You are either with us or against us. Clearly Bob, by your questioning the President, you are against us.

And shouldn't you be shopping at Walmart instead of making cogent political statements?

I enter Wal-Mart as infrequently as possible (which means never). But, you are correct. Any criticism is considered unpatriotic. BTW...remember when Wal-Mart used to pride itself on the number of products that were "made in America"?

It seems to me that most totalitarian systems have an initial goal of eliminating dissidents. And here we sit, fat and happy, told to believe everything our elected leaders tell us is true.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Ah, yes, the President reducing issues to black and white. Such perfidy. And every President gets skewered, there's nothing different to see here, move al(on)g. Blah blah blah.

The Insanity of Bush Hatred
Our politics suffer when passions overcome reason and vitriol becomes virtue.

BY PETER BERKOWITZ
Wednesday, November 14, 2007 12:01 a.m.

Hating the president is almost as old as the republic itself. The people, or various factions among them, have indulged in Clinton hatred, Reagan hatred, Nixon hatred, LBJ hatred, FDR hatred, Lincoln hatred, and John Adams hatred, to mention only the more extravagant hatreds that we Americans have conceived for our presidents.
But Bush hatred is different. It's not that this time members of the intellectual class have been swept away by passion and become votaries of anger and loathing. Alas, intellectuals have always been prone to employ their learning and fine words to whip up resentment and demonize the competition. Bush hatred, however, is distinguished by the pride intellectuals have taken in their hatred, openly endorsing it as a virtue and enthusiastically proclaiming that their hatred is not only a rational response to the president and his administration but a mark of good moral hygiene.

This distinguishing feature of Bush hatred was brought home to me on a recent visit to Princeton University. I had been invited to appear on a panel to debate the ideas in Princeton professor and American Prospect editor Paul Starr's excellent new book, "Freedom's Power: The True Force of Liberalism." To put in context Prof. Starr's grounding of contemporary progressivism in the larger liberal tradition, I recounted to the Princeton audience an exchange at a dinner I hosted in Washington in June 2004 for several distinguished progressive scholars, journalists, and policy analysts.

To get the conversation rolling at that D.C. dinner--and perhaps mischievously--I wondered aloud whether Bush hatred had not made rational discussion of politics in Washington all but impossible. One guest responded in a loud, seething, in-your-face voice, "What's irrational about hating George W. Bush?" His vehemence caused his fellow progressives to gather around and lean in, like kids on a playground who see a fight brewing.

Reluctant to see the dinner fall apart before drinks had been served, I sought to ease the tension. I said, gently, that I rarely found hatred a rational force in politics, but, who knows, perhaps this was a special case. And then I tried to change the subject.

But my dinner companion wouldn't allow it. "No," he said, angrily. "You started it. You make the case that it's not rational to hate Bush." I looked around the table for help. Instead, I found faces keen for my response. So, for several minutes, I held forth, suggesting that however wrongheaded or harmful to the national interest the president's policies may have seemed to my progressive colleagues, hatred tended to cloud judgment, and therefore was a passion that a citizen should not be proud of being in the grips of and should avoid bringing to public debate. Propositions, one might have thought, that would not be controversial among intellectuals devoted to thinking and writing about politics.

But controversial they were. Finally, another guest, a man I had long admired, an incisive thinker and a political moderate, cleared his throat, and asked if he could interject. I welcomed his intervention, confident that he would ease the tension by lending his authority in support of the sole claim that I was defending, namely, that Bush hatred subverted sound thinking. He cleared his throat for a second time. Then, with all eyes on him, and measuring every word, he proclaimed, "I . . . hate . . . the . . . way . . . Bush . . . talks."

And so, I told my Princeton audience, in the context of a Bush hatred and a corollary contempt for conservatism so virulent that it had addled the minds of many of our leading progressive intellectuals, Prof. Starr deserved special recognition for keeping his head in his analysis of liberalism and progressivism. Then I got on with my prepared remarks.

But as at that D.C. dinner in late spring of 2004, so again in early autumn 2007 at dinner following the Princeton panel, several of my progressive colleagues seized upon my remarks against giving oneself over to hatred. And they vigorously rejected the notion. Both a professor of political theory and a nationally syndicated columnist insisted that I was wrong to condemn hatred as a passion that impaired political judgment. On the contrary, they argued, Bush hatred was fully warranted considering his theft of the 2000 election in Florida with the aid of the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore; his politicization of national security by making the invasion of Iraq an issue in the 2002 midterm elections; and his shredding of the Constitution to authorize the torture of enemy combatants.

