Now, let's distinguish between wishing someone was dead and...

Jim Lindgren is struck by Michelle Goldberg's passion. It's hateful and casual, as she expresses the exquisite difference between the way lefties wanted Cheney dead and some righties — purportedly — actually want to kill Obama.

Hmm. Did anyone really threaten to kill Obama? It's a federal crime, and isn't it vigorously investigated? If people are doing this, why are we not seeing arrests?

Anyway, comparative hatred is a strange game, isn't it? Let's be rational and analytical, mm'kay?

"Screw Civility: Why Bush-Bashing Should Be Obama's Eeelection Strategy."

That's heading used by The New Republic in email that got me to click over to this article by Michael Schaffer.

Naturally, I was interested. Interested in eeelection, which I took to be a way of e-voting for electric eels. Also screwing civility sounded hot, though I deplore the close proximity of screwing and electric eels. And then, of course, it's provocative to advise Obama to Bush-bash — or to screw him with an e-eel.

Clicking over, I see the sober headline is "Exit, Pursued By History: How Bush treated Clinton and how Obama should handle Bush."

Obama should save the civility shtick for Republicans he'll have to work with. As for the guy retiring to Texas, the new administration should ensure he remains the useful foil he was during the 2008 campaign. That starts with letting nothing--not public amnesia, not nostalgia, and certainly not a statesmanlike gesture from the White House--lift him from the PR cellar. When the new crew opens up the books on Bush's government, they ought to let every embarrassing detail out....

There's no guarantee Bush will remain this loathed forever. After next week, bad employment figures and reports about failed initiatives land on Obama.

There was Clinton-hating before there was Bush-hating, and there will be Obama-hating too. Can we break the chain of hate? Shaffer thinks that's for losers. Keep hate alive.

Democrats ran against Herbert Hoover for decades; Republicans kicked around Jimmy Carter for a dozen years. If Bush's successors play their cards right, Democrats could use his legacy as a thumb on their side of the scale for a generation....

Because hope and change... that would be such a stupid path to take.

Meanwhile, in a more civilized location, Barack Obama is dining with the conservative opinion leaders.

"He's a socialist, a Muslim, an actual love-child of Malcolm X."

"His birth certificate was missing, his book had been ghost-written by William Ayers, and his wife, 'Mrs. Grievance,' as a National Review cover dubber her, was perennially on the cusp of getting caught ranting against the white man. The only thing keeping the Illinois senator's infamy from going public is the quiescence of the liberal media."

Dubber? Uh, dub, that's how Michael Schaffer -- author of the upcoming One Nation Under Dog -- characterizes the beliefs of the Obama-haters out there, in a New Republic article that my "Today at TNR.com" email titled "Why Anti-Obama Hate Will Be So Different Than Anti-Clinton Hate." Dub, are we saying "different than" now? "Anti-Obama haters" -- are they different than -- I'm catching on -- plain old Obama haters or do they hate them too? Why are we contrasting Obama haters only to Clinton haters -- or anti-Clinton haters, if that makes more sense to you -- and not also to Bush haters?

It seems to me that hating the President has been an American tradition for a long, long time. I was going to say ever since the Kennedy assassination, but then I vividly remember people hating JFK. I was 12 years old when JFK was assassinated, and on that day, a school mate asked "Who would do such a thing?" I thought it was an easy question and the obvious answer was: Republicans.

So, yes, it's an American tradition to hate the President, and there are always going to be some people digging up reasons to hate the President -- reasons that are true and false and everything in between.

Schaffer writes:

Whatever its effectiveness ahead of Election Day, the right-wing hate campaign made for a nice exercise in nostalgia. For eight years, opposition politics have mainly involved attacking the president for, like, things he's done or wanted to do in office----and not, say, secret religious view he holds or convoluted murders involving his wife. Now, after an administration in the wilderness, they were back--the conspiracy theorists, the paranoiacs, the fringe figures whose dubious relationships with the truth weren't enough to disqualify them from star turns in the right-wing media. The last Democratic president had spent his White House years in perpetual battle against well-funded crackpots peddling far-fetched theories, and now this one would, too.

Oh, so Bush hating belongs in a different category because... the author agrees with it. It was "for, like, things he's done or wanted to do in office." Like, okay, I get it. None of that Bush-hating crap was paranoid, conspiracy nonsense? He was accused of blowing up the World Trade Center!

Skipping ahead in the article:

Once he was living in the White House and flying around on Air Force One, Clinton became a symbol of the country, for better or worse, and attacks on his love for America became a lot less credible. And for all his faults, he also became the rapidly graying man in a suit on TV every night rather than a bearded hippie whose (fake?) marijuana-smoking represented a Main Street worry.

The same thing will happen to President Obama. Once he's the man at the lectern with the presidential seal--the real one--he's pretty hard to dismiss as a frightening outsider... In 2009, Obama's [sic] will move elsewhere, too. But where?

As Shaffer sees it, Bill Clinton did some things in office that spurred new nutty conspiracy theories and promoting these theories was more difficult in the days before YouTube. Because of these differences, Shaffer says, Obama hate will leave behind all the crazy theories from the campaign and become what Bush hating has (supposedly) been: critique of any real failures of governing. Happily, then, "the only thing he has to do now is govern well."

Dub?

Of course, it would be nice if people were sensible and scrupulous about the facts and the conclusions they draw from them. But Shaffer himself falls way short in this very essay, in a respected political magazine, one that presumably has fact-checkers (and editors). I think President-hating will rage on, mixing truth with flakiness, fantasy, nastiness, and anything else anybody wants to offer in the marketplace of ideas.

What Shaffer is selling... I'm not buying.