Even if I were against Bush…
…I’d have to admit that he’s telling the truth here, and that it’s an admirable sentiment (although nice guys sometimes finish last):
I do believe in the institution of the presidency, and I didn’t think it was right then, I still don’t think it’s right to engage in name-calling if you’re the president of the United States.
And I’d have to observe that the current occupant of the White House disagrees with that policy—at least, as long as he’s the one who’s president and doing the name-calling.
Bush was a class act. In fact, about the only Republican of my lifetime who wasn’t was Nixon. On the other hand, you have to go back at least to JFK to find a Democrat POTUS who was a class act, and even then I’m not so sure (perhaps you have togo back to Truman).
Have you guys read some of the reviews – I mean “reviews” – on Amazon for Bush’s book?
I went today to check it out, and about half of them are really appalling. One of them suggests he should be “shot for treason.”
This is really an intriguing phenomenon. I think neo is right when she says “Even if I didn’t like Bush” I’d have to admit he was a class act. I imagine I would have felt the same way about a President Lieberman, if he’d ever ran and won (as if…). I wouldn’t have liked a lot of his policies, but I could never actually loathe the man.
The intriguing thing is that Bush is so hated by so many. Do the liberals who hate him, ostensibly for “torture” and manipulating intel or whatever – do they hate FDR for his internment policy, or for the kangaroo trial and execution of General Yamashita, or for the ad hoc military commission trial of one or two American citizens in the famous Quirin case? Seriously, whatever Bush did, was it worse than that? Or worse than what Wilson did? And even if it was a little worse (which I don’t concede, but lets play), was it “shot-for-treason” worse?
Bush Derangement Syndrome is actually a real phenomenon – Krauthammer was not being flip when he coined it. It should be in the manual.
I’ve not quite grasped what causes it, however.
It is all the more odd because if there was any occupant of the White House in recent history less like “Hitler” than Bush, and more decent and absolutely worshipful of the Madisonian project, I can’t think of him. But many people sincerely believed that he intended to install himself as a dictator (or maybe I just live in California, so it seemed like many).
Well, guess I’m just saying it’s puzzling to me. I don’t have a good theory for it.
kolnai: they hated him before any of those things happened.
They hated him more after. But not a whole lot more, because they hated him so very much to begin with.
I wrote some of my thoughts on the phenomenon here.
I think they hated him so much because they secretly desire a fuhrer and their dream was thwarted each second Bush was in office. This occurred to me when Obama was treated with hagiography in 2008 (and beyond).
Relatedly, Bush’s single sentence defense of waterboarding (paraphrase: “of thousands of captured, a few hundred turned over to CIA, three waterboarded) pissed me off. Where was your pithy explanation of your policies 4, 6 or 8 years ago? Thanks for leaving us supporters twisting in the wind trying to defend the Bush Doctrine when you scarcely articulated it. So glad you were above it all with your nobless-oblige, “don’t worry your pretty little heads,” let us Ivy League professionals take care of business.
No, no, you don’t understand, kolnai. Those weren’t the actions of FDR or Truman, those were the actions of the US Government. Totally different. FDR only did good things; it was the US Government that did anything that doesn’t so good in retrospect.
[Having said that, I don’t criticize Roosevelt or Truman for these things; different times, different threats/fears, different context. It’s possible to be too punctilious, and utterly fatal in times of peril.]
Yes, I like your take on it, and I see what you mean in your comment on Dr. Sanity’s “displacement” theory – it definitely is present, but it can’t be the whole story (there’s something “extra” involved).
So, the idea is that Bush represents the kind of America that the left despises. In his twang, his chumminess, his southernness, is that “anti-intellectualism” that Hofstadter got all riled up about all those years ago, and has been the bugaboo of the progressives every since. Ironically, it was Bush’s apparent “anti-intellectualism” that induced the most extreme advent of that other phenomenon that so ruffled Hofstadter’s feathers, the “paranoid style.”
And to come back to the displacement theory – it is almost certainly correct. Think about the way Bush is described by his haters – to cite Markos Moulitsas, he’s to them the very paradigm of the “American Taliban.” He wants to execute gays. He wants to impose a theocracy. He wants to banish science to the outer darkness and return to Biblic literalism. He wants to oppress women. He wants to throw young people into crazed suicide missions for both nefariously secular (oil) and non-secular (millenarian) reasons.
