Kerry succumbs to Chaitred

Hugh Hewitt has drawn attention to John Kerry’s disgusting sotto voce comment on the Bush administration to a supporter that was caught on tape today in Chicago: “”Let me tell you, we’ve just begun to fight. We’re going to keep pounding. These guys are the most crooked, you know, lying group I’ve ever seen. It’s scary.” (Click here for Hugh’s excellent post on the subject.)
President Bush seems to drive his political opponents nuts. The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait first confessed to hatred of President Bush and sought to dignify it in a lengthy article last fall. Chait’s remarkable article on the higher wisdom of Bush hatred is “Mad about you: The case for Bush hatred.” We coined the term “Chaitred” to capture the phenomenon of irrational hatred of President Bush.
Howard Dean rose and fell as a proud exponent of Chaitred. Walter Mondale publicly succumbed at a surreal symposium on Bush administration foreign policy over which he presided and rendered judgment, supported by the testimony of luminaries from the Carter and Clinton administrations. Kerry in the meantime more or less kept the lid on.
Today Kerry demonstrated that he has joined the ranks of Chait, Dean, Mondale, et al. as victims of Chaitred. Let us take the occasion to review our analysis of the pathology. Rocket Man provides a comprehensive fisking of the Chait piece in “Why do they hate him?” Deacon then contributes “The aesthetics of hating President Bush,” I add “A footnote on the ethos of liberal hate,” and Deacon returns with a concluding thought, “If we are in a culture war.”