Of course, these very examples illustrate nothing so much as the damage hatred inflicts on the intellect. Many of my colleagues at Princeton that evening seemed not to have considered that in 2000 it was Al Gore who shifted the election controversy to the courts by filing a lawsuit challenging decisions made by local Florida county election supervisors. Nor did many of my Princeton dinner companions take into account that between the Florida Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court, 10 of 16 higher court judges--five of whom were Democratic appointees--found equal protection flaws with the recount scheme ordered by the intermediate Florida court. And they did not appear to have pondered Judge Richard Posner's sensible observation, much less themselves sensibly observe, that while indeed it was strange to have the U.S. Supreme Court decide a presidential election, it would have been even stranger for the election to have been decided by the Florida Supreme Court.





As for the 2002 midterm elections, it is true that Mr. Bush took the question of whether to use military force against Iraq to the voters, placing many Democratic candidates that fall in awkward positions. But in a liberal democracy, especially from a progressive point of view, aren't questions of war and peace proper ones to put to the people--as Democrats did successfully in 2006?
And lord knows the Bush administration has blundered in its handling of legal issues that have arisen in the war on terror. But from the common progressive denunciations you would never know that the Bush administration has rejected torture as illegal. And you could easily overlook that in our system of government the executive branch, which has principal responsibility for defending the nation, is in wartime bound to overreach--especially when it confronts on a daily basis intelligence reports that describe terrifying threats--but that when checked by the Supreme Court the Bush administration has, in accordance with the system, promptly complied with the law.

In short, Bush hatred is not a rational response to actual Bush perfidy. Rather, Bush hatred compels its progressive victims--who pride themselves on their sophistication and sensitivity to nuance--to reduce complicated events and multilayered issues to simple matters of good and evil. Like all hatred in politics, Bush hatred blinds to the other sides of the argument, and constrains the hater to see a monster instead of a political opponent.

Prof. Starr shows in "Freedom's Power" that tolerance, generosity, and reasoned skepticism are hallmarks of the truly liberal spirit. His analysis suggests that the problem with progressives who have succumbed to Bush hatred is not their liberalism; it's their betrayal of it. To be sure, Prof. Starr rejects Bush administration policies and thinks conservatives have the wrong remedies for what ails America today. Yet at the same time his analysis suggests, if not a cure for those who have already succumbed, at least a recipe for inoculating others against hating presidents to come.

The recipe consists above all in recognizing that constitutional liberalism in America "is the common heritage of both modern conservatives and modern liberals, as those terms are understood in the Anglo-American world," writes Prof. Starr. We are divided not by our commitment to the Constitution but by disagreements--often, to be sure, with a great deal of blood and treasure at stake--over how to defend that Constitution and secure its promise of liberty under law.

The conflict between more conservative and more liberal or progressive interpretations of the Constitution is as old as the document itself, and a venerable source of the nation's strength. It is wonderful for citizens to bring passion to it. Recognizing the common heritage that provides the ground for so many of the disagreements between right and left today will encourage both sides, if not to cherish their opponents, at least to discipline their passions and make them an ally of their reason.

Mr. Berkowitz is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and a professor at George Mason University School of Law.

You must have slept in late. RoninLB already posted this. An op-ed article doesn't equate to facts. Nothing different to see here, move al(on)g. Blah blah blah. :p

it's difficult to hate a man who is irrelevant. pity is the "new black."

the most the man can do at this point is veto pork-laden bills. good for him, it's a great legacy: "I stopped Democrats from spending." Just wish he were as concerned about pork before the "bridge to nowhere" was passed.

keep on keepin on!

Just read that Berkowitz piece.

man that guy likes to hear himself talk.:rolleyes:

yeah, late to the game today.

Opinions are amalgams of fact and experience, and I offered plenty of MSM failures-as-fact, which were evidently invisible or inconvenient.

It is my opinion that Bush is pilloried more by MSM (and liberal elitists of other occupation). In support of that opinion, I offer those facts I set forth and the informed opinions of others (with the facts that they set forth). If all your opinions are based strictly on first-hand empirical observation, to the exclusion of 2nd or 3rd party analysis, you get out a lot more than most people, but you don't get much out of them.

