In Defense of "Bush Haters"

This guy sure is pissed, not without reason.  The Bush shills and loyalists have coined a phrase as a defense mechanism against this kind of increasingly common reaction:  they refer to "Bush haters," as though this kind of response is irrational and inexplicable.  It doesn't occur to them that there are reasons people hate Bush, that people are responding to events, to facts, to stupid things the man and his Administration have done. 

Hundreds of millions of people throughout the world didn't hate George W. Bush when he was Governor of Texas; even in Texas, people who opposed him generally didn't hate him.  He was a bad Governor, but more pathetic than venal.  Hating Bush isn't some weird affliction that strikes for no discernible reason; it is a rational response to actual decisions and policies adopted by a pathetic, undeveloped, inadequate man named George W. Bush, who has been one of the worst, most dangerous, and most incompetent Presidents in the history of the country.  (Reading Mencken, it strikes me that Harding and Coolidge may given Bush a run for the money...but, as I like to say, when you're down in the gutter, why worry about who is closest to the edge of the curb?)

Imagine, for a moment, if you will, if (as may well have happened) folks sat around Baghdad in 1993 making jokes about "Saddam haters":  "Oh those Saddam haters, they always find fault" [Update:  almost!]  Or Berlin in 1943: "Oh those Adolf haters, they just can't get over it."  Moscow, 1951:  "Poor comrade Joseph, how the bourgeois traitors hate him."  Madrid, 1973, "Those Franco haters, why can't they just grow up."  We would rightly regard this as pathetic apologetics, the last ditch gasps of partisan and delusional party hacks.  And we would rightly regard it that way because of the concrete record of misdeeds by the leaders in question.

So what Bush supporters really mean to say is that there is not a concrete record of misdeeds that warrants hatred of this President.  Alas, they never engage the record or the misdeeds, and for obvious reasons:  because there is no rational or informed person in the world who does not view the behavior of this man and his Administration as a disaster for his country and for humanity. 

In order to snap these mindless Bushies out of their trance, I propose that everytime you meet someone who makes a passing reference to "Bush haters," you reply:  "Love the sinner, hate the sin."