The extent to which liberals are unwittingly aping their bete noire Bush is extraordinary. So where Bush and his supporters deployed the politics of fear to exaggerate the threat of Islamist violence, now left-leaning observers do the same in relation to right-wing terror, claiming Norway shows "the rage with which Islamophobia is spreading through Europe" and the "rise of right-wing fanaticism".
Where in the wake of 9/11 Bush and others demonised radical Muslim preachers, claiming their words fostered violence, now liberal commentators heap similar hatred on right-wing authors who criticise Europe's immigration policies.
They claim people such as Mark Steyn, whom Breivik quoted in his "manifesto", are the real warpers of brain cells, whose words turn men into murderers.
American journalist Max Blumenthal says "the rhetoric of the characters who inspired Breivik was so eliminationist in its nature that it was perhaps only a matter of time before someone put words into action". Such sentiments eerily echo the Right's demonisation of hot-headed imams, and express the implicitly censorious belief that allegedly wicked words lead directly to murder.
And where Bush and his followers convinced themselves, often without evidence, that al-Qa'ida was a vast network with tentacles everywhere, so the cultural elite now claims the far Right has become the dark underbelly of society.
Echoing Donald Rumsfeld's weird comment about "unknown unknowns", one Norwegian writer says hundreds of thousands of right-wing extremists lurk within "the darker waters of the blogosphere", in a "vibrant cyberscene characterised by unmitigated hatred of the new Europe". Where Bush saw American values threatened by faceless fundamentalists, Europe's multicultural elite fantasise that its PC way of life might be killed off by internet-bred lunatics.
The liberal exploiters of Norway have even adopted Bush's civilising mission.
Some on the Right imagined that the Muslim masses might be pacified by giving them the Christian Bible to pore over; now some on the left want to subject Europe's xenophobic hordes to its version of the Bible: the broadsheet newspaper.
As a writer for The Guardian put it: "Had [Breivik] been forced to receive his information through a broadsheet newspaper, where not all the stories dealt with Europe's loss of confidence and the rise of militant Islam, it is conceivable that his world would have looked slightly different."
Yes, that's right. If we "force" the European masses to consume responsible reporting, maybe they'll become more civilised and less prone to barbarism.
This liberal aping of the Bush approach to terror is very revealing. It suggests that much of the chattering-class critique of the Right's politics of fear was not driven by political principle, but rather by alternative prejudices, by a belief that the Right was demonising and censuring the wrong people.
It shouldn't have declared war on a foreign civilisation, but rather on the inhabitants of our own civilisations, those ill-educated, badly bred, non-broadsheet reading masses, who apparently are just one blog posting away from committing mass murder.
