The Case for Bush Hatred
John Q. Smith
Mad About You by Jonathan Chait
http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20030929&s=chait092903
Post date: 09.18.03 Issue date: 09.29.03
I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it. I think his policies
rank him among the worst presidents in U.S. history. And, while I'm
tempted to leave it at that, the truth is that I hate him for less
substantive reasons, too. I hate the inequitable way he has come to his
economic and political achievements and his utter lack of humility
(disguised behind transparently false modesty) at having done so. His
favorite answer to the question of nepotism--"I inherited half my
father's friends and all his enemies"--conveys the laughable implication
that his birth bestowed more disadvantage than advantage. He reminds me
of a certain type I knew in high school--the kid who was given a fancy
sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow
earned it. I hate the way he walks--shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out
from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he
talks--blustery self- assurance masked by a pseudo-populist twang. I
even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. I hate his
lame nickname- bestowing--a way to establish one's social superiority
beneath a veneer of chumminess (does anybody give their boss a nickname
without his consent?). And, while most people who meet Bush claim to
like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate
him even more.
There seem to be quite a few of us Bush haters. I have friends who have
a viscerally hostile reaction to the sound of his voice or describe his
existence as a constant oppressive force in their daily psyche. Nor is
this phenomenon limited to my personal experience: Pollster Geoff Garin,
speaking to The New York Times, called Bush hatred "as strong as
anything I've experienced in 25 years now of polling." Columnist Robert
Novak described it as a "hatred ... that I have never seen in 44 years
of campaign watching."
Yet, for all its pervasiveness, Bush hatred is described almost
exclusively as a sort of incomprehensible mental affliction. James
Traub, writing last June in The New York Times Magazine, dismissed the
"hysteria" of Bush haters. Conservatives have taken a special interest
in the subject. "Democrats are seized with a loathing for President
Bush--a contempt and disdain giving way to a hatred that is near
pathological--unlike any since they had Richard Nixon to kick around,"
writes Charles Krauthammer in Time magazine. "The puzzle is where this
depth of feeling comes from." Even writers like David Brooks and
Christopher Caldwell of The Weekly Standard--the sorts of conservatives
who have plenty of liberal friends--seem to regard it from the
standpoint of total incomprehension. "Democrats have been driven into a
frenzy of illogic by their dislike of George W. Bush," explains
Caldwell. "It's mystifying," writes Brooks, noting that Democrats have
grown "so caught up in their own victimization that they behave in ways
that are patently not in their self-interest, and that are almost
guaranteed to perpetuate their suffering."
Have Bush haters lost their minds? Certainly some have. Antipathy to
Bush has, for example, led many liberals not only to believe the costs
of the Iraq war outweigh the benefits but to refuse to acknowledge any
benefits at all, even freeing the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein's reign of
terror. And it has caused them to look for the presidential nominee who
can best stoke their own anger, not the one who can win over a majority
of voters--who, they forget, still like Bush. But, although Bush hatred
can result in irrationality, it's not the product of irrationality.
Indeed, for those not ideologically or personally committed to Bush's
success, hatred for Bush is a logical response to the events of the last
few years. It is not the slightest bit mystifying that liberals despise
Bush. It would be mystifying if we did not.
One reason Bush hatred is seen as inherently irrational is that its
immediate precursor, hatred of Bill Clinton, really did have a paranoid
tinge. Conservatives, in retrospect, now concede that some of the
Clinton haters were a little bit nutty. But they usually do so only in
the context of declaring that Bush hatred is as bad or worse. "Back
then, [there were] disapproving articles--not to mention armchair
psychoanalysis--about Clinton-hating," complains Byron York in a
National Review story this month. "Today, there appears to be less
concern." Adds Brooks, "Now it is true that you can find conservatives
and Republicans who went berserk during the Clinton years, accusing the
Clintons of multiple murders and obsessing how Vince Foster's body may
or may not have been moved. ... But the Democratic mood is more
pervasive, and potentially more self-destructive."
