Monday, January 09, 2006

Bush implements left's rhetoric, thus infuriating them

Notice that when Bush agrees with or implements the left's rhetoric, they get madder than Barney Frank when he can't find his pink lace teddy? Just a few examples:

1. The left denounces Bush for ignoring Kyoto, despite the fact that the Senate voted 95-0 (that includes Democrats) against ratifying Kyoto in 1997. In other words, Bush simply agreed with the Senate, yet he catches hell for their votes while the same people who rightly voted against Kyoto ignore their own votes? Naturally, the MSM doesn't remind them how they voted on Kyoto, thus enabling them to spew their galling hypocrisy with impunity.

2. The left told us all throughout 1998 that Iraq had WMD's and that Saddam needed to be disarmed and toppled. The most vocal supporters of regime change in 1998 have become some of the loudest critics today. Then again, in 1998 there was a Democratic president who was going to be impeached, so regime change and disarming made sense then. Once Bush decided to go ahead with the Dems' calls (and with enforcing several UN resolutions), he was criticized more than the poor bartender who didn't put enough Dewars in Sen. Kennedy's glass.

3. The NY Times has been howling over the "Bush's warrantless searches" story for a few weeks now, yet they used to sing a different tune. From the Weekly Standard:
WHAT IF THE CIA OR FBI should catch wind of an imminent plot to blow an American airliner out of the sky? "Should the government disclose terrorist threats to the public and let passengers make their own decisions about how to react?" Not all that many years ago, the New York Times editorial page believed that even here "the answer ought to be no." Sure, hundreds of lives might be saved, in the near term, by such an announcement. But at what cost to the nation's most highly classified and clandestine counterterrorism programs?

"Terrorist threats are not just another species of consumer information," the Times reminded its readers; "they are a form of intelligence that depends on secrecy in collection, expertise in interpretation and extreme care in dissemination." Bad guys read the newspaper, too, in other words. And even well-intentioned public disclosures might give those bad guys an advantage: "Valuable sources of intelligence would dry up as terrorists aware of information leaks sought to eliminate the leakers." Best to keep everybody in the dark.

That was in April 1989. As recently as November 2000, the paper of record still thought it "understandable" for the government to investigate and prosecute media leaks that compromise "the secrecy of the nation's most sensitive intelligence gathering systems." Programs involving "electronic intercepts and other data obtained by advanced satellites and other devices" were a particular concern. The more they learned about American signals intelligence capabilities, after all, the easier it would become for our "adversaries to cut off

access to vitally important information about threats to the United States." So "responsible news organizations" would want to be especially "mindful of the security concerns" when reporting on these surveillance initiatives.

Meanwhile, responsible news organizations might also want to consider explicitly endorsing a joint congressional investigative committee's call for the extension of such surveillance to U.S.-based targets. "The CIA and the National Security Agency, which does electronic eavesdropping, will also have to devote more of their efforts to analyzing international terrorist threats inside the United States," the New York Times announced in July 2003.

Now, over two years later, the Times has decided to reveal that on the very day its editorial page offered this suggestion, just such an NSA domestic surveillance effort was already underway, on orders from the president. And all of a sudden, responsible news organizations everywhere are loudly warning that the End of Democracy is nigh. It is an outrage that George W. Bush did what the New York Times recommended--according, most notably, and weirdly, to the New York Times itself.
With regard to the above three points, the left's mentality can best be summed up thusly: "How dare you listen to us?" So why exactly does the left get its thong in a knot when Bush listens to them? Simple: BDS, Bush Derangement Syndrome.

It's an illness that clouds all rational thought processes, reducing normally bright (or at least modestly reasonable) people to the level of blithering idiots and brazenly bold hypocrites. Sufferers of BDS will forget or ignore their own statements if said statements seem to correspond in any way with Bush's actions.

At this time, the only known cure for BDS is Jan. 20, 2009, when a new president gets sworn in. However, if the GOP continues to whitewash the left at the ballot box, look for BDS to mutate and become a different form of DS.