Let’s get one thing absolutely clear: Bush was an incompetent who surrounded himself with bad advisers from the Nixon/Bush I years. And he took their advice WAY too often. Moreover, he split the Republican party apart by relegating free marketers to hangers on and elevating evangelicals into the true core of the Conservative movement. It will take years for the party to recover from the damage he has done.
But for all of that, he still didn’t deserve the vituperation and hatred spewed at him by the left for the past 8 years. J.R. Dunn gets to the point in a piece that is otherwise far too laudatory to Bush:
As in all such cases, Bush hatred involves a number of factors that will be debated by historians for decades to come. But one component that cannot be overlooked is ideology, specifically the ideologization of American politics. It is no accident that the three most hated recent presidents are all Republican. These campaigns are yet another symptom of the American left’s collapse into an ideological stupor characterized by pseudo-religious impulses, division of the world into black and white entities, and the unleashing of emotions beyond any means of rational control. The demonization of Bush — and Reagan, and Nixon — is the flip-side of the messianic response to Barack Obama.[...]
For the country as a whole, the prospects are bleaker. The left is convinced that hatred works, that it’s a perfect tactic, one that will work every time out. They have already started the process with Sarah Palin, their next target in their long row of hate figures. They’re wrong, of course. In a democracy, hatred is not a keeper, as the Know-Nothings, Radical Republicans, segregationists, Birchers, and many others have learned to their eventual dismay. But the process can take a long time to work itself out — nearly a century, in the case of racial segregation — and no end of damage can occur in the meantime.
I couldn’t agree more. Anyone not on the left who shows promising signs of achieving popularity will be smeared, denigrated by and defecated on by the left and their mouthpiece, the media. And we all know who will be leading THAT charge…
Obama’s Presidency will be a welcome breather. But the hatred will be back in spades should he lose congress, reelection, or should a Republican be elected in 2016.
Previously: Magnanimity
Tags: Andrew Sullivan, Barack Obama, Bush Derangement Syndrome, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin
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5 Responses to “Brief Reflection On Bush”
January 20th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Bush is most stupid, ignorant, impudent president to the United Sates ever
He caused harm to his people by; Making most of the world hates them, Deepening and magnified their debts to other nations and stubbornly keep assisting and baking the most Nazis regime in the world “Israel” on their behalf.
But what I don’t understand is: how did these people elected him for a second time??.
Either the American people are stupid themselves, or they agree to what he had done through his 8 years of deceit and arrogance towards the world.
In other words, we “the developing countries people” blames the American people for what he did.
January 20th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
Mahmoud,
Most people don’t vote for one candidate, they vote against the other. A lot of people who voted for Bush in 2004 were holding their noses doing so.
Worth considering…
January 20th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
How is the hatred endemic to the left any different from the hatred endemic to the right? The right’s reaction and tactics to Clinton taking office seemed pretty irrationally vitriolic to me, as do the antics of any number of talking heads (Coulter, Limbaugh, et. al.). I agree that “the vituperation and hatred” unleashed is undeserving and counterproductive, but claiming the left has some kind of monopoly on it is ludicrous.
January 20th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
I recall no assassination fantasies being published or played in theaters re: Clinton. To be sure, people on the right disliked Clinton, but he in turn played very partisan politics from the Oval Office, in ways that Bush did not and that Obama does not seem to want to.
January 21st, 2009 at 8:18 am
I think you’re remembering the Clinton years pretty selectively. I came of age during Reagan’s first term, and have been paying close attention to our national political dialog ever since; I was shocked by how nasty things got after Clinton’s election… the kinds of truly nasty, misogynistic comments about Hillary that became commonplace, the sheer personal loathing expressed all the time, etc. This seems to have become part of our political culture; Clinton got it, Bush got it, and it appears that Obama will be getting it from some quarters.
The only thing that seemed different in the Bush years was that any criticism, even when it included specific policy opinions, was immediately labeled “hatred.” So people who would run through everything they thought was stupid and wrong-headed about his policy would be called a “hater.” His supporters were, in my view, about the whiniest bunch in American political history.
I think it’s inevitable that when politics becomes so personality driven (“I voted for him because I think he’s a good man!”) this is inevitable. I don’t think you can lay it on the door of any particular political faction without ignoring a lot of history, though.
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