It's certainly true that there is a left-wing fringe of Bush haters
whose lurid conspiracy-mongering neatly parallels that of the Clinton
haters. York cites various left-wing websites that compare Bush to
Hitler and accuse him of murder. The trouble with this parallel is,
first, that this sort of Bush-hating is entirely confined to the
political fringe. The most mainstream anti-Bush conspiracy theorist
cited in York's piece is Alexander Cockburn, the ultra-left, rabidly
anti-Clinton newsletter editor. Mainstream Democrats have avoided
delving into Bush's economic ties with the bin Laden family or
suggesting that Bush invaded Iraq primarily to benefit Halliburton.
The Clinton haters, on the other hand, drew from the highest ranks of
the Republican Party and the conservative intelligentsia. Bush's
solicitor general, Theodore Olson, was involved with The American
Spectator's "Arkansas Project," which used every conceivable method--
including paying sources--to dig up dirt from Clinton's past. Mainstream
conservative pundits, such as William Safire and Rush Limbaugh, asserted
that Vince Foster had been murdered, and GOP Government Reform Committee
Chairman Dan Burton attempted to demonstrate this theory forensically by
firing a shot into a dummy head in his backyard.
A second, more crucial difference is that Bush is a far more radical
president than Clinton was. From a purely ideological standpoint, then,
liberal hatred of Bush makes more sense than conservatives' Clinton
fixation. Clinton offended liberals time and again, embracing welfare
reform, tax cuts, and free trade, and nominating judicial moderates.
When budget surpluses first appeared, he stunned the left by reducing
the national debt rather than pushing for more spending. Bush, on the
other hand, has developed into a truly radical president. Like Ronald
Reagan, Bush crusaded for an enormous supply-side tax cut that was
anathema to liberals. But, where Reagan followed his cuts with
subsequent measures to reduce revenue loss and restore some
progressivity to the tax code, Bush proceeded to execute two additional
regressive tax cuts. Combined with his stated desire to eliminate
virtually all taxes on capital income and to privatize Medicare and
Social Security, it's not much of an exaggeration to say that Bush would
like to roll back the federal government to something resembling its
pre-New Deal state.
And, while there has been no shortage of liberal hysteria over Bush's
foreign policy, it's not hard to see why it scares so many people.
I was (and remain) a supporter of the war in Iraq. But the way Bush sold
it--by playing upon the public's erroneous belief that Saddam had some
role in the September 11 attacks--harkened back to the deceit that
preceded the Spanish-American War. Bush's doctrine of preemption, which
reserved the right to invade just about any nation we desired, was far
broader than anything he needed to validate invading a country that had
flouted its truce agreements for more than a decade. While liberals may
be overreacting to Bush's foreign policy decisions-- remember their fear
of an imminent invasion of Syria?--the president's shifting and
dishonest rationales and tendency to paint anyone who disagrees with him
as unpatriotic offer plenty of grounds for suspicion.
It was not always this way. During the 2000 election, liberals evinced
far less disdain for Bush than conservatives did for Al Gore. As The New
York Times reported on the eve of the election, "The gap in intensity
between Democrats and Republicans has been apparent all year." This
"passion gap" manifested itself in the willingness of many liberals and
leftists to vote for Ralph Nader, even in swing states. It became even
more obvious during the Florida recount, when a December 2000 ABC
News/Washington Post poll showed Gore voters more willing to accept a
Bush victory than vice-versa, by a 47 to 28 percent margin. "There is no
great ideological chasm dividing the candidates," retiring Democratic
Senator Pat Moynihan told the Times. "Each one has his
prescription-drugs plan, each one has his tax-cut program, and the
country obviously thinks one would do about as well as the other."
Most Democrats took Bush's victory with a measure of equanimity because
he had spent his campaign presenting himself as a "compassionate
conservative"--a phrase intended to contrast him with the GOP ideologues
in Congress--who would reduce partisan strife in Washington. His loss of
the popular vote, and the disputed Florida recount, followed by his
soothing promises to be "president of all Americans," all fed the
widespread assumption that Bush would hew a centrist course. "Given the
circumstances, there is only one possible governing strategy: a quiet,
patient, and persistent bipartisanship," intoned a New Yorker editorial
written by Joe Klein.
