Arrived in my inbox a note without salutation or signature. It said, “Your memory is either very short or very selective” — and then it gave a link. The note turned out to be from Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com, and the link was to a piece he wrote called “Deleting the Bush Personality Cult from history.” Find it here. He says that conservatives like me are forgetting or ignoring a cult of personality around George W. Bush. Therefore, we are guilty of hypocrisy when we go after the creepier forms of Obama-admiration.

He says, “. . . huge swaths of the right-wing movement were devoted to an unprecedented veneration of George Bush. A whole industry on the Right was created to convert him into a warrior-deity . . .” I do not see things that way, but “that is a point of view,” to borrow an old line.

Greenwald spends some time on two figures in particular: Angela Williamson and Monica Goodling, appointees at the Justice Department. I regret to say that I had never heard of either of them, or their doings. It’s not that my memory is “either very short or very selective.” It could be that I’m not always a very attentive reader of the newspapers.

Lest there be any doubt: I dislike cults of personality, and I’m sure my colleagues do too. Such cults are especially startling in the United States, a republic and a home of individualism, at least in theory. I’m not in favor of creepiness over my guys any more than I am in favor of creepiness over liberal Democrats. There is a difference between healthy appreciation for a leader, or gratitude for him, and something like secular worship. So, are we all agreed?

It should not be necessary to make these elementary points, but I guess it couldn’t hurt.