. . . there was Bush Derangement Syndrome. (The famous 2003 article by the late Charles Krauthammer.)
What is amazing in retrospect is how viciously the Left treated the mild-mannered, civil, only moderately conservative milque-toast. Remember the Buck Fush bumperstickers? Also interesting is that the intensity of the Left's rage is pretty much the same whether the target is a gentlemanly Bush or an obnoxious and crude Trump.
No matter how moderate and conciliatory you are, leftists will hate you and smear you in every conceivable way. Here:
Consider the "civility" shown by Democrats toward the eminently civil "compassionate conservative" President Bush.
Protesters regularly carried signs saying things like "Save Mother Earth, Kill Bush," "Hang Bush for War Crimes," "Bush=Satan," "Bush is the only Dope worth Shooting." They burned Bush and other administration officials in effigy countless times.
Jonathan Chait wrote a 3,600-word word piece for the New Republic in 2003 on "the case for Bush hatred." In it, he admitted that "I have friends who … describe his existence as a constant oppressive force in their daily psyche."
Nobel Peace Prize winner Betty Williams gave a speech at a women's peace conference in Dallas in 2007 declaring that "right now, I could kill George Bush." The audience laughed, and she won praise for her "bravery."
Pollster Geoff Garin told The New York Times that Bush hatred was "as strong as anything I've experienced in 25 years now of polling."
The winning film at a 2006 Toronto film festival was a movie — Death of a President — that realistically depicted Bush's assassination.
The left regularly compared Bush to Hitler, just as they are now with Trump.
Playwright Harold Pinter said that "the Bush administration is the most dangerous force that has ever existed. It is more dangerous than Nazi Germany."
Harry Belafonte called Bush "the greatest terrorist in the world."
Civility, like truth, is not a leftist value. To understand the Left you must understand that they have no qualms about using our values against us. Thus they accuse Trump of incivility when he punches back at them despite their having no respect for civility in the first place. After all, it is a bourgeois value, and they are radicals and 'transgressives.' They will use civility if if it helps their cause but abandon it when it doesn't. It is the same as with free speech and other values we cherish.
They don't care about these values; what they care about is power. Truth counts for nothing. This is why it does no good to point out to them the absurdity of the Hitler comparisons and the falsehood of rest of their smears. As long as the smears work to mobilize their benighted base, leftists will hurl them.
If we said, falsely, that Hillary = Stalin to give them a taste of their own medicine it would do no good. They would accuse us of smearing Hillary, again using our values against us when they have no objection to smears that work for them.
This is also why it is a mistake to call leftists hypocrites. They are worse than hypocrites since they have no allegiance whatsoever to the values that their behavior betrays. And the same goes for accusing them of applying double standards. They don't share our standards.
You can't shame them either, for they have no shame.
Since for a leftist it is all about power, the only way to defeat them is by overpowering them. This is what Trump, but no other Republican, knows how to do. He knows how to get under their skin and cause them to adopt ever more extreme positions that lose them credibility with reasonable voters. He knows how to use power and he has the courage to use it.
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