Surely there's a Vaccine by now?

While, I don’t buy into his political views very often, I do think Thomas Friedman of the New York Times is a fabulous writer and, if he is allowed to plagiarize his own work, then I see no reason why I can’t too.

Much of that which follows I wrote several years ago for a newspaper when the term “BO” simply referred to a personal hygiene issue. Oh, happy days indeed. I repeat the theme now because the malady it discusses is still around today and I was reacquainted with this long-lived condition by three events.

First, there was a report from a friend who had encouraged some contacts to take a look at this Blog. They refused because they “didn’t want to hear anything negative”. Surely, there is no greater darkness than a closed mind.

Then there was the acquaintance yesterday saying, effectively, that if I couldn’t say anything bad about President George W. Bush, then she didn’t want to hear word one about Obama. But she failed to realize that I’m not in the fair reporting business and I’ll let the drive-by media sing that gentleman’s praises.

Finally, in an attempt to get Obama off the hook for blowing it with the International Olympic Committee, it seems that Chicago was eliminated as a venue because it was all George Bush’s fault. Thus it seems that “Bush Derangement Syndrome”, (BDS), has a longer life than Swine Flu and here’s some of what I wrote about that all those years ago.

“The infection predates the Iraq war and the Afghanistan war, all the conspiracy theories about the events of September 11 and is obviously well before the alleged Rove/Libby/Cheney malfeasance.

I lean towards the opinion that there are a couple of possible causes or maybe even only one because it's not hard to combine the two.”

“One is symbolized by the inaccurate but oft repeated ‘selected not elected’ mantra of the 2000 election, followed closely by, ‘Bush did not win the popular vote’.”

“Never mind the fact that four independent analyses of the complete Florida vote, ‘hanging chads’ and all, were carried out by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and the Miami Herald and all concluded that the President could not have lost that state. This conclusion, arrived at by the loudest and most influential voices of the political left in this country, goes unheeded by the BDS sufferers including even some of the more even-handed of its constituents.

Why? Presumably, because, it contradicts that which they want so desperately to believe. These same even-handed folks also ignore the facts that we do not have a ‘first past the post’ system in this country because we are a federal republic and/or if Kerry had won just 60,000 more votes in the state of Ohio, he would have been President in 2004 with 4 million votes less than Bush.”

“The second possibility goes like this. The political left in this country is concentrated in the urban areas of both coasts and a favorite assumption, in say, New York or San Francisco, is that ‘we are the intelligentsia, we are better educated, we are socially aware, we know what is best for everybody’, and therefore, by a thought process not dissimilar to the ‘Divine Right of Kings’, they convince themselves that leadership is theirs by ordination.”

“One corollary of this assumption is that ‘fly-over country’, say west of the Hudson River or east of the San Bernardino Mountains, does not deserve the same electoral rights as the ‘informed’ coastal enclaves who would be delighted to make all the decisions on behalf of everyone. The fact that this view was propounded as far back as Ancient Rome, became the lynch pin of feudal systems of medieval Europe and was even carried much closer to our own time in this country where first slaves and then women were just too dumb to vote, does not dissuade our would-be lords and masters from pursuing their self-appointed role.”

“As a result, much of my email used to consist of people bemoaning the fact that a stupid man occupies the Oval Office and is being manipulated by the unholy trinity of Cheney, Rove and Rumsfeld. And it seems the legacy of this fatuous belief continues. It would be foolish of me not to accept that this was a possibility but the case was weakened, in my view, by the methods used to try to prove it.”

What follows now is partly old comment and partly new and, if you have nothing better to do, you can parse which is which.

To this day, there are those who firmly believe that just beyond every horizon there is a squadron of black helicopters awaiting the word from a capitalistic Darth Vader to usher in the New World Order which appears to be an unholy alliance between “Big Oil”, the “Military-Industrial Complex”, Pro-Life “fanatics” and assorted Jews and/or Freemasons.

Even some of those well outside this lunatic fringe use a myriad of misquotes or incomplete quotes or unsubstantiated quotes or those without attribution from books and articles or films such as “Fahrenheit 911” in order to “prove” the criminal duplicity of the Bush Administration and its usually unspecified or secret associates. By the volume of “proofs” I get from some people there are those who are so consumed by BDS that almost their entire existence is devoted to scouring the Blogs for any scrap of “evidence” which they then weave into the most outrageous conspiracies imaginable. And the promise is usually the same with the enjoinder to “wait just until next week and you’ll see” that all their dire predictions will be fulfilled.

Well, I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting. And I’m still waiting for a nostrum to treat BDS.

Maybe another 911 will have to do?