Republicans have created this completely fictional President: his name is Barack X, and he’s an Islamo-socialist revolutionary who’s coming for your guns, raising your taxes, slashing the military, apologizing to other countries, and taking his cues from Europe — or worse yet, Saul Alinsky!

And this is how politics has changed: you used to have to run against an actual candidate. But now, you just recreate him inside the bubble and run against your new fictional candidate. That’s how Bush won in 2004 — by running against John Kerry, a French war criminal.

And speaking of Bush, I know conservatives are saying ‘Oh Bill, come on — Democrats did the same thing to him.’ No. Say what you will about the left’s hating of Bush, (but) at least we were hating on the real guy. We didn’t invent a boogeyman who tanked the economy, took us to war on false pretenses, and tortured prisoners — that was the actual guy.

But run down the list of complaints about ‘Fantasy Obama’. He ‘wants to raise your taxes,’ even though he’s lowered them; ‘confiscate your guns,’ even though he’s never mentioned it; and ‘read terrorists their rights’ — yeah, like he did Tuesday in Somalia.

…You see, the difference is the Republicans’ hatred of Obama is based on a paranoid feeling on what he might do; what he’s thinking; what he secretly wants to change. Anger with Bush was based on what he actually did. What Bush was thinking didn’t matter — because he wasn’t.

He did the right thing. But it was a brave thing because he had to take on the muscle of the oil industry, including the American Petroleum Institute, which is their association, their lobbying group. The members of Congress who had expedited this — trying to railroad it through under an arbitrary deadline — received $42 million from the oil industry, the fossil fuel industry, and they were riding it through.

It was because Obama had people power behind him, that he could do the right thing. You know, Bill McKibben, the great naturalist writer and his organization called 350.org, and the National Resources Defense Council brought thousands of people to Washington to show the President that he could do the right thing and they would have his back. Franklin Roosevelt said to the union guys, you know, ‘Make me do the right thing. Go out and build popular support so I can do the right thing.’ Lyndon Johnson put his arm around Martin Luther King and said ‘Dr. King, go out there and make it possible for me to do the right thing.’

…The issue in the (Keystone XL) Pipeline — there were lots of technical issues — but the real issue was the integrity of the political process. There was collusion between high government officials and the (oil) industry to get this through before the public had a chance to be heard. They stopped it, and they also gave the President the ammunition to fight the right battles. He could not have done it without people power. That’s one reason why Occupy Wall Street is so important right now: to build the support for change.