Gore Derangement Syndrome (GDS)

Steve Benen endorses Paul Krugman's latest here, and in as much as Krugman says mean and funny things about Republicans, I think share the endorsement. Here's a snip:

What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?

Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration....

But Gore hatred is more than personal. When National Review decided to name its anti-environmental blog Planet Gore, it was trying to discredit the message as well as the messenger. For the truth Mr. Gore has been telling about how human activities are changing the climate isn’t just inconvenient. For conservatives, it’s deeply threatening.

Is this how GDS really works, though? Perhaps partly so. But I think for the most part this is just the right continuing to portray Al Gore as it did pre-2000: Al Gore is a dilettante and an exaggerator. Most of what Al Gore says is deeply untrue. If Al Gore is on a climate change crusade, then clearly climate change isn't real and Al Gore's just lying, once again, in pursuit of power.

This is of a piece, I think, with the right-wing version of a different malady--Hillary Derangement Syndrome (HDS)--which continues to turn Republicans into neo Cold Warriors, mired in a long struggle against the left-wing threat posed by Hillary Clinton long after such an interpretation of Hillary Clinton could be in any way plausible.

I don't really think, though, that either of these syndromes is part of some party-wide inferiority complex or psychological illness or anything like that. Rather, that controlling narrative is the central flank of the GOP's time-tested "smear on the way to victory" strategy. The narrative about Hillary emerged when smearing her was an easy way to cut down her husband, Democratic President Bill Clinton. Remember the bumper stickers? "Impeach Clinton and her husband Bill"? Bill, we were supposed to believe, was the Manchurian Candidate, under Hillary's radical spell, and impeaching him (an idea that germed in his first term) was as much about any crimes he might have committed as it was about bravely saving the country from an extreme ideological threat.

We're seeing the same thing with GDS now, and there's no doubt in my mind that will see it for the rest of Gore's life, even as the merits of the criticism become farther and farther removed from reality.