I have very, very smart and highly educated friends who believe every word of that. Indeed, it wasn’t so much me becoming a conservative that strained our friendships; it was being a conservative *during the Bush years.* It’s almost as though they hold a grudge against me, as if I’ve profoundly wronged them in a deeply personal way – “Never forget.”
Whenever the subject of Bush comes up – I never do it, but they can’t help themselves – it always ends badly. The conversation gets ugly, and even my most hipsterish, cynical, ironical Jon Stewarty-friends turn gravely serious and actually get steamed. Not too long ago, one of them emailed me and in the course of our exchange he slipped up and called me crazy, despicable, and hateful. It came within a few words of ending the relationship for good.
The scariest thing of all is that these very intelligent people really do believe that evil did not truly exist in the world until George W. Bush “stole” the 2000 election. Does anybody else feel, like I do, that when Obama seems to believe that piece of madness, he REALLY believes it?
The insanity is mind-boggling. It’s as though they sincerely believe that on the one hand there was Hitler, but then there was a true monster, named Bush…
I guess Hitler at least made the trains run on time, or something.
Anyway, I think I will never understand how a mind, intelligent or not, can work itself into such a palpably ludicrous state. Displacement is a good start. Bush’s paradigmatic “flyover Americanness” is another piece of the puzzle.
I still feel like there’s more to it.
Re: Occam’s Beard – For what it’s worth, I agree with you on the last part. I was merely noting the hypocrisy.
Come to that, I might be the only person alive who thinks both Korematsu and Yamashita were decided correctly. I’ll probably regret having posting this in public when I look for a professorship in a few years.
So I’ll just add for my future prospective employers that, dude, it was the SYSTEM that interned the Japanese, and it was all that bastard MacArthur’s fault that poor General Yamashita was railroaded. FDR, or rather, Saint Franklin, as he’s known in my domicile, was the source only of rainbows and liberation from fear and want. Granted, granted…
Kolnai, there’s also this to consider: Hardcore progressives frequent book review sites to write opinions and thereby shape opinion.
Some thoughts on BDS. Allow me to introduce a phrase as a term of art and not a self-defining term. A Christian “true believer” is one who believes in the “have you accepted Jesus” message. True believers understand BDS because the same hate is directed at them. There’s a bunch of them, and they lie low. Their incitement to political activity, I believe, explains at least one dynamic of the tea party movement.
Bush haters hate him because they know he was of this Christian faction. He wasn’t raised in the type of Christianity which threatens them, rather the opposite. But Bush had “an experience.”
And true believers recognize each other. Muslims, progressives, and true believers have this in common that makes them dangerous for this world: They believe in Heaven and Hell (or variants of that version) and are ready martyrs. There’s no fooling them, no compromising them, and thus, they are hated and hate each other.
kolnai: You may note that, in my earlier post that I linked to in my comment here, I wrote in the second paragraph:
I plan to talk about it all a bit more in a post tomorrow.
Curtis – that’s really interesting. First, your qualification – “the type of Christianity which threatens them” – strikes me as just right. For in their own ways Reagan and Carter were true believers too. To a large extent, the amping up of the culture wars which began around 1994 and continued straight through to 9/11, would help explain the amped up alarm that progressives feel at evangelicals.
Second, your theory fits in nicely with both Dr. Sanity’s displacement theory and neo’s “Bush represents everything the left despises” addendum. The left hates true believers who can match their intensity with an equal and opposite force. In this case, they saw two: Muslims and evangelicals. Muslims are scarier (and the left is aware of that, however subliminally), but evangelicals, to the left, are still hateful. As well, sadly, the left often drifts too close to the view that America – traditional, existing America – is the most evil thing in the world.
So, taken together, Bush’s religion, his ossified Americanism, and the fearful nature of our real enemies, made it rather easy for the left to shift the focus of their fear and rage to Bush. In effect, the dominoes were all in place; something just had to tip the first one over.
One guesses it would have been different – not better, just different – if, say, McCain had been President instead of Bush. No doubt the left would have loathed him as they loathe every Republican who wins; but I can’t see the same degree of hatred manifesting itself in the way it did w/r/t Bush had McCain been in his place.
