I was going to talk about The Gulag Archipelago but got distracted...

Man, when these Amnesty International guys decided to jump the shark, they went for the moon, didn't they? Wow.

Okay, look, obviously the charge is grotesque to any person who knows even the slightest smidgeon of truth about the gulags, much less than to persons such as myself who have read Solzhenitsyn's Архипелаг ГУЛАГ, which is to say, The Gulag Archipelago. And most especially it is absurd and grossly insulting to those who, like my friends Marina and Yessengeli, originally read the thing in samizdat while living in a remote town on a forty-degree-below-zero steppe surrounded by "too many camps to count" (as Yessengeli told me a little while before introducing me to his mother, a former political prisoner under Stalin).

But I have to agree with Glenn Reynolds, who says, "[Amnesty seems] to have joined the rather lengthy list of those suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome. Bush's ability to induce that state in his critics, and thereby cause them to blow their own credibility, is astonishing, and surely one of his greatest strengths."

You know, that really is true, though I'd never really thought of it that way before. As I've explained to my kids many times, hate makes you weak and stupid. And it has been a long, long time since there was any President who inspired more mouth-frothing, brain-destroying hatred in his opponents than does George Bush. Here is a man whose policies, especially domestic, are eminently open to rational criticism -- but the Almighty Himself couldn't keep most of Bush's critics rational.

Look, I thought Republicans lost their mental grip over Clinton. I mean, Clinton certainly was the very embodiment of "rich white trash" and somebody I'd go to considerable lengths to keep away from my children or other impressionable persons, and I have nothing but contempt for the man's character. But hey, I don't fantasize about his death, and I think there were at least a few Arkansas men who died without his having a hand in it or Arkansas women who were molested without his having a, um, part in it, shall we say. And I'm not sure some of the Republicans I knew would be able to stay with me on those last few points.

But now I understand that before The W Years, I only thought I'd seen politically motivated hatred. The Shrub could be beaten by any decently competent mainstream candidate, should in fact have been beated in '04 -- but by the time his enemies are through convincing any remotely middle-of-the-road person that they are clinically insane, they've alienated just enough swing voters for him to come sailing triumphantly through.

The man gets to run against first Al Gore and then John Kerry, two of the worst candidates since...well, come to think of it, since Michael Dukakis; and Kerry's most viable primary opponent was the even-more-impossible-to-take-seriously Howard Dean; so maybe this is a fundamental Democratic Party problem. Can we get a new opposition party, please? One with grown-ups in its positions of leadership? There's too much I dislike about party-line Republicanism for me to be comfortable with elections like the last one, in which for the first time in my life I found myself voting for W instead of against him. Something has to be done...and something tells me Howard Dean and Markos Zúniga aren't too likely to be moving the Dems toward rationalism and civility anytime soon.

KP