Whoda Thunk Crazy Was Contageous?

"With George Bush off the front pages for much of the last few months, the political pathology known as Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) took an unexpected summer hiatus.

BDS sufferers - liberal Democrats seething over successive presidential election losses and hamstrung by a Republican president confidently wielding wartime authority - failed to transfer their enmity to Sen. John McCain, largely because they couldn't bust his 'maverick' brand, but to a larger extent because they assumed Sen. Barack Obama was going to win in a laugher.

That presumption ended when Mr. McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. Before Charlie Gibson could even grill the Alaska governor over her "hubris" in accepting Mr. McCain's historic invitation, the raw rage that focused for eight years on the 43rd president of the United States transferred in a flash to a former "Miss Congeniality" and Anchorage suburban mother of five who immediately swung the momentum to Mr. McCain's side.

Palin Derangement Syndrome, a more irrational variant of the Bush contagion, doesn't require sufferers to know anything about the subject of their hatred. Anonymous, unsourced rumors fuel the fire (book banning, speaking in tongues, creationism, etc.). Lovely family photos hacked from a personal e-mail account displayed on commercial Web sites push more buttons. Asterisks from Mrs. Palin's biographical sketch - 'moose hunter,' 'small-town mayor,' 'wife of champion snow machine racer' - cause excessive sweating and irregular heartbeats. She even fired a guy who Tased a 10-year-old. (Oh wait, she didn't.)

What will happen when they find out she shops at Wal-Mart?"

-- Andrew Breitbart, suffering from something himself, or giving you Real Clear Politics