Pejman Yousefzadeh pushes back against this post:

The mere fact that Republicans are negotiating with the Obama Administration over legislation does not mean that critiques against the Administration are somehow invalidated. You weren’t making this claim about the supposed invalidity of Democratic critiques of George W. Bush when Democrats were negotiating with him over legislation, were you?

Wrong on both counts.

No one on the left doubted George W. Bush's cultural or biographical legitimacy as president. In the first term there were claims of illegitimacy - but on the, er, understandable and technical grounds that he won fewer votes than his opponent, and won via an extremely contentious court case. No one treated the son of a former president as some kind of anti-American or un-American alien, the way Palinites treat Obama. Nonetheless, several Democrats immediately supported his massive tax cut - while no Republicans, in the wake of an Obama landslide - supported a desperately needed stimulus. I do not recall states mulling secession or nullification of federal decisions under the last president.

As for "critiques", GOP cooperation does not invalidate them. But I'm not talking about good faith critiques of policy. I'm talking about the plain fact that Fox News, talk radio, the Pajamas Media network have not just criticized the president, but demonized him as beyond the American pale, lying about his belief in American exceptionalism, tying him to "Kenyan anti-colonialism" or other such Stanley-Kurtz style paranoia-for-pay. Check out the image above. Did it appear in some fringe Larouchian publication? Nope; it was right there in Forbes Magazine, next to a piece by Steve Forbes. Name one MSM publication that photo-shopped Bush in that way.