The reaction to my piece on the issue of the demonization of George W. Bush by the liberal-left side of the country has been unsurprisingly vituperative, evidently unconscious of the irony that answering with eight parts insults and invective to one part fact or sober analysis, well, kinda makes my point for me.

So let's see what happens this time. The Wall Street Journal has published one of those op-eds designed to cause apoplexy in aging radicals-- a piece by the Romanian KGB defector Ion Mihai Pacepa which you'll find here:

http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110010438

And which I'll summarize with this excerpt:

Sowing the seeds of anti-Americanism by discrediting the American president was one of the main tasks of the Soviet-bloc intelligence community during the years I worked at its top levels. This same strategy is at work today, but it is regarded as bad manners to point out the Soviet parallels. For communists, only the leader counted, no matter the country, friend or foe. At home, they deified their own ruler--as to a certain extent still holds true in Russia. Abroad, they asserted that a fish starts smelling from the head, and they did everything in their power to make the head of the Free World stink...

Unfortunately, partisans today have taken a page from the old Soviet playbook. At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, for example, Bush critics continued our mud-slinging at America's commander in chief. One speaker, Martin O'Malley, now governor of Maryland, had earlier in the summer stated he was more worried about the actions of the Bush administration than about al Qaeda. On another occasion, retired four-star general Wesley Clark gave Michael Moore a platform to denounce the American commander in chief as a "deserter." And visitors to the national chairman of the Democratic Party had to step across a doormat depicting the American president surrounded by the words, "Give Bush the Boot."

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This is incendiary stuff, and the reaction is likely to be extremely indignant, sarcastic, and even less clear or concise than usual. Pacepa's point is likely to be caricatured as basically a fascist "shut up," and the problem is... there will be some truth to that caricature. One of our great strengths, and concomitantly one of the Soviet bloc's great weaknesses, was our robust history of dissent.

If the question is put, would you rather have dissent or victory, the proper American answer is, it's only through our willingness to question and rethink things in process that we've achieved victory so often. We win because Americans aren't like the soldiers (or citizens) of countries where good ideas and improvements die unspoken for fear of the consequences of speaking up. The great example of this, of course, was the president who rose by attacking waste-- but not savaging the president who presided over it-- during wartime. Senator Harry Truman made his name trying to improve the way we fought World War II-- and within a relatively short time, he was in charge of it.

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Nevertheless, Pacepa reminds us of a significant point when he walks us through the ways in which America's own criticisms of America have been used by our enemies. It does us no good to deny that this happens-- indeed it's a bit perverse to argue the value of dissent, and then turn right around and say "But how could you think anyone might actually listen to what I'm saying when I do so?"

The fact is, there's ample evidence that the extreme and unrealistic invective aimed at the president and the war in Iraq and Afghanistan has significantly harmed the goals folks on the left side profess to be fighting for.

When all the talk is of how Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are the worst hells on earth, dictators running true hells are let off the hook. When all the talk is of Bush and Cheney plundering Iraq for their own or Halliburton's sake, the real kleptocrats can point to that and say they are simply doing what the whole world does.

And when an intervention that ends a dictatorship and a humanitarian nightmare is portrayed as being infinitely worse than the regime it ended, what happens to the constituency for humanitarian intervention elsewhere? If America has destroyed and bungled everything in Iraq, if the president who acts is subject to endless abuse, who will take it upon themselves to act in Darfur, who will support him if he does so, who will think the result of doing so will be worth the effort and won't inevitably result in another ghastly mess? (After all, if war never solved anything...)

By refusing to see that there is a basic level of support for the American ideal and our own liberal goals which we should insist upon, even as we robustly and thoroughly hash the ways and means out, the liberal side has made it easier for our enemies to deny that liberal goals are achievable, that they can come from western help, and that western help is something the west should even be offering. General Pacepa's piece is a deeply uncomfortable one, but one we should all be willing to confront. After all, dissent from pious orthodoxies is one of our values, no?

Many competing theories exist to explain the current president. Often people embrace more than one at the same time, even when they're obviously contradictory—thus you'll hear somebody at the espresso counter speak of Bush as jibbering idiot puppet and evil manipulative genius at the same time; or someone at the sushi bar describe him as a ruthlessly cynical profiteer and a wide-eyed bringer of the prophesied Apocalypse (which would, presumably, render his ill-gotten fortune useless).

In arguing over the likelihood or practicability of an impeachment effort here, I've often run into people who are so vested in one or more of these extreme cartoons of Bush, his administration and its place in the world, that they seem absolutely boggled if you approach him as being like any other president-- that is, as a recognizably human mix of ambition, ego, set goals, pragmatic bendings-with-the-wind, and so on.

I've lived through the administrations of some pretty seriously disliked presidents-- Nixon, Carter, Reagan and Clinton were all loathed by some faction or other in their day-- and yet only Bush seems to have advanced to this other level where he seems to be a whole 'nother species, with no ordinary human traits at all. Like Sauron, he seems to be just a flaming eyeball in a castle to such people, without other corporeal form.

Partly I suppose it's because Bush is an unusually opaque politician-- his short, simple phrasing and singsong delivery make Reagan seem like George Sanders in All About Eve. It's very hard to see the real person behind that weirdly cautious, proctological delivery style.

