History Lesson

Paul Krugman proposes a thought experiment in his article "The Arabian Candidate", where he suggests that an American president under the control of Arab terrorists would behave a lot like George W. Bush. Krugman is not the first to make such a suggestion. Recently Matthew Yglesias developed his unified theory to explain the Bush administration's policies (the president is an Iranian agent. Mark Ames may have been the one start this all though, with a piece he wrote in the September 2001 issue of the Exile. Over time the "Bush is a foreign agent" meme (almost always applied hypothetically) has steadily gained ground and gone from the fringe (Ames) to the mainstream (Yglesias and Krugman) of liberal opinion. This evolution isn't especially important, but it does symbolize how much Bush has polarized the country and unified the left.