Bush-bashing in books: Checkpoint

As anyone who has been conscious for the last few weeks knows, Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint is about a man named Jay who wants to murder George W. Bush. I have resisted this book, just as I have all of Baker's since his clever little debut, The Mezzanine. I concluded that Baker's main talent was getting himself noticed in literary salons, and have contented myself with confirmation of this in the reviews that I've read of his innumerable subsequent books.

But Baker now can be credited with provoking one of the more interesting book reviews I have read in a long time -- that by Leon Wieseltier in the Sunday NYT (registration required).

Mr. Wieseltier dispenses his opinion of the book in the second word of the review, which begins "This scummy little book. . . " The rest of the review is a comment on Bush-bashing. Here's an illustrative excerpt, quoting a conversation between Jay and Ben, whom the reviewer describes as "Baker's liberal":

The striking thing about Jay's analysis of the war -- that it is the consequence of George W. Bush's religiosity, and servility before American corporations, and alliance with neoconservatives who are ''not humble enough before the mystery of a foreign country'' -- is that it is not Jay's alone. The same account is familiar from newspapers and television shows and Web sites everywhere. In a sense, Baker has slandered the opposition to George W. Bush by representing it with a disordered mind bent on murder. In this season of ferocity, therefore, it is worth insisting that Bush-hatred is generally not a plot to kill the president. Yet the discussion of Bush-hatred, and of Baker's book, cannot be concluded with a polite absolution. For the virulence that calls itself critical thinking, the merry diabolization of other opinions and the other people who hold them, the confusion of rightness with righteousness, the preference for aspersion to argument, the view that the strongest statement is the truest statement -- these deformations of political discourse now thrive in the houses of liberalism too. The radicalism of the right has hectored into being a radicalism of the left. The Bush-loving mob is being met with a Bush-hating mob. Liberals are forgetting why liberals are not radicals. When Jay demands to know how Ben would feel if Bush were killed -- ''won't part of you think, He's got it coming to him? Huh?'' -- the most that center-left Ben can muster in the way of principle is this: ''I don't -- I'm not -- I can't predict how I would react if the president were actually shot,'' followed by some sensitive mutterings about ''the simple sight of any human being stilled.'' American liberalism, in sum, may be losing its head.

This is the sort of thing I've been trying to say about Bush-bashing, e.g., here.

Not that I agree with everything in the review -- Wieseltier talks about the "deranging influence of blogs." But, really, go read the whole thing.