Thanks to Al Gore’s unprecedented recount strategy in 2000 the American left has steeped in a demonology that criminalizes honest differences of opinion. It has become nearly impossible to find common ground.

It began before that. The assault on Iran-Contra was largely a hoax, made worse by huge defensive mistakes by Reagan’s people. That was foreign policy criminalized. Nixon, of course, helped get the ball rolling years before that by setting a trap for himself and falling into it. Suddenly, the history of presidential misbehavior disappeared and Nixon was accused of “unprecedented” crimes.

Of course, Bill Clinton lying in the face of a federal judge in a civil rights case where he was the defendant was nothing like that! Waving his pudendum in the face of an Arkansas state employee and inviting her to “kiss it” somehow became “only about sex” when M. Lewinsky, a White House intern, was brought into the case as an example of someone else who had been invited to “kiss it,” and had.

Imagine for a second the volcanic eruptions if George Bush, father or son, had so much as patted an intern’s rear end. It would have constituted the end of civilization itself.

Likewise, Jeremiah Wright is on tape asking God to damn America, and Obama, his 20-year congregant and protege, is O.K.’d by the Democratic Party as its presidential nominee. And no one anywhere even addresses James Cone’s “theology,” which is the foundation at Obama’s church.

It’s enough to make me wonder whether when the graveyards vote in Chicago if they don’t use the graves to bury the truth.