Michael Kinsley, a liberal whom I actually find to be somewhat reasonable much of the time, has a putrid little column in this week's edition of Time Magazine, wherein he tries to explain the left's irrational, seething hatred of George W. Bush.

For quite some time, Republicans have been bewildered by the left's frothing disdain for Bush, especially considering the fact that, frankly, he ain't all that conservative. He hasn't cut a single government program that I'm aware of, nobody who was getting big wads of taxpayer largesse under Clinton is getting any less, and yet they seem to hate him even more than they hated Reagan (if that's possible).

Charles Krauthammer recently tried again to unravel the mystery from an outsider's perspective in the pages of Time, but this week Kinsley steps up from the left to explain it all. Says Kinsley:

To start, we do think he stole the election. Yes, yes, we're told to "get over it," and we've been pretty damned gracious. But we can't help it: this still rankles. What rankles especially is Bush's almost total lack of grace about the extraordinary way he took office. Theft aside, he indisputably got fewer votes than the other guy, our guy.

Oh yes, they've been quite gracious. Gracious through the umpteen recounts (including those by leftist media organizations) that have unanimously showed Bush winning Florida. Gracious in continuing to insist that Bush "stole" an election in which he won the electoral college and in which the U.S. Supreme Court "handed him the election" by finally ordering Florida to actually obey its own written laws. Yes, we've hardly heard a peep out of them about it.

We expected some soothing bipartisan balm. There was none, even after 9/11. (Would it have been that hard to appoint a Democrat as head of Homeland Security, in a "bring us together" spirit?)

This one makes me laugh out loud. Raise your hand if you believe a Democrat Homeland Security director would have assuaged the Democrats and "brought us together." How soothing a balm did Bush's education bill authored with uber-liberal Ted Kennedy prove to be? How soothing to the Democrat spirit was the appointment of Democrat Norman Mineta (who, perhaps coincidentally, has proven to be one of the most incompetent members of the Bush administration) to his cabinet as Secretary of Transportation? Yes, had Bush only appointed a Democrat to head Homeland Security, Democrats would be singing Kumbaya right now.

(Psst! We also thought, and still think, he's pretty dumb — though you're not supposed to say it and we usually don't. And we thought that this too would make him easier to swallow.)

Ah yes, more of that Democrat graciousness we've been hearing about. Kinsley whispers it because the left has been so reticent to publicly charge the president with stupidity, as you know. In fact, this is probably the very first time you've even heard the left make the charge, so scrupulous have they been in avoiding this topic. Fine, so Bush is the dumbest guy to ever earn degrees from Yale and Harvard.

It turns out, though, that Bush's, um, unreflectiveness shores up his ideological backbone. An adviser who persuades Bush to adopt Policy X does not have to be worried that our President will keep turning it over in his mind, monitoring its progress, reading and thinking about the complaints of its critics, perhaps even re-examining it on the basis of subsequent developments, and announce one day that he prefers Policy Y.

I call this the "Joe Klein Objection." This, in a nutshell, is why Democrats were so enamored with Bill Clinton. They see handwringing indecision and waffling as virtuous. A few months ago, Klein (also in the pages of time) wrote a piece called "The Blinding Glare of His Certainty." His thesis was that the thing which makes Bush so repugnant is that he knows what he believes, and doesn't have to wrestle with each individual issue as it arises without the benefit of some interpretive philosophical framework.

"There are plenty of thoughtful, angst-ridden evangelicals, of course," Klein plaintively pointed out. Bush, however, is not one of them. He's not particularly angst-ridden, which as Klein (and Kinsley) see it is his flaw. Clinton, on the other hand, having no actual principles to operate from, saw each issue as brand new, unrelated to any others. Thus he required the obligatory period of navel-gazing onanism before reaching a conclusion based on emotions and expediency, which was subject to change again as soon as the wind shifted. In other words, to Klein and Kinsley, he was thoughtful virtue incarnate.

There's much more of the same in Kinsley's article, but I've had all I can take. Let's skip closer to the end:

Krauthammer is wrong, though, to suppose that anger is driving liberals to self-defeating ideological extremes. The mood is not suicidal. It is comically pragmatic.

This is pure wishful thinking on Kinsley's part. His television set must be broken, since he obviously has not been watching the Democrat candidates in action. Whether you like or hate Bush, there's simply no way to claim that the current Democrat approach is anything like "pragmatic." They believe they lost the 2002 mid-terms because they weren't strident or belligerent enough. Their response is to border on the hysterical, which will only benefit Bush and the Republicans.

So let me say what Kinsley doesn't have the guts to come right out and say: the left hates Bush because he's an evangelical Christian. Think I'm oversimplifying it? Who's the one member of the administration the left hates even more than Bush himself? You guessed it: John Ashcroft. Now what do Ashcroft and Bush have in common that, say, Dick Cheney (who appears to be more politically conservative than the president, and who, while still hated, is not hated on an order even approaching that of Bush and Ashcroft) doesn't share?