Catching up on messages and such…
Couple of nights ago, I Tweeted, “Missed the president’s speech. Too early. My wife caught it, though, and said he did well. And she’s a tough audience. So I’m satisfied…”
To which Burl responded,
Just imagine how tough it is to hate absolutely everything the prez says and does.
I imagine that it would be a burden.
Or would it just make life simpler?
I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to make them happy. The people on the left who suffered from Bush Derangement Syndrome didn’t seem happy, either.
So I’m thinking, “burden.”
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It’s human nature for us to dismiss the views of those with whom we disagree as subject to irrational motivations or just blind hatred of an individual, whether that’s the President or any elected official or politician.
I know because, by and large, I still support this President in most (not all) policy areas (at least compared to all the alternatives I see out there) and it’s very tempting to lump all his critics into the “loony birther” category or some such. And while they do tend to be some of the most attention-grabbing critics out there just by virtue of some of the outrageousness of their beliefs, it behooves me to seek out the more rational conservative voices out there to try to understand the legitimate disagreements that are not motivated by pure hatred. Incidentally of course this President gets a lot of criticism from both ends of the political spectrum.
By the same token, if one happened to agree with President Bush, say, about something like the Iraq invasion…then it quite naturally would have been tempting to dismiss all opposition as a product of Bush Derangement Syndrome, and to bring it up frequently when defending something like, oh, say, the Iraq invasion. But a person who did that and was a rational, un-Partisan thinker would eventually realize that while, yes, there were a lot of people who said some extreme things about President Bush, most people who disagreed with him on the war could not be dismissed as “deranged,” but rather their arguments at the very least would have to be acknowledged to be soberly arrived at through their view of the available facts, even if one disagreed with their conclusion. Surely he would, right?
I thought the POTUS speech was one of his worst. He rambled too much. The first 15 minutes were fine. After that he seemed like he was trying too hard.
“You’re taking this very personal. Tom, this is business and this man is taking it very, very personal.”
— Santino Corleone
Phillip, I didn’t say that everyone who disagreed with Bush was “deranged.” (After all, I disagreed with him on most things — just not Iraq.) I said that the “spit-on-the-ground-when-his-name-gets-mentioned” people WERE suffering from “Bush Derangement Syndrome.”
There were people — lots and LOTS of people on the left really, really HATED him long before Iraq, and before 9/11.
I clearly remember marveling at the phenomenon in his first months in office. Ask Mike Fitts. I kept asking him about it, as though he somehow held the secret, as the self-described “New Republic liberal” (as opposed to “Mother Jones liberal”) on my staff. It was… weird.
At the time, I sort of attributed it to leftover bitterness from the “long count” in Florida. Which was silly — a reasonable argument could have been mounted for either Bush or Gore having won, although Bush’s case was somewhat stronger (a count by leading media groups, which wasn’t completed until MONTHS after the Supreme Court settled the matter, found that of four ways to count the results, Bush won on three of them — including the way that Gore wanted the votes counted). There was a lot of silly talk after that about Bush having stolen the election.
But I think it went deeper than that. I think it was visceral. Many liberals just instinctively hated the way he talked, his facial expressions, very personal things.
Anyway, my point is, Iraq just gave a lot of those people something to hang their anger on. The anger, for many, was already there.
I think a lot on the right viscerally despise Obama because he is NOBODY’S idea of Joe Average.
I think a lot of people on the left despised Bush on a gut level because he not only came across as Joe Average, but a sort of cornball 1950s B-movie Western version of Joe Average.
It’s kind of like… Sarah Palin talking about “real America.” Everybody sorta knows what she means, and it makes some people on the right nod their heads, and some people on the left to go ballistic.
Bush came across as almost a caricature of that “real American.” Whereas Obama is the unemotional, academic, multicultural ideal of those who go ballistic when Palin says things like that.
Me, I wonder why either of the these groups get so emotionally stirred up.
And, to oversimplify — if some actually hate Obama because he’s black (sorta, kinda), then others hate Bush because he’s just SO freaking white…
On a personal level, Bush was almost too easy to make fun of — his bumbling speech, the way he fondled other heads of state, his what-me-worry attitude, everything. The real problem is that these internationally embarrassing superficial things overshadowed deeper, more serious issues. But you can count me as a guy who, while I disagreed with Bush on most issues, I felt Bush had core beliefs he was true to, and also had a sense of honor, albeit flawed. (Cheney, on the other hand.) They were unapologetic about being whores for international corporate interests instead of American citizen well-being. So? That’s like criticizing leopards for being spotty.
I actually applaud Bush for some things. The notion that you could pay for a war by lowering taxes and exporting jobs wasn’t one of those things.
The problem with the Obama hatred is that it is so unrelenting, so loud, so weird, so well-funded by secret groups, so unfocused, so … so … gut-level. I have described it before as being almost religious in nature, as the loathing is rooted in a core belief system. Almost at the level of … racism?
“the way he fondled other heads of state”
Did he give the Queen of England a hug too?
The problem when Palin and others say “the real America,” she means “us, not you” to fellow citizens.
