Why the Bush derangement syndrom matters

Daniel Henninger explains:

This persistent belief that George Bush committed a major moral crime, which was refuted by the Robb-Silberman Commission, had consequences. It has led many people in Washington's standing institutions--Congress, the press, the intelligence and foreign-policy bureaucracies--to think they've been released from operating inside the normal boundaries that allow political Washington to function, that allow partisans to do business, whether on foreign policy, Social Security or homeland security.

Over the Bush years that code has been displaced by a new ethos that to resist policies that flowed from such a "lie," anything goes--such as leaks about the most sensitive national security programs or published "dissents" by recently retired CIA officials like Paul Pillar. Compare this ethos to that of the U.S. intelligence community that ran the Venona program, producing invaluable signals intelligence on Soviet espionage activities from 1943 onward without any participant revealing its existence. No such achievement is imaginable now.

Instead every issue that emerges becomes an illegitimate extension of the original "lie"--the NSA wiretaps, the Guantanamo detentions, Abu Ghraib, terrorist interrogation techniques, the Plame affair. This is a dangerous game. Raised to this level, policy becomes a super-heated moral Armageddon that makes mere politics impossible to manage. One then might ask: Do you want this government to fail? To which a tragicomic response is appropriate: Are you insane?

And the press is as responsible for this as the politicians, who now seem to be the dog being wagged by the tail. Why would a responsible newspaper decide that it is ok to publish the existence of a top secret program to disrupt terrorist planning? Because Bush lied? Because he wasn't really elected? Because it violates someone's privacy?
Because the leaker and the paper's editors are insane?

At times, one imagines that a second 9/11 would be cheered on the left.