I don’t know any American liberals who wanted George W. Bush to be overthrown or assassinated

But if you rely on Jay Nordlinger and Victor Davis Hanson at the National Review, you’d think they all do.

Who are these guys? Jay was a good music critic when I worked at the New York Sun, and his latest political prattling shows that he should have kept his focus on the tunes and off politics. Victor Davis Hanson is a ridiculous propagandist bully boy who likes to pretend he is a historian. And apparently it’s alright with them to advocate the worst of actions against President Obama because someone or other said something similar about President Bush at some point.

Instead of agreeing like some cooler heads that conservatism has a problem with having too many extremists close to its core who believe in things like Obama being a secret Muslim, that he was not born in America, that he should be overthrown in a coup, that he should die, etc., they engage in a ‘two wrongs make a right’ argument. They say that there was a lot of Bush hate, and try to equate ‘Bush hate’ with a selection of ridiculous examples of people who said they wanted Bush dead (or in some cases, as I’ll show, didn’t). They call it ‘hypocrisy’ by the left, but what they’re really doing is excusing the rantings of people like John L. Perry and pastor Steven Anderson. At no moment do Nordlinger or Hanson say that these statements – advocating a coup against our president, or his death, is wrong. So they must welcome that kind of rhetoric.

For starters, using the language of hatred to criticize President Bush is deserving of ridicule. No one should say they ‘hate’ President Bush. He was a bad president, and I don’t find the language of hatred they cite to be persuasive in making the case that he was. But it’s just language, freely expressed opinions. No one on the left is stating that Republicans and conservatives simply can’t state that they hate Obama. They’re stating that shouting ‘you lied’ from the House floor is a breach of established decorum, and that declaring that you hope President Obama fails is evidence that Republicans in Congress aren’t seeking to work with the president in any way. If Rush Limbaugh says he hates President Obama, it doesn’t really matter. If Rush engages in borderline racist rhetoric, or in the case of Glenn Beck goes right over the line, that’s a different problem.

The problem is, Jay and Victor are both obsessed with a set of ridiculous examples of people who apparently advocated that President Bush should die. They try to equate this with liberal animosity to Bush and the GOP, but Garrison Keillor saying some nasty things about Republicans doesn’t even compare to anyone advocating the death of a president – it’s just an opinion.

Let’s look at their examples:

Hanson: “the Aflred Knopf novel Checkpoint about killing Bush, or the Toronto Film Festival award-winning docu-drama about killing Bush — but perhaps we forget there was no outrage from the Democratic congress or the New York Times at all that and worse. In addition, we may have forgotten the New York play I’m Gonna Kill the President.”

It’s worth bearing in mind that Checkpoint is a debate between someone who wants to kill Bush and someone who thinks violence will beget violence. It’s an interrogation of the merits of political tactics, not advocacy of killing a president. If Hanson can’t be bothered to look up a docudrama’s title, neither can I. And ‘I’m Gonna Kill the President’ was an ironic play in the tradition of the Italian Dario Fo that doesn’t name President Bush as its target.

Hanson again: “the creepy Guardian column by Charles Brooker published on the eve of the 2004 election”

What, American liberals now have to account for every single British lefty who writes a column? If a Tory says all the Pakis should be rounded up and boated back to Karachi, should I blame that on Newt Gingrich?

Hanson: “At about the same time, one Ahmed Omar Abu Ali was tried and convicted, inter alia, for planning to kill George Bush.”

See what I mean about Hanson being a lying propagandist bully? What does a convicted al Qaida collaborator have to do with the American left?

Onto Nordlinger’s mouth-breathing follow-up:

On Bill Maher’s show, Sen. John Kerry joked about killing Bush. (“I could have gone to 1600 Pennsylvania and killed the real bird with one stone.”)

That’s a lie and Nordlinger knows it. Kerry told Maher that instead of campaigning in New Hampshire in 2006, he could have just been won the presidency in the first place in 2004. It was a humorous lament about his electoral defeat, not his desire to bash the President’s skull in. Nordlinger bringing up this horse pucky again is no different from McCain’s faux outrage over candidate Obama’s ‘lipstick on a pig’ phrasing about the impossibility of taking Sarah Palin’s qualifications seriously.

A New York Democrat, Alan Hevesi…said that his fellow New York Democrat, Chuck Schumer, would “put a bullet between the president’s eyes if he could get away with it.”

Yes, and when Hevesi turned out to be a crook, Democrats were so sad to see him exit the political stage…these words have never come out of Senator Schumer’s mouth, they were only ascribed to him unfairly by a pol who took from the public trust.

A CBS talk-show host, Craig Kilborn, showed Bush giving a speech, and he put on the screen the words “SNIPERS WANTED.”

Is Craig Kilborn even a liberal? No one knows! His failure at The Daily Show handed the task over to Jon Stewart, and he hasn’t been heard from in a serious way since 2004 when his contract at CBS lapsed. Will John L. Perry’s next column appear in Newsmax next week?

Betty Williams is an Irishwoman who won the Nobel Peace Prize. She said, “I have a very hard time with this word ‘non-violence,’ because I don’t believe that I am non-violent. . . . Right now, I would love to kill George Bush.”

Again with the foreigners who say they want to kill an American president. Why does the American left have to account for an Irish woman’s rantings? Is there some Liberal International that Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, and Betty Williams were hanging out at?

So there you have it – some people who have little if anything to do with the Democratic mainstream made some ridiculous statements (or in Senator Kerry’s case did not), and that’s proof that conservatism doesn’t need to account for its extremists.

Now I’m not saying the left doesn’t have extremists. But if you draw the Venn diagrams, there is more insanity of the variety that is being criticized on the right side than you’ll find on the left. Just look at the Public Policy Poll on Republicans who are Birthers vs. Democrats who are 9/11 truthers. It’s 42% of Republicans vs. 25% of Democrats. I think that’s all the proof you need that fewer on the left subscribe to its fringe than people who subscribe to the right’s latest paranoid style.

So Jay, Victor, come on down to SoHo, and I’ll be happy to buy you both a couple pints of STFU. In all my years I’ve never met a thoughtful American liberal Democrat who favored President Bush’s extra-constitutional ouster or murder. That you would shovel this dross the day after your fellow conservative travelers at Newsmax did the wise thing and took back their “let’s overthrow Obama” outburst is proof that you’ll sink to the most desperate levels of rhetorical trash to preserve your blamelessness. It’s unbecoming of thought leaders who want to be taken seriously.