That is, after all, why it is Bush Derangement Syndrome, not mere Conservative Derangement Syndrome (though we may be getting there…).
apologies, neo – I didn’t mean to imply you hadn’t said that. I was just trying to say, too hastily, that I’m bothered by my inability to wrap my mind around BDS.
I’ve read about two-thirds of Decision Points at this time. I have an even deeper respect for President Bush than I had previously.
He is humble; readily admits to mistakes; and is generous in giving praise to others. It is readily obvious that he was changed by 9/11. And his love and concern for the military I find to be very touching.
Long term, history will be very kind to the former President. More so because he was preceded by a perpetual adolescent and followed by an incompetent socialist.
Kolnai, it puzzles me, too. I can see disagreeing with the man — heck, I did that regularly. But my otherwise gentle and civilized family of origin — well-educated liberal Democrats all — were ready to stage an intervention with me simply because I said I didn’t hate Bush. It wasn’t enough to disagree with him. It wasn’t enough that I didn’t vote for him (the first time around, at least — I kept quiet about the second time!) No, I had to hate him, or they gazed at me with brows creased with worry and whispered anxiously to one another whenever I left the room. These are NOT hateful people. They brought me up teaching me very carefully not to hate — which is partly why I ended up fleeing the Democrats when they turned so venomous — but when I try to remind them of this, it doesn’t seem to make sense to them. I didn’t get it then and still don’t get it now (though thankfully I don’t hear all that much about Bush any more!)
Class and character are no longer recognized by a lot of people. Instead they judge themselves by the cocktail parties they attend, by the designer bags they carry, and by adherence to what they deem to be intellectual consensus. Bush’s refusal to play the status game, although he actually outranks them, threatens everything they believe about themselves. When he confronted his alcohol problem, he dug more deeply into his own value system than his detractors ever did, and they sense that he stands on firmer ground than they do. They are infuriated that he won’t play their games.
These are NOT hateful people.
Of course they are. By definition.
W is/was a good, decent man doing what he thought best for the country, whether you agreed with his decisions or not. Disagree with his decisions? Sure. Hate him for them? No. The irony is that Obama has continued many of the policies W followed that caused leftists to hate him so.
I left the following comment on the Market Ticker forum the other night. It was actually about Palin Derangement Syndrome, but I think it applies equally well to Bush Derangement Syndrome.
I just read this via Ricochet:
http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/ex-german-chancellor-gerhard-schroeder-george-w-bush-not-telling-truth-in-memoir/19712116
Gazprom Gerd Schroeder calls Bush a liar. I doubt that Schroeder’s reaction to losing the election was shown in the US, but he was disgusting–sort of on the order of “I can’t believe this woman was elected over ME.” As to his contention that Bush was wrong on Iraq’s WMD, I remember clearly reading in the Frankfurter Allgemeine before the war that German intelligence also thought there were WMD. I was carefully reading 3 German dailies and 3 weeklies at the time before I took a position on Iraq, and this report confirmed for me that Iraq was a danger to us.
I suspect that this will get wider coverage in the US, but I hope not. Schroeder is a sleazebag of the first order. After spending the first half of his life on the left, he changed when he started dealing with energy company exexs and bankers. Then he decided he wanted to play with the big boys, which ended in his Gazprom job.
rickl,
I agree, but it was this very outrageous treatment of her that allowed her to break the hold of the radical feminists on women’s issues. The left screwed itself. People have gotten tired of all the cards they throw at us.
I had a lib friend that admittedly hated Bush for his Christian backwardness. I asked her how she sees herself different from the common bigot. Haven’t heard from her in probably four years.
Let’s see, Bush is:
Decent
Good natured
Religious
Plain spoken (with a Texas twang)
Respectful of others
A believer in American exceptionalism
Decisive
Genuine
Compassionate
Unsophisticated
Gosh, Sarah Palin has many of those same characteristics. (Okay, she’s plain spoken with a down-home Alaskan twang.) Those are the characteristics of the heroes and heroines of movies that were made in this country before the 60s. Since the 60s the culture has moved away from those values. Particularly the left. JFK set a standard of charisma and sophistication for politicians of the left that they are still yearning for. Many on the left find the values and unsophistication of Bush and Palin to be off putting, even threatening. It is a symptom of the cultural war that rages in this country.