Instead, Bush has governed as the most partisan president in modern U.S.
history. The pillars of his compassionate-conservative agenda-- the
faith-based initiative, charitable tax credits, additional spending on
education--have been abandoned or absurdly underfunded.
Instead, Bush's legislative strategy has revolved around wringing out
narrow, party-line votes for conservative priorities by applying
relentless pressure to GOP moderates--in one case, to the point of
driving Vermont's James Jeffords out of the party. Indeed, when
bipartisanship shows even the slightest sign of life, Bush usually
responds by ruthlessly tamping it down. In 2001, he convinced GOP
Representative Charlie Norwood to abandon his long-cherished patients'
bill of rights, which enjoyed widespread Democratic support. According
to a Washington Post account, Bush and other White House officials "met
with Norwood for hours and issued endless appeals to party loyalty."
Such behavior is now so routine that it barely rates notice. Earlier
this year, a column by Novak noted almost in passing that "senior
lawmakers are admonished by junior White House aides to refrain from
being too chummy with Democrats."
When the September 11 attacks gave Bush an opportunity to unite the
country, he simply took it as another chance for partisan gain. He
opposed a plan to bolster airport security for fear that it would lead
to a few more union jobs. When Democrats proposed creating a Department
of Homeland Security, he resisted it as well. But later, facing
controversy over disclosures of pre-September 11 intelligence failures,
he adopted the idea as his own and immediately began using it as a
cudgel with which to bludgeon Democrats. The episode was telling: Having
spent the better part of a year denying the need for any Homeland
Security Department at all, Bush aides secretly wrote up a plan with
civil service provisions they knew Democrats would oppose and then used
it to impugn the patriotism of any Democrats who did--most notably
Georgia Senator Max Cleland, a triple-amputee veteran running for
reelection who, despite his support for the war with Iraq and general
hawkishness, lost his Senate race thanks to an ugly GOP ad linking him
to Osama bin Laden.
All this helps answer the oft-posed question of why liberals detest Bush
more than Reagan. It's not just that Bush has been more ideologically
radical; it's that Bush's success represents a breakdown of the
political process. Reagan didn't pretend to be anything other than what
he was; his election came at the crest of a twelve-year-long popular
rebellion against liberalism. Bush, on the other hand, assumed office at
a time when most Americans approved of Clinton's policies. He triumphed
largely because a number of democratic safeguards failed. The media
overwhelmingly bought into Bush's compassionate-conservative facade and
downplayed his radical economic conservatism. On top of that, it took
the monomania of a third-party spoiler candidate, plus an electoral
college that gives disproportionate weight to GOP voters--the voting
population of Gore's blue-state voters exceeded that of Bush's red-state
voters-- even to bring Bush close enough that faulty ballots in Florida
could put him in office.
But Bush is never called to task for the radical disconnect between how
he got into office and what he has done since arriving. Reporters don't
ask if he has succeeded in "changing the tone." Even the fact that Bush
lost the popular vote is hardly ever mentioned. Liberals hate Bush not
because he has succeeded but because his success is deeply unfair and
could even be described as cheating.
It doesn't help that this also happens to be a pretty compelling
explanation of how Bush achieved his station in life. He got into
college as a legacy; his parents' friends and political cronies propped
him up through a series of failed business ventures (the founder of
Harken Energy summed up his economic appeal thusly: "His name was George
Bush"); he obtained the primary source of his wealth by selling all his
Harken stock before it plunged on bad news, triggering an inconclusive
Securities Exchange Commission insider-trading investigation; the GOP
establishment cleared a path for him through the primaries by showering
him with a political war chest of previously unthinkable size; and
conservative justices (one appointed by his father) flouted their own
legal principles--adopting an absurdly expansive federal role to enforce
voting rights they had never even conceived of before--to halt a recount
that threatened to put his more popular opponent in the White House.
