Sour grapes watch
There's a fundamental disconnect between the popular Dem image of the President as a malapropism-prone bungler, and the fact that he continually wallops them time and again. From his mysterious ability to get their legislators to vote for a war they all deeply oppose, to precedent-shattering midterm victories, to a remarkable invulnerability to sustained criticism over very real policy flaws, ordinary partisan annoyance at these defeats is amplified a thousandfold by a nagging sense that, hey, we're getting shown up by a moron. And so derisive mythos comes back to bite 'em in the rear; good, and well-deserved. It also makes for some interesting reading whenever the President does something that, in ordinary times, would simply be accepted as a good and laudable thing. Visiting troops at war on Thanksgiving, for example. A few anti-Administration types (Atrios, Henley) did manage to do the right thing and give props to the President for his trip. Matthew Yglesias, on the other hand, could only splutter that no Democrats were invited. dKos Guest Poster No. 437, in what must be a first, charges the President with craven cowardice for, uh, voluntarily travelling to a war zone. He also joined the ever-shrill Hesiod in charging that the whole thing was undertaken to avoid being upstaged by Hillary Clinton. Hey guys, maybe your world revolves around HRC, but you're in a decided minority.
There's no convincing the die-hard Bush-haters of the world that they're motivated by anything other than substantive, sober reasons, and there's definitely no convincing them of how ridiculous they look at times like this. It's a pity, because the whole phenomenon is bad for civic discourse; but sometimes all you can do is sit back and enjoy the show.
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