Jonathan Chait warns his compadres that leftists and many liberals are letting hatred of Bush blind them to the reality of (among other things) Saddam's WMD program.

...Bush's claims should never be taken at face value. But accepting the fact that Iraq had an extensive and continuing program for weapons of mass destruction doesn't require taking Bush at his word. The U.N. Special Commission, when it finished its work in 1999, concluded the same thing. So has Germany's intelligence service. So has the United Kingdom's. Indeed, the only people who seem to doubt it are either allies of Hussein or those who distrust Bush so much that they automatically assume everything he says must be false.

What he doesn't say, but implies, is that they're setting themselves up to look once again like utter fools when the evidence all comes out, probably later this summer or fall. Either that, or reduce themselves to coming up with pathetic theories of how the evil neocon Zionist cabal planted them there.

They continue to misunderestimate the President, and they're going to pay for it again, perhaps heavily, in a year and a half.

"misunderestimate"?

How about misunderstand or underestimate?

Misunderestimate grates -- badly.

It was a joke, based on one of Dubya's more famous malapropisms. It's like strategery, except he really said it.

It won't be a problem.

They'll just change the subject to, oh, the administration's perfidy in Uzbekistan.

I think the Intellectual Left fear and loath GWB because his success violates all their cherished axioms. GWB is inarticulate, he is not terribly smart, and he brazenly promotes policies which the Intellectual Left KNOW only the evil and the brain-dead can support. So, as far as they are concerned, by every right he should be a pushover. So GWB's incredible popularity, especially among the classes the Left purports to represent, can mean one of two things:

1. 70+% of US population are evil and/or brain-dead

2. Their entire view of the world is wrong.

I had seen very few left-wingers articulate the above - and those who did were convinced #1 is the case. But whether or not they articulate it, they can not escape the feeling that something is very wrong with their world. Consequently their relentless hatred of GWB.

I must add that some social/religious conservatives felt the same way about Clinton. Clinton's popularity violated THEIR view of how world works just as brutally. But social/religious conservatives do not have nearly as many voices in the US media, so their incredulity was not as obvious.

I tried to like Clinton, at first.

I started disliking him not long after he was sworn in.

Yet, the rabid Clinton-haters began to wear on me, badly. And no, I don't mean impeachment. In fact, I think impeachment was the right thing to do, and I also think acquittal by the Senate was the right thing to do. The right thing happened all the way around, even if the process was muddy.

I only mention the above not to spark a Clinton Debate, but to point out: I didn't like him. But I didn't hate him--I mean, he could piss me off, but not with a Capital-H Hate.

The Clinton Haters bugged me and at times disturbed me.

As I read and learn more about politics, the more I realize that this is the beauty of our system. The population will always be divided by fierce angers and resentments. The people on the losing side will have a more obviously nasty element at any given time. Yet through it all, we survive.

It's the genius of our particular form of government. Democracy, I mean, and such a closely balanced and complex one like this one especially. It's almost miraculous how functional our system really is, when you consider everything.