by Chuck Morse

Created on: January 18, 2011   Last Updated: January 19, 2011

Derangement
The ongoing liberal obsession with George Bush

It’s been over two years since President George W. Bush retired to his modest and ecologically correct ranch in Crawford Texas yet Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) continues to course furiously through the veins and arteries of American liberals. It distorts debate and contorts the minds of those possessed of this tenacious demon. President Barack Obama seems almost irrelevant to them. In their Bush centered universe they contrast Obama’s success with Bush’s alleged failures while blaming Obama’s failures on Bush. Of course George Bush was not the first president to attract such strong emotions. John Adams was both loved and loathed in his day.

Syndicated columnist and psychiatrist Charles Krauthammer was right when he coined the term Bush Derangement Syndrome. There does appear to be something deranged, something discernibly unbalanced in the rantings and ravings of the BDSer and that same derangement also includes the same perverse obsession with former Vice President Dick Cheney. Over this past holiday I heard a BDSer friend refer to Cheney as a “traitor” who should be executed. I heard another BDSer friend launch a bizarre tirade over Bush “making money” from oil in Iraq as she breathlessly proceeded to babble a stream of kooky conspiracy theories. The mere mention of Bush’s name turned these two intelligent and sober people into Linda Blair in The Exorcist.

I heard another BDS friend declare to me that he would “never step foot again in Florida” because Florida was where Bush “stole the election with the help of his rich right-wing friends on the Supreme Court.” Referring to Bush as rich, which is an item of standard BDS faire, overlooks the fact that his 2000 opponent Al Gore was probably richer and that his 2004 opponent John Kerry was certainly richer. Gore’s father was on the board of Occidental Petroleum and was president of Island Creek Coal, a corporation that was known for strip-mining mountaintops. While Bush and Cheney were allegedly conspiring to make money from oil, Gore was receiving substantial sums from an oil inheritance. Teresa Heinz, John Kerry’s ketchup heiress wife inherited at least a half a billion from the estate of her late husband John B. Heinz III. Former President Bill Clinton receives a quarter of a million for speaking engagements while former President Bush declines fees for

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