The Great Madness of 2004-10

If you read nothing else this weekend The Great Madness of 2004-10 by Victor Davis Hanson

The Trailer “   The First Symptoms of Hatred—2004 to 2008 During the years of insanity, Al Gore won both a Nobel Prize and an Academy Award for his propaganda film An Inconvenient Truth—before the disclosures of climate gate, new data on everything from the Himalayan glaciers to polar bear populations, realization that temperatures had not risen in the last 12 years, and the rather blatant and various money-making scheme of Gore, Inc. (more good stuff) .... In these years of insanity, I used to be asked on campus questions as lectures along the lines of “Bush’s polluting pals are ruining the planet when we know Al Gore’s cap and trade would save us. Now it’s too late!” Of course, in 2006 gasoline will relatively cheap, unemployment low, and there was growth in the economy. College students had the luxury of declaiming how George Bush had wiped out the polar bears as they waited for several good job offers. [...] Stage Two of Worship, 2008-10 Then the mad hatred turned to the mad worship. Do we remember the great campaign of 2008? The madness now metamorphosized, as an obscure, heretofore unremarkable rookie senator became the Great Savior who would deliver us from Bush. Newsweek declared him a god; almost nightly we heard of leg tingles and speeches comparable to the Gettysburg Address. To doubt was racist, to really doubt was un-American. But now there was no shrieking, shrill Hillary Clinton to scream that such dissent was not really un-American.(She would soon charge that doubt about Libya was a sort of un-American support for Gaddafi.) [...] Diagnosis, Treatment, Prognosis What caused the American madness from 2004 to 2009? Fury arose over Iraq in part. In part, the profile of George Bush as Texan, Christian, strutting, twangy ‘dead or alive’ stereotype was an easy target. The long years of liberal wilderness, out of power, had turned into a shrillness. The expanding economy had made life good and gave one the leisure to listen to the unhinged like Code Pink, Cindy Sheehan, or Michael Moore. Obama was right out of upper-middle-class, liberal white guilt, central casting: charismatic, young, half-African, an exotic name, hard-left credentials  [...] When I read high octane writing like this I find myself wondering to what end?  You know?  We're not the ones who need to read this stuff, and they don't know it exists.  You know?