By Jacob Bacharach

October 12, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -   A little over a year ago, I wrote an article for this publication called, “The Liberal Rehabilitation of George W. Bush Is Complete,” and so it’s my regrettable duty to inform Ellen DeGeneres that her palling around with George W. Bush at a Dallas Cowboys game Sunday—and her subsequent sanctimonious defense of such as a gesture of benevolent friendship meant to heal our fractured, angry nation—is too late. Michelle Obama’s Werther’s Original has melted away, and there’s nothing left but dry mouths and hacks.

It would be easy to get angry at Ellen’s hollow gesture of comity, the post-relevant liberal trailblazer sharing her nachos with America’s most prominent living homophobe, warmonger and torturer, the man who presided over what remains the greatest orgy of murderous violence in this not-as-young-as-it-used-to-be century, the heckuva-job glad-hander who sleepwalked through the deaths of perhaps 1,800 people—many of them, horrifically, by drowning—in one of the most terrible natural disasters in American history, a virulent racist who defeated another sainted American cretin, John McCain, in a South Carolina primary by accusing him of miscegenation.

But what is American public life, and especially American political liberalism, if not a perpetual Operation Paperclip—the post-war intelligence operation to smuggle useful Nazis into America so they could build us weapons against the next, bigger threat? The periods of moral convalescence vary, but the next looming national catastrophe always appears on the horizon, and the former persona non grata, who has bided his or her time by doing something respectable like sucking salaries out of think tanks or semi-retiring in laconic politeness to a family compound, slink back at the first sign the new vulgarities are even more outré and intolerable than his or her own vulgar outrages.

People will tell you—in the case of Ellen and George—that it is primarily an element of ruling class solidarity, that the millionaires and billionaires will always have more in common with each other than with you. There is certainly some truth there, but how then to explain the you-go-girl cheering of so many fans of Michelle Obama, or Ellen? It cannot be simply a matter of that old American pathology, personally misidentifying with people vastly richer than oneself through a form of aspirational Stockholm syndrome.