Conservatives believe liberals resent Bush in part because he is a
rough-hewn Texan. In fact, they hate him because they believe he is not
a rough-hewn Texan but rather a pampered frat boy masquerading as one,
with his pickup truck and blue jeans serving as the perfect props to
disguise his plutocratic nature. The liberal view of Bush was captured
by Washington Post (and former tnr) cartoonist Tom Toles, who once
depicted Bush being informed by an adviser that he "didn't hit a triple.
You were born on third base." A puzzled Bush replies, "I thought I was
born at my beloved hardscrabble Crawford ranch," at which point his
subordinate reminds him, "You bought that place a couple years ago for
your presidential campaign."
During the 1990s, it was occasionally noted that conservatives despised
Clinton because he flouted their basic values. From the beginning, they
saw him as a product of the 1960s, a moral relativist who gave his wife
too much power. But what really set them off was that he cheated on his
wife, lied, and got away with it. "We must teach our children that crime
does not pay," insisted former California Representative and
uber-Clinton hater Bob Dornan. "What kind of example does this set to
teach kids that lying like this is OK?" complained Andrea Sheldon
Lafferty, executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition.
In a way, Bush's personal life is just as deep an affront to the values
of the liberal meritocracy. How can they teach their children that they
must get straight A's if the president slid through with C's--and brags
about it!--and then, rather than truly earning his living, amasses a
fortune through crony capitalism? The beliefs of the striving, educated
elite were expressed, fittingly enough, by Clinton at a meeting of the
Aspen Institute last month. Clinton, according to New York magazine
reporter Michael Wolff, said of the Harken deal that Bush had "sold the
stock to buy the baseball team which got him the governorship which got
him the presidency." Every aspect of Bush's personal history points to
the ways in which American life continues to fall short of the
meritocratic ideal.
But perhaps most infuriating of all is the fact that liberals do not see
their view of Bush given public expression. It's not that Bush has been
spared from any criticism--far from it. It's that certain kinds of
criticism have been largely banished from mainstream discourse. After
Bush assumed office, the political media pretty much decided that the
health of U.S. democracy, having edged uncomfortably close to chaos in
December 2000, required a cooling of overheated passions. Criticism of
Bush's policies--after a requisite honeymoon-- was fine. But the media
defined any attempt to question Bush's legitimacy as out-of-bounds.
When, in early February, Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry
McAuliffe invoked the Florida debacle, The Washington Post reported it
thusly: "Although some Democratic leaders have concluded that the public
wants to move past the ill will over the post-election maneuvering that
settled the close Florida contest, McAuliffe plainly believes that with
some audiences--namely, the Democratic base of activists he was
addressing yesterday--a backward-looking appeal to resentment is for now
the best way to motivate and unite an often-fractious party." (This was
in a news story!) "It sounds like you're still fighting the election,"
growled NBC's Tim Russert on "Meet the Press." "So much for
bipartisanship!" huffed ABC's Sam Donaldson on "This Week."
Just as mainstream Democrats and liberals ceased to question Bush's
right to hold office, so too did they cease to question his intelligence.
If you search a journalistic database for articles discussing Bush's
brainpower, you will find something curious. The idea of Bush as a
dullard comes up frequently--but nearly always in the context of
knocking it down. While it's described as a widely held view, one can
find very few people who will admit to holding it.
Conservatives use the theme as a taunt--if Bush is so dumb, how come he
keeps winning? Liberals, spooked, have concluded that calling Bush dumb
is a strategic mistake. "You're not going to get votes by assuming that,
as a party, you're a lot smarter than the voters," argued Democratic
Leadership Council President Bruce Reed last November. "Casting Bush as
a dummy also plays into his strategy of casting himself as a Texas
common man," wrote Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne in March 2001.
Maybe Bush's limited brainpower hasn't hampered his political success.
