. . . he seems to have slept through all eight years of the BusHitler “Selected-Not-Elected” Administration and woke up only after Mr. Obama moved into the White House.

Sheriff Clarence Dupnik was at it again today, this time in an interview with Fox News. He has used virtually every opportunity to stand in front of microphones to imply that “vitriolic rhetoric” on radio and television might have had something to do with the murder of six innocents by a mentally ill young man. He did so even while admitting to Meghan Kelly that there was absolutely no evidence to that effect. This also in spite of the news that the man had an apparent obsession with Congressman Giffords going back to 2007.

There is also no evidence that Sherrif Dupnik noticed any vitriolic rhetoric from the Left during the Bush Administration. Apparently Keith Olbermann, Bill Maher, Jack Cafferty, Erika Jong, Whoopie Goldberg, Rosie O’Donnell, Henry Waxman, Patrick Kennedy, et. al. all kept their strong disagreements with the party in power to themselves.

And those Code Pink protesters shouting at General Petraeus were models of decorum and civil discourse.

Obviously, Dupnik’s comments are a calculated seizing of an opportunity to score points for his side. But it, along with CNN’s coverage of the savage crime and Paul Krugman’s commentary, all represent a fresh low point.

All this puts me in remembrance of another passage that ultimately got edited out of the Palin book. Here’s another “deleted scene” from The Faith and Values of Sarah Palin:

Of course, the political sphere has never been a place for the thin-skinned or those without the stomach for a bare-knuckle street fight. We think of the founding father’s era as one of decorum and high-mindedness but in fact the presidential race pitting Thomas Jefferson against John Adams got astonishingly nasty. Proxies for each candidate questioned the other’s manhood and floated scurrilous, baseless rumors about their morals, habits and parental heritage. The treatment Lincoln received from unfriendly newspapers and the political cartoonists they employed often horrifies those previously unacquainted with the history and journalism of that period.

Still, many historians and academics with detailed knowledge of our nation’s past are convinced there is something singularly toxic and ugly about our time. In the closing days of George W. Bush’s presidency, Peter Wood, the provost at King’s College published A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America. In it he asserts, “For the first time in our political history, declaring absolute hatred for one’s opponent has become a sign not of sad excess but of good character.”

Absolute hatred is certainly an appropriate term for the ever-intensifying levels of disdain Bush inspired in large swaths of people, particularly those in media, entertainment, academia and the leftward side of the political sphere. The term Bush Derangement Syndrome became widely used to describe the visceral loathing many in the media and in Washington freely expressed.

During the campaign of 2008, with Bush leaving office and the Democrats firmly in control of both houses of Congress, it almost seemed as if the ferocious contempt which had for so long been focused like a laser on George W. Bush was searching for a new place to burn. McCain was too moderate to fill the bill.

Then McCain surprised the world by choosing Sarah Palin. And a reckless condescension found a new home. Now the term Palin Derangement Syndrome has entered the cultural lexicon.