OK, MAYBE I AM INSANE, BUT THAT’S BUSH’S FAULT TOO

Just like Stalingrad (Bret Stephens, Jerusalem Post, May 28th, 2004)

According to Sidney Blumenthal, a one-time adviser to president Bill Clinton who now writes a column for Britain's Guardian newspaper, President George W. Bush today runs "what is in effect a gulag," stretching "from prisons in Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guantanamo to secret CIA prisons around the world." Blumenthal says "there has been nothing like this system since the fall of the Soviet Union."

In another column, Blumenthal compares the April death toll for American soldiers in Iraq to the Eastern Front in the Second World War. Bush's "splendid little war," he writes, "has entered a Stalingrad-like phase of urban siege and house-to-house combat." [...]

Blumenthal is not alone. Former vice president Al Gore this week accused Bush of creating "more anger and righteous indignation against us as Americans than any leader of our country in the 228 years of our existence as a nation." Every single column written by the New York Times's Paul Krugman is an anti-Bush screed; apparently, there isn't anything else worth writing about. A bumper sticker I saw the other day in Manhattan reads: "If you aren't outraged, you're not paying attention."

There are two explanations for all this. One is that Bush really is as bad as Sid, Al and Paul say: the dumbest, most feckless, most fanatical, most incompetent and most calamitous president the nation has ever known. A second is that Sid, Al and Paul are insane. [...]

This is an easier case to make. Blumenthal, for instance, is the man who described Clinton's as the most consequential, the most inspiring and the most moral American presidency of the 20th century, only possibly excepting FDR's. Krugman spent his first couple of years as a columnist writing tirades about how the US economy was on the point of Argentina-style collapse.

What makes these arguments insane – I use the word advisedly – isn't that they don't contain some possible germ of truth. One can argue that Clinton was a reasonably good president. And one can argue that Bush economic policy has not been a success. But you have to be insane to argue that Clinton was FDR incarnate, and you have to be insane to argue Bush has brought the US to its lowest economic point since 1932. This style of hyperbole is a symptom of madness, because it displays such palpable disconnect from observable reality.

If you have to go looking for outrage, the outrage probably isn't there. That which is truly outrageous tends to have the quality of obviousness.

Never mind the elusive search for the outspoken, moderate Muslim. Why are there so few voices from the decent, moderate middle condemning these slanders and verbal outrages?