than 120 percent of the time!”

In fact, Biden has gone so far as to say that he and Obama could pursue criminal charges against Bush, and Obama himself has said he would instruct his Attorney General to distinguish between Bush’s “genuine crimes” and his “really bad policies.” Now there’s a fair and mild-headed president.

It is ridiculous, bizarre and scary. But most of all, it is sad. Barack Obama has so deeply embedded himself among the radical left that his entire perspective on the U.S. political spectrum has been skewed. And the less likely it seems he will beat John McCain, the more he resorts to the BDS-based impulse of comparing him to Bush.

But it will be really hard for Obama to win the election with a message that only appeals to his own hard-core supporters. And seeing that it is his only message, November doesn’t look so good for him. Does anyone else smell the imminent spread of MDS?

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