Conor Friedersdorf’s Grassy Knoll
24th November 2013
The Other McCain is delightfully dyspeptic today.
Fortunately, the Secret Service need not worry about Friedersdorf purchasing a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle just now. The focus of his manic obsession is not the current president, but his predecessor.
Bush Derangement Syndrome — the psychiatric malady that seized the minds of liberals for eight years of their paranoid nightmares — has left the landscape littered with deranged kooks. In 2011, Jared Loughner succumbed to 9/11 Truther craziness and went berserk in Tucson. Barrett Brown flipped out last year, ranting about a mad conspiracy against him. Down in Alabama, Roger Shuler is convinced he is the target of a corrupt scheme masterminded by Karl Rove. Anonymous hacker Jeremy Hammond blames Bush, too.
Then there is Conor Friedersdorf, superficially rational yet consumed by the delusion that George W. Bush was the worst president in American history, and in the grip of a dread fear that there will be a Second Coming of Dubya if the GOP ever wins another election.
Like David Frum, Friedersdorf (who Mark Levin calles ‘Friedersdork’, not without reason) is somebody who leveraged a fringe position as a Perhaps Bright Young Conservative into fifteen minutes of fame and then promptly left the reservation, never to return.