It’s a bit like watching an eagle catch a fly. At FrontPage, Matthew Yglesias vs. Victor Davis Hanson in Symposium: The Left’s Attack on Bush.

The question: “There is, undeniably, a visceral disdain and hatred on the part of the Left when it comes to dealing with this Republican President. Could you give your interpretation of this phenomenon?”

FP: Mr. Yglesias?

Yglesias: There’s obviously some of that out there and I think you see a lot of the same thing coming from the other side as well. Most dislike of Bush, though, is grounded in a dislike of the policies he’s pursued. I don’t see why anyone should find this particularly surprising — Bush is a conservative Republican, so naturally enough liberals don’t like him very much. Before the war, one thing a lot of “liberal hawks” said was that their anti-war colleagues were being blinded to the merits of the war by a knee-jerk dislike of the president.

I think one thing we’ve seen over the past twelve months, though, is that suspicion of the president grounded in his conduct domestically and regarding postwar Afghanistan was well grounded. Just as he’s mishandled the government of the United States, he’s also proven incapable of managing postwar Iraq competently. This is tragic, because whatever our feelings about the war before it happened, we now all have a stake in seeing a good outcome, but that doesn’t seem to be the direction in which things are headed.

I find myself largely in agreement with Professor AbuKhalil’s remarks — George W. Bush’s personal qualities aren’t really the issue here. That said, when you have an administration that’s as ridden by internal conflicts as this one obviously is, it’s reasonable to ask whether the people at the very top of the pyramid have the skills necessary to sort out the conflicting advice they’re getting in a reasonable manner. I think there’s a lot of evidence that the president has mixed and matched elements of the Secretary of Defense’s policy agenda with other elements coming from the Secretary of State in ways that I don’t think make a great deal of sense. It’s not unreasonable to speculate that the president’s well-known lack of intellectual curiosity is part of the problem here. Still, the real issue is the overall merits of the policies the administration is putting forward and not any one person’s actions.

FP: Dr. Hanson, what do you make of Prof. AbuKhalil’s and Mr. Yglesias’ comments? Is the Left’s disdain for Bush really rooted in the feeling that he is too unqualified and incompetent? Does the Left truly believe this President has mishandled the government and proven incapable of managing postwar Iraq? Or is the problem really rooted in the fact that the Left sees an ideological enemy that is very competent in doing exactly everything that the Left vehemently opposes?

Tell us why you think the Left hates President Bush with so much fury.

Hanson: The fury is deductive-a much exaggerated version of the conservative dislike of Clinton even when he pushed welfare reform, balanced budgets, and the bombing of Milosevic. After all, Bush increased domestic spending-education, health, housing-by over 7% per annum; add record aid for AIDs, prescription drug entitlements, near amnesty for illegal immigration, minority appointments-and there is little reason to see him as particularly reactionary or even traditionally conservative. The poor benefit from low interest rates, historical rates of GNP growth, tax cuts, spectular productivity growth, low inflation, and sudden job creation this month.

No, the problem derives from pre-existing and often trivial animus: (1) anger over the 2000 election and the eroding political resonance of traditional liberalism, (2) Bush’s purported anti-intellectualism, Christianity, southern accent, and unconcern with aristocratic leftism from the NPR to the New York Times to Malibu parties. Shrug off all that and it threatens the pretensions of the intellectual elite; (3) and his moral clarity that shook up the world nursed on�fuzzy, triangulating Clintonism-whether in the case of corrupt Middle East regimes, “moderates” like Yasser Arafat, the utopian pretentious and profiteering Europeans, South Koreans, NATO, and what now seems to be an increasingly corrupt United Nations. Whatever one thinks of Bush, everything is now on the table for reappraisal and�a wide variety of vested interests depend on caricaturing him rather than adjusting to change and adjudicating issues and ideas on their merits.

And that’s just the first question. A must-read.

The other panelists are:

Dr. Laurie Mylroie, one of the foremost American scholars on Iraq and Saddam Hussein and the author of the new book, Bush vs. the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror. She is represented by www.benadorassociates.com.

Dr. As`ad AbuKhalil, Professor of Political Science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley. His latest book on the Saudi government and its ties to the US, Saudi Arabia & the U.S.: The Tale of the “Good Taliban,” will appear in a few weeks by Seven Stories Press.