Does this make sense to anyone else?
I think the hatred of Bush stems from one point, and an early one. Bush stole the election in 2000 from Gore, who was supposed to be elected easily on Clinton’s coattails and continue Clinton’s Pax Americana. That Bush beat Gore in a hotly contested election, and afterwards in Florida with all the hanging, dimpled and pregnant chad recounts, set the stage for the ‘illegitimacy’ of Bush and everything about him. Then there was the short-lived Comedy Central show, ‘That’s My Bush!’, which poked merciless fun at him and fed into the hatred of him as the ‘frat boy’ president. Think about it. How could anyone who flew a fighter jet (the F-102 Dagger, a/k/a The Widowmaker) ever be considered stupid? How does community organizing even compare in the ‘takes brains to operate’ scale? Yet to lefties, Bush will always be the stupid one and Obama the florid baritone speechifying, 3-D chess-playing super-genius.
In my not so humble opinion, the basis for how a president is perceived is how he is first presented to the American people. There is only one first impression allowed. Bush was a thief and a moron. For many, 9/11 changed that perception. For the rest, 9/11 hardened a perception of the idiot cowboy. With Obama, his national stage debut was as the Keynote Speaker at the Dem Convention in 2004. He had praise and adulation thrown at him from the beginning, which is why I think he hoodwinked and bamboozled so many who now have buyer’s remorse.
The media is the message. And that message has only gotten worse and more one-sided. Sarah Palin is the latest on the Right, and certainly not the last, to be messaged by the media in an extremely negative way. The hatred by the left has to have someone external to hate in order to have a justifiable reason to hate, a scapegoat for hate if you will. Ronnie Raygun (war-mongering anti-intellectual/Bedtime For Bonzo); but Reagan was a known quantity with a long history with the American public (how else could ‘no one I know voted for him’ have won in two electoral landslides?). Bush I and the checkout scanners (stupid and out of touch). Dan Quayle and ‘potatoe’ (stupid! 11!!venty!!), without ever telling the rest of the story of how that was the way the word was spelled on the cue card given to him by a teacher. Bush II and ignorant, non-nuanced cowboy diplomacy (and liar and torturer and mass murderer). Now Sarah Palin, the Bible and gun clinging hick chick from Alaska who can’t even recite what newspapers she reads, but who knows the Boston Tea Party took place in 1773.
My summary:
Bush rocks, Obama sucks.
I purchased the audio version of Decision Points for my iPhone (endless hours of driving and working) and I suppose that I am about 1/3d of the way through.
His style of writing is unadorned; he writes in simple declarative sentences. If I were to compare him to another author, I’d say he was the Anti-Shelby Foote.
I don’t enjoy how he has organized his memoir. He chose to tackle topics individually instead of writing chronologically. While it is interesting to read of his struggle with alcohol or his deepening Christian faith, I think the effects of intertwining events during his presidency is lost.
Overall, though, I am pleased to know President Bush more intimately by exploring his fascinating life before and during his years in the White House. I have always respected and admired (even though I disagreed often) him and this book only deepens my feelings about him.
I’ll give it three stars. 😉
RickZ, when someone begins railing about how Bush stole the election, I simply say that had Gore won his home state we would not be having this conversation usually shuts them up. If not, reminding them that the Supreme Court voted 7-2 in their decision or that even the New York Times concluded the Bush won Florida certainly will.
Facts are stubborn things.
“These are NOT hateful people. They brought me up teaching me very carefully not to hate ”
Yes, they are hateful people – that is by definition of what you describe. No one hates what they agree with, you can find the most hate filled person on the planet and what they like they will not hate and will teach others not too.
Now, they may very well have (and given what you said probably so) not really understood that significance and not passed it on, but that type of thought doesn’t just spring up out of no where.
There were classes of people it was OK to hate just as there were classes of people it bad bad too. Most likely it was considered so obvious, so basic, so just a part of what they were that there was no *need* to teach you otherwise. However, it more or less sounds as if you took what they taught at face value.