I saw the "oversimplification" argument against W as actually laugh-out-loud-then-cry hysterical from a position endorsing such nuanced, historically informed dielectical theses as: No War for Oil!!!!!!!!!!!; Bush=Hitler!!!!!!!!!!; Bush Ignores/Shreds the Constitution!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hey, people hate the Yankees, hate the Cowboys and hate the Knicks (count me in the last of these categories)... in those instances it is, IMHO, appropriately juvenile to revel in personalizing the contempt. (Isaiah "You Can't Call A Foul On Me, I'm Isaiah Thomas" Thomas as a Knick?!? and about to be "outed" for something by Stephon Marbury how deeeeelicious!)

But on matters of national politics, I think Berkowitz is right, and there is a ... liberal ... exult in acting so il-liberally, so contrary to decorum, rectitude and honor, that it's tempting to believe they've forsaken the foregoing entirely. The sanctimony is almost palpable -- and for a group that (by and large) disdains "traditional" religious pieties and self-satisfaction, the word "ironic" is too small.

Bush is hated more (and that hatred is indulged more) than any prior American President. Newsweak spiked the Lewinsky story, with complicity from others in MSM; CBS exalted in the fabricated TANG memo and gave our idiom "fake but accurate"... which is just the most egregious of the innumerable imagined indictments.

This is crucial to the narrative of defeat, because having personalized and demonized W and everything he does and/or stands for (and/or is accused of standing for), acknowledging any success that cannot be co-opted or stolen from his credit, undoes the Bush=Hitler (and therefore everything we do to oppose/destroy him is justified) meme.

Oh, and W is 40-0 against the Democratic Congress in their attempts to stop/de-fund/take control over the Iraq War. What an ineffectual boob.

Please use all the space necessary to catalog the achievements of the new Democratic Congress. You know, the smart, principled, honest, anti-corruption, anti-Pork party... who (i) enjoy a lower approval rating than W, and (ii) benefit in no small part from W being despised and "to blame" for just about everything.

God, it's got to hurt to have W (the moron, goes the meme) thwart the party of self-appointed and congratulated genius on such a regular basis, and, in so doing, give the lie to their claims of vox populi, innovation, or even ideas.

I understand, in some small way, that it's got to be difficult to remain civil when you're perennially shown to be so ideologically and intellectually deficient, by a moron. It doesn't excuse such uncivil, ad hominem behavior, mind you, but I can see how they would succumb.

...because the other alternative is to blame the populus for being too stupid to appreciate your evident intellectual, moral and philosophical supremacy; which you can't do, because you need the public to be stupid to buy "No War for Oil", "Bush=Hitler", SCHIP, and just about anything that comes of of John Kerry's or Charles Schumer's respective mouths.

Back to the salt mines; apologies for the duplicate post, but there were reasons in addition to Ron's. FWTW.

JP

You're just cranky because our president isn't a conservative. Let's look forward to Ron Paul in '08. :)

Damn. My charade has been peeled! :D

I'd be all over some W-bashing if it had to do with his apostatic "conservativism". The more he caves to libs on issues (AIDS in Africa, largest Education spending EVVVVAR, etc.) the more he's detested as a neo-con.

The hatred is manifestly unhinging, if W is a freaking "neocon". I mean, if you're going to be so thoroughly scourged and blackly destested for being a "neocon", you might as well be one. Make the crime fit the punishment! Jeebus!

W. A conservative. HAH! Up is down, black is white, Mule and Superman, living together!

We're in 1984 where words mean nothing any longer if he's a "neocon". Wait, strike that. If we were in 1984, it's, by definition, because of W and his Constitution/civil liberties shredder (tm).

JP

Mule and Supe, living together? My eyes! :eek:

:D

Bush is Mr Neocon. The other group in the Rep party are 10th Amendment fans.

no child..... and prescriptions will soon cost big B's. A leader of social programs thru capitalist means.

Huge socialist programs, reducing budget debt, increasing jobs, increasing total capital, and increasing gov't revenue, aka extortion/taxes. to pay for it all is a pretty good act imo.


The left hates capitalism. The left wants gov't to distribute wealth so we're all equal and could live on cloud 9. Every year we could beg our politicians for a better hand out.

So far capitalism is still functioning. If the left gains critical mass in Wash capitalism will suffer.


Bush is neocon par excellence. A socialist paying for programs thru increasing total wealth, ie functioning capitalism.


[all above a prejudicial rant]