Nevertheless, that there is a real Bush is amply attested to by Democratic colleagues from Texas days, soldiers' families met in the Oval Office, etc. Or, one could just as readily say, it's amply attested to by the fact that even when his approval ratings have left the toilet and are now well on their way down the sewer, he still manages to get what he wants out of Congress. At the very least, he's savvy about how to play the game, and regularly cleans the clocks of the allegedly smarter (Kerry, Pelosi, Chirac, etc.) And he has known human parents, so I suppose we can assume that genetically, he's indistinguishable from other homo sapiens.

Still, it's common to run into this notion that he's some sort of freakish religious Dr. Evil, well beyond mere ordinarily evil Republicans like Reagan or his father. It's especially neat to place the Bible at the heart of his unique evilness, since it allows one to make the ridiculous observation that, hey, [insert middle east regime] is run by religious nuts, and so are we!

Well, I do think Bush's reading and upbringing is at the heart of his management style, but I don't think it's the Bible that's the central book in his life—or the central reason why liberal elites detest him on such an instinctive level. What they hate about him is another major strain in American culture to which he belongs—and for which he turned his back on the blessings of their culture.

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What the elites hate about Bush, what the intelligentsia find so personally distasteful about the man, is his middle-Americanness, his bourgeois ordinariness-- his fundamentalist faith, his pickup truck and baseball lifestyle, his Clint Eastwood taciturnity (and regular guy inability to speak the language of therapy, which his predecessor of course understood was the ultimate pickup language), and of course, his heretical belief that objectively, America is better than Taliban Afghanistan.

Worst of all, of course, is that Bush is not just some hick, a Falwell or Dobson who grew up in Dogpatch worshiping a Redeemer who would kick city boy butt, but that of course he is the quintessential preppy, third generation politician, one of two Skull & Bonesmen in the last presidential race (and the one with considerably bluer blood).

Like FDR, then, Bush is hated as a traitor to his class-- but where in 1932, FDR was hated for betraying the political philosophy of the New England wealthy, Bush is hated for betraying their lifestyle, for having had the chance to remain urbane and upper crust, and throwing it away for Texas and Jesus. Since even the people who despise him for that recognize that, deep down, doing so is kind of shallow-- nothing shows lack of breeding more than openly judging people by their class-- they have to find more serious-seeming and self-acceptable reasons to hate him.

Thus we have the extraordinary acts of psychological projection by which the crimes and attributes of Bush's opponents are literally attributed to him. Our self-declared enemy is (or, more likely, was) an Islamic terrorist leader who seeks the establishment of a global Caliphate and the imposition of Taliban-style theocracy, and would use nukes if he had 'em to purify the world. That his dream that the West will submit to hijab-wearing and Islamic dysfunctional behaviors is so nutty (There are some parts of Brooklyn, Osama, that I wouldn't advise even the Jihad to enter) is beside the point; he did a lot of damage demonstrating that he was a tactical idiot for his cause.

The very disappearance, and probable death, of this leader, though, makes it easy for people to mentally refashion Bush exactly along his lines-- like Osama, Bush gave up luxury and loose living for a sternly practical and religious life in a dusty, unpleasant desert, therefore they must both be animated by an identical desire to wage war and inflict mass suffering in the name of establishing a final theocracy to the glory of their respective sky-gods.

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To more rational folks like ourselves, Bush-- the son who inherited his father's business and like so many second generation leaders combines a shrewd set of instincts born of being close to power (and the power-hungry and sycophantic) all his life, with a certain narrowness and lack of intellectual curiosity that is not atypical for those born at third base-- may or may not seem an admirable figure, but it is absurd to put such religio-Napoleonic dreams on his shoulders. It is much more profitable to see his administration in the terms of trendy business books by Tom Peters or Peter Drucker, and to recognize that Bush approaches the world like a CEO facing a marketplace that has changed, with new technologies and foreign competitors:

What do the Honda Supercub, Intel's 8088 processor, and hydraulic excavators have in common?... These products did not come about as the result of successful companies carrying out sound business practices in established markets. In The Innovator's Dilemma, author Clayton M. Christensen shows how these and other products cut into the low end of the marketplace and eventually evolved to displace high-end competitors and their reigning technologies.

That summary of a recent business bestseller describes exactly Bush's way of going around the UN and the traditional (high-end) powers and forming his own coalition of low-end powers from Poland to Australia for a war in the middle east. Many other such books explain more-- what is Bush if not a One-Minute Manager? What is his contempt for the slow, cautious foreign policy elite and the Kissingerian status quo they want to protect if not the entrepreneur's contempt for the cubicled drones at a hidebound old Fortune 500 company? Donald Rumsfeld's attempts to reshape a drastically smaller military for new challenges could hardly be more obviously corporate in inspiration.

But even faced with an administration full of CEOs, even as the name Halliburton is routinely dropped as all the evidence anyone needs for the most outrageous claims, no one recognizes CEO-like behavior when it's right in front of them. The commentariat doesn't read business books, so they've missed the most obvious key to Bush's behavior-- and invent one out of something (his supposed extreme religiosity) they are more aware of, if hardly any more comprehending of.