Krauthammer is at it again.

Warning: righteous indignation alert.

I know everyone is tied up with the media's egregious handling of the Swift Vet Thugs, but Krauthammer's new column "The Pressure Cooker Theory" is too hacktacular to let slip.  Goddamn, it has got to be soul-destroying to be this much of a hack:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37224-2004Aug26.html

...But that is still not enough to account for the level of venom today. It is not often that a losing presidential candidate (Al Gore) compares the man who defeated him to both Hitler and Stalin. It is not often that a senior party leader (Edward Kennedy) accuses a sitting president of starting a war ("cooked up in Texas") to gain political advantage for his reelection.

The loathing goes far beyond the politicians. Liberals as a body have gone quite around the twist...

How to explain? With apologies to Dr. Freud, I propose the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release.

The hostility, resentment, envy and disdain, all superheated in Florida, were not permitted their natural discharge...The Democrats fell unnaturally silent. For two long, agonizing years, they had to stifle and suppress. It was the most serious case of repression since Freud's Anna O. went limp. The forced deference nearly killed them. And then, providentially, they were saved. The clouds parted and bad news rained down like manna: WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Joe Wilson and, most important, continued fighting in Iraq.

...The result has been volcanic. The subject of one prominent new novel is whether George W. Bush should be assassinated. This is all quite unhinged. Good God. What if Bush is reelected? If they lose to him again, Democrats will need more than just consolation. They'll need therapy.

I don't know about liberals needing therapy, but "Dr." Krauthammer needs a professional reprimand for making a complete mockery out of his old profession (while misquoting Kennedy and blatantly misinterpreting Gore in the process).  This is beyond callous.  In recent months, Kruathammer has "diagnosed" Kennedy, Gore, Pelosi, Dean, all war opponents and now all liberals as suffering from various forms of dementia -- he is now literally arguing that a political philosophy and set of positions is a form of dementia.

So you've got the Swift Boat Thugs defaming the value of Vietnam decorations and ginning up buried anger about America's worst foreign policy decision among a generation of soldiers for partisan gain.  And you've got "Dr." Krauthammer equating liberalism with mental illness on the pages of the Post.  And it's not just him.  He's just lending his professional "respectability" to the thuggish Republican tactic of labelling various Democrats "insane".  There's a direct link between this sort of thing and the notion that Kerry "exaggerated" his heroism in Vietnam, that's he's still "hung up" on that war.  Krauthammer will likely be telling us all about it in the weeks to come.

Anyone who's ever had a friend or family member who faced real mental illness, or who has battled it him/herself has got to be furious about this.  I lived for three years with two (thoroughly apolitical) roommates struggling with ADD and clinical depression respectively, while they weighed the personal and financial costs of going on drugs or enrolling in therapy against the daily toll their problems took on their life and work.  I thank my lucky stars I've never had to deal with serious depression in my adult life and I really believe that mental illness is debilitating and life-sucking for those who face it. Maybe that's the "liberal" in me -- a weird combination of mushy and angry -- or maybe just Freudian repression! Krauthammer, a trained shrink, faces no such qualms as he revels in that "ugly contempt for losers" that Hertzberg defined as the guiding principle of the modern Republican party -- be those losers people facing mental illness or out-of-power Democrats or just liberals in general.  Krauthammer isn't being clever or irreverent or un-PC here.  He's being an intellectual thug, making a mockery of his degree and his profession and his oath.  He needs to be stopped.

Apparently Getler doesn't cover the Post op-ed page.  But if you're so inclined, you can write a letter to the editor at:

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