Trying to imagine what the “optics” would have been had Cheney been the president and Bush the VP. Not any better, but it would have “felt” right.
To follow up on something Burl said…as you might imagine I tend to hang out with people who are on the leftish side of the political spectrum, not exclusively of course, but in my line of work it seems to run that way…I can tell you that while many of my friends really hated Bush, the much more predominant view was that Bush was just an affable idiot. The REAL hatred was for Cheney, and I think that some of the things that have come out in recent months about the inner workings of the Bush administration post 9/11 and leading up to Iraq, really bear out the appropriateness of that hatred’s aim.
Brad, your contortions are showing;perhaps you need a vacation…
“If he had NOT been a Democrat — if he and Nikki had both run as Republicans, or if voters had somehow been kept ignorant of the party identification of the two candidates or, if you’ll allow me to dream (and Lord, hasten the day!), no candidate had had ANY party label — then he would have won.” – B.W. March 29, 2011
“As we say in the Grownup Party — enough, already.” B.W. – March 30, 2011
I knew it would not take too long.
Active detestation, even outspoken detestation of the President is nothing new in our history (and I think you’ve made this point already),in some respects the GOP’s reaction to Obama reminds me of a little kid in my hometown. Whenever his mother took him to get a shot, he’d start crying before the nurse injected him and he’d continue until she said, “All right, Clay, it’s over, you can stop crying now.” IOW, whining fulfills an inner need.
Your original post reminds of a favorite t-shirt slogan–The Onion, I think:
I save time. I use stereotypes.
The ting is, a stereotype would exist if there weren’t truth in it. At the same time, if one takes the extra time, one can see that no individual in the stereotyped class shares all of the characteristics to the same degree, if at all.
I agree that Cheney was the bad actor in the Bush administration, ably assisted by Rumsfeld, and that Bush, while guilty of negligent entrustment of our nation’s reins, was not a bad guy, all told.
Obama plays basketball, drinks beer and smokes/d– this does not put him in the wine-sipping, brie-nibbling arty-set that his critics seem to want to pigeonhole hm in–not that there’s anything remotely wrong with drinking wine, eating brie or patronizing the arts.
He’s also mixed race and has a non-Anglo name. Wonder how much of the negative perception is colored (ha ha) by that?
Never wasted the energy to “hate” Bush, I did laugh at him a lot, thank you John, Steve, and SNL. I really did “hate” most of his policies, however.
There are few of Obama’s policies I “hate.” The stupid ones.
Yeah, but I don’t find his beer-drinking convincing. Even though I like Obama, I must say that.
I mean, look at this picture. He looks like he’s going, “This is an excellent working-class beverage, and I am thoroughly enjoying, or at least appreciating in the abstract, the solidarity that it symbolizes… and I really, truly hope I don’t start retching while the photographer is still here…”
Now Hillary — I BELIEVED in HER beer-drinking. Although she may have gone a blue collar too far with the boilermakers, I at least believed in her beer-drinking.
And let’s face it — in a bowling competition, I’d bet on Hillary.
No, of course not. We all know the AntiChrist will be a smoother talker than that. And will probably look more like John Edwards. Come to think of it, HE was a pretty good speaker…
I mean, get a load of the way he says, “THOSE are some NICE bowling SHOES…”
It’s like he’s in a foreign country, trying to get by with a phrasebook…
Pretty sure that 30 percent or so of Democrats didn’t believe that Bush was literally the AntiChrist.
Let’s face it; Bush was/is hated in part because he was billed as an evangelical Christian. Trouble is, a lot of us evangelicals behave and communicate in such a way that we pretty much deserve to be hated.
In my work, I visit churches–almost exclusively evangelical ones, and to me it is really sad how much the Gospel of Jesus is compromised with ‘Americanism,’ or perhaps more accurately, evangelical historical revisionism.
The interesting thing is, most evangelical Christians I know in Germany have pretty much the opposite stance that American evangelicals take on nearly every political issue, except maybe on abortion.
Well, there was one evangelical in Germany who told me in 1979 that Jimmy Carter was the Antichrist. Whatever. He probably changed his mind by now.
@ Kathryn, I was happy to read, on March 17, that President Obama is actually Irish. Maybe we’re related.
Hillary comes from a solidly middle-to-upper-middle class suburb on the near northwest side of Chicago– not on the lake, mind you where the fancy elites live, but still very non-ethnic (ahem)–think Irmo. Obama, to the extent he actually comes from Chicago, comes from Hyde Park, on the South Side, where in the 1980s, the University of Chicago, owner of all the commercial property, ensured that there were only two places off campus to drink, and the whole campus is faux Oxbridge (except for the Frank Lloyd Wright Robie House). Harvard is more organically olde. So, while Obama may in fact be a beer poseur, Hillary doesn’t exactly come from Archer Avenue, with a tavern on every corner, literally.
George W. Bush brings to mind a cross between Alfred E. Neuman and Maynard G. Krebs.
My impression of Barack Obama hasn’t jelled quite yet, but it’s starting to look like Geoffrey Holder (as the “un-cola nut” man) will be part of it…