And maybe pointing out that he's not the brightest bulb is politically
counterproductive. Nonetheless, however immaterial or inconvenient the
fact may be, it remains true that Bush is just not a terribly bright
man. (Or, more precisely, his intellectual incuriosity is such that the
effect is the same.) On the rare occasions Bush takes an extemporaneous
question for which he hasn't prepared, he usually stumbles
embarrassingly. When asked in July whether, given that Israel was
releasing Palestinian prisoners, he would consider releasing famed
Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, Bush's answer showed he didn't even know
who Pollard is. "Well, I said very clearly at the press conference with
Prime Minister [Mahmoud] Abbas, I don't expect anybody to release
somebody from prison who'll go kill somebody," he rambled. Bush's
unscripted replies have caused him to accidentally change U.S. policy on
Taiwan. And, while Bush's inner circle remains committed to the pretense
of a president in total command of his staff, his advisers occasionally
blurt out the truth. In the July issue of Vanity Fair, Richard Perle
admitted that, when he first met Bush, "he didn't know very much."
While liberals have pretty much quit questioning Bush's competence,
conservatives have given free rein to their most sycophantic impulses.
Some of this is Bush's own doing--most notably, his staged
aircraft-carrier landing, a naked attempt to transfer the public's
admiration for the military onto himself (a man, it must be noted, who
took a coveted slot in the National Guard during Vietnam and who then
apparently declined to show up for a year of duty). Bush's supporters
have spawned an entire industry of hagiographic kitsch. You can buy a
twelve-inch doll of Bush clad in his "Mission Accomplished" flight suit
or, if you have a couple thousand dollars to spend, a bronze bust
depicting a steely-eyed "Commander-in-Chief" Bush. National Review is
enticing its readers to fork over $24.95 for a book-length collection of
Bush's post-September 11, 2001, speeches-- any and all of which could be
downloaded from the White House website for free. The collection recasts
Bush as Winston Churchill, with even his most mundane pronouncements
("Excerpted Remarks by the President from Speech at the Lighting of the
National Christmas Tree," "Excerpted Remarks by the President from
Speech to the Missouri Farmers Association") deemed worthy of cherishing
in bound form. Meanwhile, the recent Showtime pseudo-documentary "DC
9/11" renders the president as a Clint Eastwood figure, lording over a
cringing Dick Cheney and barking out such implausible lines as "If some
tinhorn terrorist wants me, tell him to come on over and get me. I'll be
here!"
Certainly Clinton had his defenders and admirers, but no similar cult of
personality. Liberal Hollywood fantasies--"The West Wing," The American
President--all depict imaginary presidents who pointedly lack Clinton's
personal flaws or penchant for compromise. The political point was more
to highlight Clinton's deficiencies than to defend them.
The persistence of an absurdly heroic view of Bush is what makes his
dullness so maddening. To be a liberal today is to feel as though you've
been transported into some alternative universe in which a transparently
mediocre man is revered as a moral and strategic giant.
You ask yourself why Bush is considered a great, or even a likeable,
man. You wonder what it is you have been missing. Being a liberal, you
probably subject yourself to frequent periods of self-doubt. But then
you conclude that you're actually not missing anything at all.
You decide Bush is a dullard lacking any moral constraints in his
pursuit of partisan gain, loyal to no principle save the comfort of the
very rich, unburdened by any thoughtful consideration of the national
interest, and a man who, on those occasions when he actually does make a
correct decision, does so almost by accident.
There. That feels better.
--
Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation
has taken: the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by
refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the
immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are
to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must
undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift
from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When
machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are
considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism,
extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
--Martin Luther King, Jr., Riverside Church, NYC, 4 April 1967
Uncle Samuel
wrote:
>I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it.
And I hate you socialist SOBs who are trying to run this nation into
the ground in your blind rush to Marxist wealth redistribution. You've
defamed our founding fathers, destroyed our culture, infested our
media, perverted our children, attacked God and flag, marginalized
common sense, race baited to polarization, and lied through your
rotten teeth the whole damned way.
You and your socialist ilk make me want to puke.
I hope you all rot in Hell for the sins against America and mankind
that you have perpetrated and seek yet to send forward. You define all
that is wrong with the nature of man in a single observably corrupt
demographic pustule, bloated by puerile partisan hypocrisy - evil to
the core.
