The Quote of the Day (So Far!) is from Peter Berkowitz's Wall Street Journal essay on Bush-hatred:
Lord knows the Bush administration has blundered in its handling of legal issues that have arisen in the war on terror. But from the common progressive denunciations you would never know that the Bush administration has rejected torture as illegal. And you could easily overlook that in our system of government the executive branch, which has principal responsibility for defending the nation, is in wartime bound to overreach - especially when it confronts on a daily basis intelligence reports that describe terrifying threats - but that when checked by the Supreme Court the Bush administration has, in accordance with the system, promptly complied with the law. In short, Bush hatred is not a rational response to actual Bush perfidy. Rather, Bush hatred compels its progressive victims - who pride themselves on their sophistication and sensitivity to nuance - to reduce complicated events and multilayered issues to simple matters of good and evil. Like all hatred in politics, Bush hatred blinds to the other sides of the argument, and constrains the hater to see a monster instead of a political opponent.
Or as Andrew Ferguson put it four years ago:
The Bush-haters know they must scramble for more high-minded reasons to explain themselves, and this year's stack of new books is the unpersuasive product of their efforts. Taken together the books make plain, if only inadvertently, that the cause of our most recent outbreak of Gasket Disease is something much deeper than policy, much deeper even than politics, plunging down and down into the mysteries of cultural identity in fractured America. At the end of 'Bushwhacked,' Molly Ivins speaks for all Bush-haters when, with typical artlessness, she sums up our present state of affairs: 'There is something creepy about what is happening here.' But they can't quite put their finger on what it is.
There's a widespread opinion that after eight years of Bush and Bush-hatred, America is ready for a president who will cool the partisan temperature in Washington. That may be true. But what if it isn't? What if polarization is exactly what partisans want?