From The Progressive, November, 2003 issue:
http://www.progressive.org/nov03/ivin1103.html

Call Me a Bush-Hater

By Molly Ivins

Among the more amusing cluckings from the right lately is their
appalled discovery that quite a few Americans actually think George W.
Bush is a terrible President.

Robert Novak is quoted as saying in all his forty-four years of
covering politics, he has never seen anything like the detestation of
Bush.

Charles Krauthammer managed to write an entire essay on the topic of
"Bush-haters" in Time magazine as though he had never before come
across a similiar phenomenon.

Oh, I stretch memory way back, so far back, all the way back to--our
last President.

Almost lost in the mists of time though it is, I not only remember
eight years of relentless attacks from Clinton-haters, I also notice
they haven't let up yet.

Clinton-haters accused the man of murder, rape, drug-running, sexual
harassment, financial chicanery, and official misconduct.

And they accuse his wife of even worse.

For eight long years, this country was a zoo of Clinton-haters.

Any idiot with a big mouth and a conspiracy theory could get a hearing
on radio talk shows and "Christian" broadcasts and nutty Internet
sites.

People with transparent motives, people paid by tabloid magazines,
people with known mental problems, ancient Clinton enemies with
notoriously racist pasts--all were given hearings, credence, and air
time.

Sliming Clinton was a sure road to fame and fortune on the right, and
many an ambitious young rightwing hit man like David Brock, who has
since made full confession, took that golden opportunity.

And these folks didn't stop with verbal and printed attacks.

From the day Clinton was elected to office, he was the subject of the
politics of personal destruction.

They went after him with a multimillion dollar smear campaign funded
by Richard Mellon Scaife, the rightwing billionaire.

They went after him with lawsuits funded by rightwing legal
foundations (Paula Jones), they got special counsels appointed to
investigate every nitpicking nothing that ever happened (Filegate,
Travelgate), and they never let go of that hardy perennial Whitewater.

After all this time and all those millions of dollars wasted, no one
has ever proved that the Clintons did a single thing wrong.

Bill Clinton lied about a pathetic, squalid affair that was none of
anyone else's business anyway, and for that they impeached the man and
dragged this country through more than a year of the most tawdry,
ridiculous, unnecessary pain.

The day President Clinton tried to take out Osama bin Laden with a
missile strike, every rightwinger in America said it was a case of
"wag the dog."

He was supposedly trying to divert our attention from the much more
breathtakingly important and serious matter of Monica Lewinsky, and
who did he think he was to make us focus on some piffle like bin
Laden?

"The puzzle is where this depth of feeling comes from," mused the
ineffable Mr. Krauthammer.

Gosh, what a puzzle that is.

How could anyone not be just crazy about George W. Bush?

"Whence the anger?" asks Krauthammer.

"It begins of course with the 'stolen' election of 2000 and the
perception of Bush's illegitimacy."

I'd say so myself, yes, I would.

I was in Florida during that chilling post-election fight, and am
fully persuaded to this good day that Al Gore actually won Florida,
not to mention getting 550,000 more votes than Bush overall.

But I also remember thinking, as the scene became eerier and eerier,
"Jeez, maybe we should just let them have this one, because Republican
wing-nuts are so crazy, their bitterness would poison Gore's whole
Presidency."

The night Gore conceded the race in one of the most graceful and
honorable speeches I have ever heard, I was in a ballroom full of
Republican Party flacks who booed and jeered through every word of it.

One thing I acknowledge about the right is that they're much better
haters than liberals are.

Your basic liberal--milk of human kindness flowing through every vein,
and heart bleeding over everyone from the milk-shy Hottentot to the
glandular obese--is pretty much a strikeout on the hatred front.

Maybe further out on the left you can hit some good righteous anger,
but liberals, and I am one, are generally real wusses.

Guys like Rush Limbaugh figured that out a long time ago--attack a
liberal and the first thing he says is, "You may have a point there."

To tell the truth, I'm kind of proud of us for holding the grudge this
long.

Normally, we'd remind ourselves that we have to be good sports, it's
for the good of the country, we must unite behind the only President
we've got, as Lyndon used to remind us.

If there are still some of us out here sulking, "Yeah, but they stole
that election," well, good. I don't think we should forget that.

But, onward.

So George Dubya becomes President, having run as a "compassionate
conservative," and what do we get?

Hell's own conservative and ***** for compassion.

His entire first eight months was tax cuts for the rich, tax cuts for
the rich, tax cuts for the rich, and he lied and said the tax cuts
would help average Americans.

Again and again, the "average" tax cut would be $1,000.

That means you get $100, and the millionaire gets $92,000, and that's
how they "averaged" it out.

Then came 9/11, and we all rallied.

Ready to give blood, get out of our cars and ride bicycles, whatever.
Shop, said the President.

And more tax cuts for the rich.

By now, we're starting to notice Bush's bait-and-switch.

Make a deal with Ted Kennedy to improve education and then fail to put
money into it.

Promise $15 billion in new money to combat AIDS in Africa (wow!) but
it turns out to be a cheap con, almost no new money.

Bush comes to praise a job training effort, then cuts the money.

Bush says AmeriCorps is great, then cuts the money.

Gee, what could we possibly have against this guy?

We go along with the war in Afghanistan, and we still don't have bin
Laden.

Then suddenly, in the greatest bait-and-switch of all time, Osama bin
doesn't matter at all, and we have to go after Saddam Hussein, who had
nothing to do with 9/11.

But he does have horrible weapons of mass destruction, and our
President "without doubt," without question, knows all about them,
even unto the amounts--tons of sarin, pounds of anthrax.

So we take out Saddam Hussein, and there are no weapons of mass
destruction.

Furthermore, the Iraqis are not overjoyed to see us.

By now, quite a few people who aren't even liberal are starting to
say, "Wha the hey?"

We got no Osama, we got no Saddam, we got no weapons of mass
destruction, the road map to peace in the Middle East is blown to
hell, we're stuck in this country for $87 billion just for one year
and no one knows how long we'll be there.

And still poor Mr. Krauthammer is hard-put to conceive how anyone
could conclude that George W. Bush is a poor excuse for a President.

Chuck, honey, it ain't just the 2.6 million jobs we've lost:

People are losing their pensions, their health insurance, the cost of
health insurance is doubling, tripling in price, the Administration
wants to cut off their overtime, and Bush was so too little, too late
with extending unemployment compensation that one million Americans
were left high and dry.

And you wonder why we think he's a lousy President?

Sure, all that is just what's happening in people's lives, but what we
need is the Big Picture.

Well, the Big Picture is that after September 11, we had the sympathy
of every nation on Earth.

They all signed up, all our old allies volunteered, everybody was with
us, and Bush just booted all of that away.

Sneering, jeering, bad manners, hideous diplomacy, threats, demands,
arrogance, bluster.

"In Afghanistan, Bush rode a popular tide; Iraq, however, was a
singular act of Presidential will," says Krauthammer.

You bet your ***** it was.

We attacked a country that had done nothing to us, had nothing to do
with Al Qaeda, and turns out not to have weapons of mass destruction.

It is not necessary to hate George W. Bush to think he's a bad
President.

Grownups can do that, you know.

You can decide someone's policies are a miserable failure without
lying awake at night consumed with hatred.

Poor Bush is in way over his head, and the country is in bad shape
because of his stupid economic policies.

If that makes me a Bush-hater, then sign me up.

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