To Hell with the lot of you.
There.
I said it.
John Q. Smith
rape children and eat them afterwards. How could you have omitted so
central and crucial a contention? There's something about you that
reminds me of Dr Seuss's evil twin. I'll be working on that image,
believe you me.
--
John Q. Smith
WHY WE HATE BUSH
It's the Stolen Election, Stupid
NEW YORK--"Have the Democrats totally flipped their lids?" asks David
Brooks in The Weekly Standard, quasi-official organ of the Bush
Administration. "Because every day some Democrat seems to make a manic
or totally over-the-top statement about George Bush, the Republican
party, and the state of the nation today."
True, Democrats loathe Dubya with greater intensity than any Republican
standard-bearer in modern political history. Even the diabolical Richard
Nixon--who, after all, created the EPA, went to China and imposed price
controls to stop corporate gouging--rates higher in liberal eyes. "It's
mystifying," writes Brooks.
Let me explain.
First but not foremost, Bush's detractors despise him viscerally, as a
man. Where working-class populists see him as a smug, effeminate frat
boy who wouldn't recognize a hard day's work if it kicked him in his
self-satisfied ass, intellectuals see a simian-faced idiot unqualified
to mow his own lawn, much less lead the free world. Another group, which
includes me, is more patronizing than spiteful. I feel sorry for the
dude; he looks so pathetic, so out of his depth, out there under the
klieg lights, squinting, searching for nouns and verbs, looking like
he's been snatched from his bed and beamed in, and is still half asleep,
not sure where he is. Each speech looks as if Bush had been beamed from
his bed fast asleep. And he's willfully ignorant. On Fox News, Bush
admits that he doesn't even read the newspaper: "I glance at the
headlines just to kind of [sic] a flavor for what's moving. I rarely
read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read [sic]
the news themselves." All these takes on Bush boil down to the same
thing: The guy who holds the launch codes isn't smart enough to know
that's he's stupid. And that's scary.
Fear breeds hatred, and Bush's policies create a lot of both. U.S.
citizens like Jose Padilla and Yasser Hamdi disappear into the night,
never to be heard from again. A concentration camp rises at Guantánamo.
Stasi-like spies tap our phones and read our mail; thanks to the
ironically-named Patriot Act, these thugs don't even need a warrant. As
individual rights are trampled, corporate profits are sacrosanct. An
aggressive, expansionist military invades other nations "preemptively"
to eliminate the threat of non-existent weapons, and American troops die
to enrich a company that buys off the Vice President.
Time to dust off the F word. "Whenever people start locking up enemies
because of national security without much legal care, you are coming
close [to fascism]," warns Robert Paxton, emeritus professor of history
at Columbia University and author of the upcoming book "Fascism in
Action." We're supposed to hate fascists--or has that changed because of
9/11?
Bush bashers hate Bush for his personal hypocrisy--the draft-dodger who
went AWOL during Vietnam yet sent other young men to die in Afghanistan
and Iraq, the philandering cocaine addict who dares to call gays
immoral--as well as for his attacks on peace and prosperity. But even
that doesn't explain why we hate him so much.
Bush is guilty of a single irredeemable act so heinous and anti-American
that Nixon's corruption and Reagan's intellectual inferiority pale by
comparison. No matter what he does, Democrats and Republicans who love
their country more than their party will never forgive him for it.
Bush stole the presidency.
The United States enjoyed two centuries of uninterrupted democracy
before George W. Bush came along. The Brits burned the White House,
civil war slaughtered millions and depressions brought economic chaos,
yet presidential elections always took place on schedule and the winners
always took office. Bush ended all that, suing to stop a ballot count
that subsequent newspaper recounts proved he had lost. He had his
GOP-run Supreme Court, a federal institution, rule extrajurisdictionally
on the disputed election, a matter that under our system of laws falls
to the states. Bush's recount guru, James Baker, went on national TV to
threaten to use force to install him as president if Gore didn't step
aside: "If we keep being put in the position of having to respond to
recount after recount after recount of the same ballots, then we just
can't sit on our hands, and we will be forced to do what might be in our
best personal interest--but not--it would not be in the best interest of
our wonderful country."
