It is a painful thing to see a good and decent man slandered and abused. George W. Bush has been crucified in the media for five years, day after day. This week, after the unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe of New Orleans, the media mob is screaming louder than ever.  It is a gruesome thing to watch, made worse because we can see the impact on him as a person.

Unlike Ronald Reagan, who could turn away a hostile question with a light—hearted joke, Bush is a man who genuinely wants to be liked and yes, even trusted by his opponents. He has done everything in his power to change the tone of national politics, and at every turn he has been greeted with vicious personal slander. It obviously hurts. Not a glib speaker, it must be agonizing for him to face a baying mob of media types who hate him and everything he stands for. Anything he says will be turned against him. He can only take the slings and arrows, without responding in kind, and quietly go back to work.

Mark Steyn just wrote about

"an aerial shot of 255 school buses neatly parked at one (New Orleans) city lot, their fuel tanks leaking gasoline into the urban lake. An enterprising blogger, Bryan Preston, worked out that each bus had 66 seats, which meant that the vehicles at just that one lot could have ferried out 16,830 people. ... New Orleans had more than enough municipal transport on hand to have got almost everyone out in a couple of runs last Sunday.

Why didn't they? Well, the mayor didn't give the order. OK, but how about school board officials, or the fellows with the public schools transportation department, or the guy who runs that motor pool, or the individual bus drivers? If it ever occurred to any of them that these were potentially useful evacuation assets, they kept it to themselves. ... So the first school bus to escape New Orleans and make it to safety in Texas was one that had been abandoned on a city street."

Will the Mayor of New Orleans be blamed? Maybe. How about the Governor, the School Board, the Transportation Department, the bus drivers? None will be a big enough target. The media around the world will aim their biggest guns at George W. The first attempts to Blame Bush didn't get far, but reporters by the thousands are now working overtime to ferret out a Smoking Gun.

Somewhere, somehow, they will find a document, a photograph, a joke, or just about any willing demagogue to shout out that George Did It. He Didn't Care.

You know the rest.

President Bush is not the only conservative to be treated this way. The list is long.  Only yesterday, the day Chief Justice Rehnquist died, he was called a "Republican thug" by a famous Harvard Law School professor. But George W. Bush is America's Victim in Chief.

Clarence Thomas called his accusers a "high—tech lynch mob" when they tried to block his Supreme Court nomination using the same tactics. "High—tech lynch mob" is not far from the truth. Like the redneck mobs of the Jim Crow South, the Left finds itself at a historical dead end. It is striking out at any target, blindly, using any accusation, no matter how vile and absurd.

Bush is today's hate object, and if only Bush can be brought down the Left imagines it might return to the glory days. But President Bush is only the most visible symptom of the Democrats' historic decline. They lost the battle of ideas long ago, and have kept going only by enforcing an ideological monopoly on the media and the bureaucracies.  Now the American people themselves have quietly turned against them, in election after election since 1994.

Establishments die hard. The last resort of the Left is unelected office ——— the judges, the civil service and the tenured faculties. While the Big Media are still the Democrats' most powerful political tool, even they are slowly crumbling.  Their news product is unwanted, and more accurate news is now only a click away.

Today we are seeing a historic course change in American politics. It has happened before, with the American Revolution, Jacksonian Democracy, the Civil War, the New Deal. Presidents are often made the scapegoats of these great turns of history. The next time George Bush looks in the mirror he might remind himself that Abraham Lincoln was called a "hairy ape," Thomas Jefferson was accused of despotism, and our chattering classes unanimously considered Ronald Reagan to be a trigger—happy nuclear warmonger. It only hurts for a decade or two.

"From time to time," wrote Thomas Jefferson, "the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots." Well, from where I stand, you can chalk up George W. Bush on the side of the patriots.