How about that?! An orderly transfer of power.

For the most part, I’ll be glad if the Bush-haters will just shut up now.

With one exception: the people who said that Bush would blame a terrorist act (or cause a terrorist act) as an excuse to stay in power as a dictator beyond 2008.  Sure, they’d like to just “move on” and pretend they never said it, but it’s time to confront them with a basic truth: THEY were the fear-mongers.  And before they just shut up, they need to reflect upon that.  I know they’ll never offer an apology.

This insistence that George Bush is intentionally using fear… as opposed to informing us of things of which we should rightly be frightened…has become so accepted that Barack Obama openly talks about moving beyond fear in his election campaign and even in his inaugural speech today.  The Left en masse has decried Bush’s “fear-mongering” about terrorist threats, which are either overstated, overplayed, scapegoats or fictitious.  And they have loudly decried it, while all along Bush has been telling us to keep shopping, go about our business and has probably left us in contented ignorance of 95% of the scary stuff he must have read in his morning briefings for 8 years.

The foil-hat crowd said he was spreading fear in order to make money and grab power.  They shouted to anyone who would hear about how he’d stolen his elections, performed a coup d’etat, was a moronic puppet of his sinister Veep, was a mastermind who caused the attack on the World Trade Center, was spying on everyone’s cell phone conversations, was apprehending American citizens for being Arabs/Muslims and sending them to secret prisons where they had no rights, was intentionally letting the black people of New Orleans drown, secretly destroyed the levees of New Orleans to make black people drown, gave the guards at Abu Ghraib an executive order to put guys in naked pyramids, was funnelling the national treasury into the pockets of his friends, either wanted to drive oil prices higher for his oil buddies or wanted to expand the places where his oil buddies could drill (which would make oil prices lower),  was just like Hitler, was a crusading religious fanatic who thinks that God is talking to him, … and…what was it?…something about his inventing a reason for us to go to war because he wanted to avenge his daddy/kill Iraqis by the millions/seize all the oil for his buddies/the lizard people told him to.

I ended that last paragraph because of necessity, but I could go own and own and own.

The Left used fear of George W. Bush to sell books.
The Left used fear of George W. Bush to sell movies.
The Left used fear of George W. Bush to sell merchandise.
The Left used fear of George W. Bush to line the pockets of their 527s by millions and billions.
The Left used fear of George W. Bush to fund-raise for their candidates.
The Left used fear of George W. Bush to gain attention for their blogs.
The Left used fear of George W. Bush to push people to the polls for votes.
The Left used fear of George W. Bush to put Barack Obama in office.

I don’t know that the Left ever takes a moment to reflect on its actions.  I would like to think that, sometime in the next few years, either gradually or in a blinding flash of the Obvious, they will come to accept the following truths:

• Terrorists really are trying to attack America.
• President George W. Bush was a good man trying to protect America.
• The people using fear-mongering to gain money and power were the American Left.

P.S.  They used hate, too.  Huge, festering mountains of hate.