Dubya was not elected and re-elected in a vaccuum.

Some of these myths are on display in the thread above by some of the American commentators.

Myth 1: If you are a decent and good person on an individual level, you are of course a progressive or, at the very least, you wouldn't do anything to undermine my interest. This is the myth Dubya was playing to in the debates with Gore, when he objected to Gore's attacks on him, saying Gore "doesn't know what's in my heart". The same myth leads MattinNYC to say his anti-abortion relatives who vote for a warmongerer are all the same decent people so of course they're not really conservative.

Myth 2: Your forebears experienced racism, so that means you're still a victim. And by extension, because you and yours were able to overcome such racism, those who haven't must be at fault for not having done so. Any African-American will recognize what I'm getting at here. Poemless cited this myth when bringing up the "no Irish need apply" history, and while I doubt very much poemless would fault African-Americans for racism still directed against them, the numbers would indicate, by voting patterns, that in general this sentiment is quite extensive in America today.

Myth 3: You're really from someplace else. You're simultaneously an Irish-American, a Polish-American and a waspy regular-issue American of English origin. By this very fact, this makes you a person of the world and not from a highly insular country which is extra-ordinarily sheltered, and has been for its entire history, from conflict and wars on your soil. As a consequence, you can solve the worlds problems by making them good - like you. Of course, the violence and the hundred of thousands killed in your name are all very far away, almost unreal. This last myth is arguably the most perfidious - it is also extremely widespread, far moreso than most American "liberals," the majority of whose Senators voted for Irak, care to admit. Perfidious because it allows the biggest war machine on the planet to be used to the great detriment of mankind without credible opposition on the part of folks in whose name the killing we be done. Why? Because of course those "decent people" cannot possibly have ill intentions, and America is a land of unleavened good. When you hear the phrase "muscular liberalism," remember this myth and its relationship to the American left.

These three myths, plus the one about the heroic individual, the self-made man who pulled himself up by his own bootstraps (as Lenin derisively refered to the myth) and the vast adherence of most Americans to them, including those on the left, are what I would argue render the left largely ineffectual in the US, or as another poster on this site said not to long ago, "the most incompetent left in the world".

So yeah, I got a filter, and when a certain American myth is invoked by Americans about their putative righteousness, I do tend to get irritated.

Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant