SOUND AND FURY SIGNIFYING NOTHING

Victor Davis Hanson:

...I think we now have come to the end to the five-year left-wing attack theme of Bush "shredding the Constitution."

Except for the introduction of euphemisms and a few new ballyhooed but largely meaningless protocols, there is no longer a Bush-did-it argument. The Patriot Act, wiretaps, e-mail intercepts, military tribunals, Predator drone attacks, Iraq, Afghanistan — and now Guantánamo — are officially no longer part of the demonic Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld nexus, but apparently collective legitimate anti-terrorism measures designed to thwart killers, and by agreement, after years of observance, of great utility in keeping us safe the last eight years.

Add in the Holder statements about Guantánamo in the 2002 interview, the Pelosi/Rockefeller/et al. waterboarding briefings, the need to consider torture in past statements by senators such as Schumer, and I think historians will now look back at these "dark years" as largely a collective, bipartisan effort.

All of which leaves us a final musing: If so, what was the hysteria of 2001-2008 about other than simple politics?

I doubt we get any more movies about ongoing renditions, redactions, any more Checkpoint-like novels, any more waterboarding skits and reenactments, any more late-night comedians doing their Bush tapped, intercepted, tortured, renditioned, tribunaled poor suspect X routines.

And I guess as well that the good old days of supposedly flushed Korans in Guantánamo and Omar the poor liberationist renditioned to Cairo are over. We are now in the age of a sober and judicious President Obama who circumspectly, if reluctantly and in anguish at the high cost, does what is necessary to keep us safe.

And we won't see a brave young liberal senator, Obama-like, barnstorming the Iowa precincts blasting a presidency for trampling our values with the shame of Guantánamo, wiretaps, intercepts, renditions, military tribunals, Predators, Iraq, etc. That motif just dissolved — or rather, it never really existed.

It short, all the fury, the vicious slander, the self-righteous outbursts, the impassioned speeches from the floor, the "I accuse" op-eds by the usual moralistic pundits — all that turned out to be solely about politics, nothing more.

This is precisely what hysteria , including political hysteria is all about--emotionalism designed to keep a hidden agenda from awareness. It is the politics of denial; and we have been drowning in the Democrats' denial for years. It will not stop now that Barack Obama has essentially adopted all of Bush's strategies in the war on terror overseas contingency operations.

Instead of investing the psychological energy necessary to effectively use those strategies, the energy will be investing in maintaining the denial by persecuting, prosecuting, denouncing and demonizing Bush, Cheney, and former officials. Recognition of Bush's accomplishments and acknowledgment that his strategies were carefully developed and actually worked cannot be made part of the national consciousness--it is far too threatening to the left. Hence, the tales told by the idiots of the left will continue unabated until disaster strikes.

Like Obama, they want to live in two completely separate realities and pretend these alternate universes are compatible.

But we all know what happens when matter and anti-matter come into contact with each other, don't we?