Pulitzer Prize winning author Jane Smiley is afflicted with a severe case of Bush Derangement Syndrome; as we reported in 2005, in an article for Salon.com she called for the entire Bush administration to be summarily executed. Here’s what she wrote:

Gary Kamiya writes, “In a just world, Bush, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Feith and their underlings would be standing before a Senate committee investigating their catastrophic failures, and Packer’s book would be Exhibit A.” No. In a just world, these people would be taken out and shot.

And now the ranting writer has found a home at the hate site that specializes in these kinds of sentiments, the Huffington Post. Noel Sheppard pulls some deranged quotes from this representative of the Democrat base.

What we notice among conservatives like Coulter, Cheney, Bush, and some Christian groups is that “equality” means nothing—they feel victimized if they are not dominant and if challenges to their dominance are not suppressed. Bush and Cheney want unfettered power; Coulter wants to incite explosions, murders, and hate-crimes. Any attempt on the part of anyone to diminish their power in any way they perceive as an attack on all of their power. This is what makes them dangerous, in the same way that killers and abusers are especially dangerous when they are challenged by their potential victims. …

As their supporters desert them and they come to feel more and more endangered, the question becomes one of containment. We have all noticed that Bush and Cheney are more dangerous. Quietly subverting them has become a Pentagon project; whether it can be done is an open question, given that they still have a core of true believers.

Fortunately, Coulter doesn’t yet have her finger on the red button, but looking at her, you can begin to understand some of the female crazies we have known—Madame Mao, Imelda Marcos. The best thing about them—maybe the only good thing—is that as they become increasingly ridiculous and frightening, they demonstrate for all to see that they are exactly the sort of persons our society needs to innoculate itself against.

Someone who has called for the entire US government to be executed is complaining that Ann Coulter incites “explosions, murders, and hate crimes.” Absolutely par for the nutroots course.

There is a bad, mean-spirited, ugly craziness loose in this country.