i prefer to compare inauguration days.
on january 20th, 2001, before bush had yet even taken the oath of office, progressives:
rioted in the streets, clashed with police, set fires to piles of debris, smashed storefronts and lined the president elect's motorcade to a) symbolically "turn their back" on the incoming president and b) hurl garbage and eggs at the passing limo.
by that time bush was already known to progressives as a dry drunk who was raised on nazi profiteering money - who was himself an incarnation of hitler - who had conspired with the manufacturers of electronic voting machines to stuff the ballot boxes, and was in any case taking the oath illegitimately. he was the "president select" (in ensuing years, progressives would encourage unity by drafting a map which suggested that the states which went for bush - the "slave states" dontchaknow - belonged to a separate republic called "jesus land"). bush was said to have been responsible for the lynching of a black man in his state while he was governor. when bush noted in response that the perpetrators had been apprehended, prosecuted and given the death penalty under his watch, progressives adjusted their take on it slightly to allow that bush was actually a triple-murderer.
that was all before bush had taken the oath.
january 20th. 2009 was a little different. one portion of the president elect's opponents spent the day hurling recriminations at one another, rather than the opposing team, while the other portion spent the day drafting optimistic open letters of congratulation about the bright side of losing to president obama and of president obama himself.
in fact, if one were to look for derangement, hate and violent rhetoric on that day, they would find it only amidst the president's supporters who had, to give one example, erected on the mall a mock guillotine for which one was invited to pay three dollars for a chance to decapitate bush.
i think york is right about the comparison of conspiracy theories. the "truther" notion is far more calumnious than the birther idea. a better comparison could be made between birtherism and the "black box voting" conspiracy theory which posits that bush conspired with the top brass at diebold to rig voting machines, as they share the aim of portraying the president's very election to office as illegitimate. to this day i think a poll of democrats would show well over 60% endorsing the idea that bush never legitimately held office.
one final point which bears mentioning is that there is wide overlap between proponents of trutherism, birtherism and black box voting cranks. and though there are leftish conspiracy nuts and rightish conspiracy nuts, they comprise a sort of party apart, with rightish and leftish factions coming together in support for politicians with affiliations as varied as ron paul and dennis kuscinich. the thing to be recognized from this is that many of the same people progressives would like to characterize as rock-ribbed mainstays of the republican base are actually people who they marched with in years past and who possibly still have positive aggregate ratings for their dailykos diaries.
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the common progressive rebuttal is to claim that polling figures which show that a majority of democrats believed that "bush knew" or "bush did it" actually reference the "reasonable" assertion that "bush should've known" based on the famous "osama determined to attack within the u.s." pdb.
of course, immediate action on the contents of the pdb would have been comprised of sending investigators to either lax or dulles to deal with a hostage stand-off, and thus wouldn't have prevented 9-11 at all.
but leaving that aside, it's not true to say that progressives were misstating a belief that "bush should've known" when they said "bush knew". the democrats who say "bush knew" mean that bush had foreknowledge and cynically allowed the attack to happen as a pretext to invade afghanistan to facilitate the construction of a natural gas pipeline. we know this because this was the plot suggested by michael moore in his 2004 documentary, Fahrenheit 9-11, which was praised by democrat leaders for it's utility as a get out the vote device.
there are some unintentionally comical comments over at the politico piece which attempt to find a space of ambiguity in the poll question, ""How likely is it that people in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East?"
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