It reminds me of a group of Atheist that were telling me that Christians were the most evil people on the planet (a group I was assigned to in a college literature class)) – they had *never* had an Atheist argue with them over their religion and Atheist were the most open minded people on the planet (unlike those evil Christians who were so badly wrong and dangerous that they needed to be gotten rid of one way or another). After a bit of hating on Christians I pointed out I was a Christian, had never had a Christian yell at me, and just had a group of Athiest do so at me. That of course an Athiest is *not* going blast another Athiest for being wrong – you have to look at how they handled people they didn’t agree with or like (and yes, I said it almost verbatim to that in a clam voice).
It resulted in yelling and shouting while I smiled at them and they went to the teacher and got me put in another group.
A great deal of the “Not Hateful People” line is because they are around people who agreed with them and never had the chance to let their Derangement Syndrome happen. It isn’t hard to make sure you the people you use to prove your “non-hatefullness” are VERY specific groups – you may not agree with exactly, but they are not agreed with in an agreed upon in a specific manner.
You can prove your universal love of all animals by being friendly with cows, horses, cat, dogs, guinea pigs, etc even though you dislike everything but the dog. It’s a different story to do Tarantulas, snakes, roaches, and other generally hated animals – yet the latter is what makes you *universally* be an animal lover instead of just picking groups to prop up your self image.
That is ultimately why the Bible (and many other religions) talk about loving your enemies – its easy to love your friends, not that hard to love strangers, tough to love your enemies. And make no mistake – people who act that way about Bush and Republicans see us as enemies.
RickZ:
I actually enjoyed That’s My Bush! (and I voted for him in 2000).
It was created by the South Park guys, who aren’t exactly flaming liberals. I thought it was more a spoof of TV sitcom clichés than anything. There was a Kramer-like neighbor who could come bursting through the door at any given moment (and somehow was never tackled by the Secret Service). In one episode, banquets for pro-abortion and anti-abortion groups were mistakenly scheduled at the same time in different rooms, and “Bush” had to keep running back and forth between them. It was something straight out of I Love Lucy.
And I thought the whole idea of a sitcom about a sitting President was pretty cool. Only in America!
A running joke was that every time he looked out the window of the Oval Office, there was a mob of angry protesters outside. It was always the same stock footage.
Sadly, the show was another casualty of 9/11. It vanished immediately afterwards, and I’ve never seen a rerun. Maybe it’s available on DVD, but I haven’t checked.
Why yes, yes it is.
Most of the Amazon reviewers are Bush haters, but a few do realize that it was primarily a parody of TV sitcom conventions.
rickl,
I guess my problem with That’s My Bush! is a problem I have with humor directed at presidents overall. It’s always the Republican ones who are made fun of. Go back to Saturday Night Live and their parodies of Ford, with his statue dog, Liberty (Stay!, or Chevy Chase doing a pratfall while playing Ford). I would buy into the humor a lot more if such humor were bipartisan. Could they not make an Obama version of The Cosby Show, with Barry lugging his teleprompter everywhere, including using it at the grocery store, or even answering a cop when he gets pulled over for driving while black, with the cop acting stupidly? Heck, there was comedy gold in Clinton’s terms, with the I feel your pain/do your knees hurt, Monica?, or taking ‘jawboning’ to new heights/lows. But no, presidential humor is only aimed at stupid, dumb Republicans while a reverential tone is provided for the ‘good’ Democrat ones. Because we all know only Democrat presidents are good, as they have good intentions, and good intentions trump bad policies. Just like Obama and comprehensive health care ‘reform’.
I do not watch Saturday Night Live anymore, and haven’t for many years now. But like Letterman and all the other late night comics, they will not gore their own sacred cows, including Gore himself. Comedy is now blatantly liberal, which is why I enjoyed Colin Quinn’s Tough Crowd on Comedy Central. But that ‘make fun of everyone’ humor show was cancelled. Funny that. Heck, even Bill Mahr’s Politically Incorrect, when it was on Comedy Central, was pretty good (then he got an oversized ego and went completely off the rails).
Here’s just one clip from Quinn’s show, and I still laugh. No sacred cows spared, Hindus offended.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1-sBzxwy-s&feature=player_embedded#!
RickZ: I don’t watch “Saturday Night Live” either, but I certainly see clips from it. Obama has most definitely been the butt of their satire within the last year. It may not be as hard-hitting as the ones they had about Bush, Palin, etc., but it’s still somewhat mocking. Here’s one from about a year ago (there have been quite a few, some of them even more hard-hitting, but I don’t have time to find them now):