Here’s a terrific new four-part series by Victor Davis Hanson that you can read during dull moments in tonight’s debate (namely, whenever Flipper is breaching): The Perfect Storm of Hating Bush.

The intro to Part One:

The American Left has become increasingly hysterical since September 11th. The symptoms of a new, disturbing extremism are manifest in a variety of forums that transcend legitimate political opposition to the war or grassroots politicking to vote out an incumbent party. Last year the comedian Rick Hall played to full houses abroad, performing his newest composition, “Let’s Get Together And Kill George Bush.” As the Republicans assembled for their August national convention in New York, a pacifist group known as “United For Peace and Justice,” nevertheless announced its sponsorship of a rather violent-sounding, off-Broadway “guerilla comedy” entitled, “I’m Gonna Kill the President.”

The 2002 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Nicholson Baker, just published Checkpoint. It is an extended dialogue about killing (in a variety of strange ways) George Bush. Jay, the protagonist of the novel, characterizes the potential targeted President as a “drunken oilman.” Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld are portrayed as “bog creatures” with “grubs scurrying out of their noses.” Such venom filters down. Sue Niederer, the mother of a soldier recently killed in Iraq, recently scoffed in an interview: “I think if I had him in front of me I would shoot him in the groined area. Let him suffer. And just continue shooting him there.”

Currently in Britain there is released a made-for-television movie of the 9-11 mass murdering—but told from the point of view of one of the 19 suicide-murderers, one Ziad Jarrah who took the controls of Flight 93 and crashed the plane and its occupants into a Pennsylvania field, when the brave passengers aborted his effort to incinerate either the U.S. Capitol building or the White House. The show’s producers—British television’s Channel 4—assure that their “whole ambition was to find out what makes these people tick, rather than to be judgmental.” And being non-judgmental is apparently assured when you hire an ex-terrorist, the IRA convicted murderer (later freed on appeal) Ronan Bennett as the drama’s chief writer.

There are always extremists, Left and Right, here and abroad. Yet, what is now different is that the public and unabashed fantasy of liquidating a sitting President, whether in comical or allegorical fashion, does not earn much censure from the mainstream Left. Instead, it seems to understand why some would wish George Bush dead. To the new critics of American conservatism, such public detestation is not an outrage, but seen as valuable and legitimate discourses of dissent against the “dominant paradigm.” Alfred Knopf, for example, is promoting Baker’s book as a cri de coeur—“in response to the powerless seething fury many Americans felt when President Bush decided to take the nation to war.”

And here’s Part Two.