Demos, the President and the War

I always assumed that the Left’s hostility to any efforts in the war against terrorists (“can’t we all get along?”) was a byproduct of Bush Derangement Syndrome, a la Groucho Marx’s “Whatever you’re for, I’m against it.” Ann Coulter, however, sees Ned Lamont’s election as proof of the opposite:

As some of us have been trying to tell you, Democrats don’t oppose the war on terrorism because they hate Bush: They hate Bush because he is fighting the war on terrorism.

I’m not so sure, although it does seem as if the peace movement, one that exists in a fantasy land where terrorists don’t plan to blow planes out of the sky just to make a point, is no longer simply a reflexive anti-Bush syndrome.  That is, to the extent BDS preceded 9/11, I still think that BDS was the driving force behind the anti-War movement.  However, many things, regardless of their origin, eventually have lives of their own, and that’s what we’re seeing here.  Hating Bush is no longer a necessary requirement for the anti-War movement.  The new anti-War movement is more dangerous for the Republicans, because it’s big enough to have an intellectual reach beyond “I hate Bush.”

I was also going to say that the newly discovered terrorist attack in England may cause some who have doubted the ferocity of the Islamist’s hatred against us to revisit and discount those doubts.  However, the mere fact that some people will have this reaction will only fuel the irrationalists’ belief that there was no bomb plot, just a government manipulation to affect people’s thinking.