When Bush loathers successfully launch a thousand craptacular books: "exposes" about Bush and his illegitimate secret black children, rapes, supposedly murdered friends, and supposedly shrieking harridan of a spouse, then we will talk about derangement.

I mean come on, all you have to do is read anything published by Regenry in the last 15 years to see true, spittle flecked, wild-eyed derangement.

Why am I not surprised to see from Technorati that this post was linked from Salon.com?

I'm linked pretty regularly on their "Blog Report" (formerly "Daou Report") which rounds up 8-10 posts from the Left and 8-10 posts from the Right every day. I'm atop the Right list for yesterday: "http://blogreport.salon.com//" (not permalinked, so I'll drop off on the next update)

Talk about your vectors of blogospheric BDS pathology ....

Bush never ran as a war hero, and he, for one, was quick to give credit to those who served in combat, including Kerry. He wasn't boasting here, but rather, once again, was praising our troops in combat.

One way of commending someone is to say: "I wish I could do what you're doing." A closely equivalent sentence would be: "Anyone who share these values would have grounds to be proud of himself if he were doing what you're doing." Stated either way, the object of the observation is the person from our armed forces being referenced.

Critics are reading this statement as though Bush's focus were on himself, and his intention were to laud himself, i.e., as if he had said: "I'm as praise-worthy as you members of our armed forces because I'd be doing the same thing you're doing if only circumstances permitted." You're reading his statement of praise for others as being a statement of personal boasting, because only then can you belittle the supposed boaster.

I do genuinely pity those many of you who are filled with corrosive hatred, whether it's for George W. Bush or anyone else.

As for neo-cons condemning Senator Kerry. I seem to remember the main proponents of Kerry's Vietnam War problems were Vietnam era members of his USN boat squadron. Some of whom were life long Democrats.

Never forget that some of those critical of kerry were prisoners of the North Vietnamese. Prisoners who were on the receiving end of the North Vietnamese response to his testimony to Congress in 1971, when Kerry asserted that the US troops "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads . . . razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan.''

Now, how can you possibly doubt the patriotic fervor of a man like that? As for his latest statement, I see that Fred Kaplan finds it as repulsive (and bizarre) as I do, and for the same obvious reasons: http://www.slate.com/id/2186554/ .