Bush Derangement Syndrome?

How, oh how OffHisMeds wishes Bill O'Reilly and other Conservative commentators would shut their pieholes and stop giving Democrats a Hall Pass by explaining away their current-day depredations as being some latent manifestation of their hatred of George W. Bush, what Charles Krauthammer so unfortunately described as "Bush Derangement Syndrome". In this scenario, Republicans attempt to explain away the excesses of the Democrat Party by waxing regretful that the Dems are so unhinged by their eight years' of hatred for Bush that they are forced to adopt the extreme positions that they do.

Case in point: The controversy over the "torture" of Guantanamo detainees. O'Reilly recently discussed the story of Nancy Pelosi and whether she did or did not lie about knowing of Waterboarding back in 2002. He then segued into the recent efforts by Pelosi, Chris Dodd, Charles Schumer and the Obama Administration to prosecute and persecute former Bush officials for either enabling, ordering or participating in so-called "enhanced interrogation" techniques. The list of targets for reprisals included a) government lawyers rendering a legal opinion of the legitimacy of Waterboarding, b) the Operatives who administered the Waterboarding, c) their superiors who ordered it, and d) the Bush Administration officials up to and including the President who authorized it.

In other words, everybody and anybody they could destroy simply because they worked in a Republican administration. It was a smorgasbord of targets, so cynically constructed that only a Fool could fail to see the classic Democrat scorched-earth policies used so successfully over the decades to criminalize their political opposition.

Enter Bill O'Reilly.

For the umpteenth time in the past few years, O'Reilly speculated that the "over-reaction" by high-ranking Democrats was "Bush Derangement Syndrome". He's not alone. Numerous other sensible commentators have trotted out this phrase with regularity, and in so doing, they give Democrats a much undeserved two-fer:

1) They excuse Democrats serial and unending manipulations of government to criminalize politics.

2) They allow Democrats to be seen in a favorable light they do not deserve as people otherwise capable of moral behavior, just as soon as they get George W. Bush out of their systems.

Are O'Reilly and his media pals incapable of understanding that the Democrats have pursued this strategy for years, simply because they see the opportunity to paralyze their political opponents? Have they totally missed the point that Dems have been pursuing criminal prosecutions against Republicans on political matters for decades now?

Did O'Reilly sleep through the entirety of the Scooter Libby Affair, when the real criminals turned out to be a bunch of Democrat Partisans? Was he on vacation as Senator Ted Stevens was prosecuted out of office on bogus charges, and his Senate seat turned over to a Democrat? Was he medicated through the entirety of the electoral jihad against Tom Delay, which five year's later has resulted in no criminal trial? Was he distracted as the Democrats used trumped-up and near incomprehensible charges to destroy Newt Gingrich?

O'Reilly needs to wake up, as does America. The Democrat Party is the Party of corruption and the subornation of the Justice Department to their political advantage. They are the Party that has demonstrated time and again that they will do anything necessary to win, the Party that has demonstrated no integrity since the days of Hubert Humphrey.

Ironically, the fruits of O'Reilly's and Krauthammer's efforts to explain why Democrats have abandoned polite society is the creation of a whole new Derangement, one you're going to be seeing more of in the years to come: Palin Derangement Syndrome. It would be comical to watch the Dems and their partisans in the Media dismantle themselves with their over-the-top vilification of Palin, but for the moral cover provided by the Bush Derangement Excusers. And if Sarah Palin withdraws from public life and say, Mike Pence takes her place, look for an outbreak of Pence Derangement Syndrome.

Either way, OffHisMeds predicts that by 2012 there will be a new Republican target, and the Usual Suspects - O'Reilly included - will be explaining it away, providing Democrats yet another excuse to be the vile, self-serving partisans they've been for the past 45 years. You might as well just call the phenomenon Republican Derangement Syndrome, since it clearly has nothing to do with any kind of emotional response to an individual, and everything to do with cold calculated political maneuvers.

And if I was O'Reilly, I wouldn't expect the Democrats to ever get over it.