Bush isn't president, but he plays one on TV. His presence in the White
House is an affront to everything that this country stands for. His fake
presidency is treasonous; our passive tolerance for it sad testimony to
post-9/11 cowardice. As I wrote in December 2000, "George W. Bush is not
the President of the United States of America." And millions of
Americans agree.
Two months after 9/11, when Bush's job approval rating was soaring at 89
percent, 47 percent of Americans told a Gallup poll that he had not won
the presidency legitimately. "The election controversy...could make a
comeback if Bush's approval ratings were to fall significantly,"
predicted Byron York in The National Review. Two years later, 3 million
jobs are gone, Bush's wars have gone sour, and just 50 percent of voters
approve of his performance. If York is correct, most Americans now
consider Bush to be no more legitimate than Saddam Hussein, who also
came to power in a coup d'état.
And that's why we hate him.
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and
Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S.
invasion of Afghanistan. It is now available in a revised and updated
paperback edition containing new material. Ordering information is
available at amazon.com.)
COPYRIGHT 2003 TED RALL
John Q. Smith
Does Bush hate himself?
An editorial
September 25, 2003
On the eve of George W. Bush's appearance before the United Nations,
Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie found it necessary
to attack the president's critics for engaging in what Gillespie called
"political hate speech." He seemed in particular to be agitated by
Democrat Howard Dean, who has not hesitated to say that Bush bungled
both diplomatically and strategically in his rush to war with Iraq.
The problem with Gillespie's attack on Dean and other Democrats is that
it came right before Bush finally took a little bit of their advice. If
there has been one core theme of Dean's campaign, for instance, it has
been that Bush needs to steer the United States back into a working
relationship with the United Nations and traditional allies such as
France and Germany.
Now that the Iraq invasion has "quagmire" written all over it, the
president is making some tentative steps in the direction the Democrats
have encouraged for months. In fact, some of the messages that Bush is
now sending echo statements that, when Dean and others made them
earlier, Gillespie and the Bush acolytes condemned as "naive" or even
"unpatriotic."
This brings us to our question for Ed Gillespie: When President Bush
says what Democrats have been saying all along, is he too engaging in
political hate speech? Or is the president simply acknowledging a
reality that has not yet dawned on Gillespie?
Uncle Samuel
wrote:
>I have to question your patriotism
That's freaking laughable, you leftist POS.
Go hump yer toaster oven.
Uncle Samuel
wrote:
>WHY WE HATE BUSH
It's gotta be tough playing to an audience of one.
Ever notice your blatant leftist screeds draw total apathy from the
rest of usenet smacky?
Uncle Samuel
wrote:
>Does Bush hate himself?
No, but I'm sure you do...
alohacyberian
news:8hq8nvoqbm2v1itn4...@4ax.com...
> On Fri, 26 Sep 2003 06:23:40 GMT, "John Q. Smith" <any...@usa.net>
> wrote:
> >WHY WE HATE BUSH
>
> It's gotta be tough playing to an audience of one.
>
Well, you can't deny that the only reason he keeps posting is that you keep
replying. ;-) KM
--
(-:alohacyberian:-) At my website there are 3000 live cameras or
visit NASA, play games, read jokes, send greeting cards & connect
to CNN news, NBA, the White House, Academy Awards or learn all
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Uncle Samuel
<alohac...@att.net> wrote:
>"Uncle Samuel" <stars@bars> wrote in message
>news:8hq8nvoqbm2v1itn4...@4ax.com...
>> On Fri, 26 Sep 2003 06:23:40 GMT, "John Q. Smith" <any...@usa.net>
>> wrote:
>> >WHY WE HATE BUSH
>>
>> It's gotta be tough playing to an audience of one.
>>
>
>Well, you can't deny that the only reason he keeps posting is that you keep
>replying. ;-) KM
Lol, too true.
But I just love how they dance when I yank the strings!