Monday, July 17, 2006

 

How dare these Bush-haters!

Syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg is indignant this morning, flat-out positively outraged. How dare these liberals! How dare they hate President Bush.

"Hatred of Bush drives - or poisons - almost everything in liberal politics now," Goldberg says, the sanctimonious righteousness dripping from his brow like so much sweat (Excuse my flowery Victorian metaphor, but nothing else seems as appopriate alongisde Goldberg's grave disapproval).

For an example of this venomous hatred, he points to the New Republic's Jonathan Chait, who wrote that Bush has "wreaked enormous damage on the political and social fabric of this nation."

Horrors! Gasp! Let the booing and popcorn throwing begin in this melodrama. The cursed, blasted liberals exercise the temerity to say that our handsome, gallant Bush has pursued some extreme courses of action that have been harmful to our nation. To be certain, Chait's criticisms carry none of the elan of the Right's artful wordsmithing. When will these dastardly liberals at least begin showing the gentlemanly or ladylike statesmanship of such conservatives as Anne Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity who so delicately, yet truthfully, make their points so that they can never be denied?

"America haters," Hannity so kindly refers to those wicked liberals.

"God haters," says Coulter, pinky sticking daintily out from her teacup.

"Shut up!" O'Reilly says to disagree in a most constructive fashion with his esteemed colleague in the adjoining chair.

OK, enough of my silly rhetoric stolen from a forgotten episode of "Dudley Do-Right." Let me just ask point blank, do conservatives seem more than a little silly in their self-righteous moralizing against criticizing the president, in their assertion that liberals are sour and mean-spirited? We know that some folks on the right exercise a Soviet-style penchant for rewriting history. But do you remember as I do their bitter, mean-spirited hatred of President Clinton? How can anyone forget, other than conservatves who do so quite conveniently?

Let's go back about 10 or so years ago and recall the constructive, statesmanlike things what they were saying:

1) Clinton murdered Vince Foster.
2) Clinton directed tanks to act as flame-throwers to ignite the Branch Davidian compound.
3) Paramilitary wacko Randy Weaver and child molester David Koresh were misunderstood heroes who stood up to Clinton's evil.
4) Government is evil. In fact, let's overthrow the government. (They backed down from that one after Tim McVeigh attempted to make good on their wish)
5) If an FBI agent comes to your door, aim for the head because he'll probably have on a flak jacket.
6) Clinton murdered those two boys mysteriously found dead along the railroad tracks outside Benton, Ark.
7) State troopers in Arkansas provided Clinton with a steady stream of bimbos. (David Brock admits he made that one up)
8) Whitewater. What the hell was that, anyway? Apparently Kenneth Starr didn't find anything there, try as he might (well, other than a cigar and a stained dress).
9) The American Spectator set up shop in Hot Springs, Ark., to search for any more allegations, the truth behind those allegations clearly of secondary importance.
10) Clinton was a draft dodger. OK, that one might be true, but a hypocrisy considering the accusers' unquestioning worship of the current Draft Dodger in Chief.
11) Clinton was a pot smoker. True again, but it appears to many of us that the current Drug User and Recovering Alcoholic in Chief used more than just pot.

These were widely accepted attitudes and views among the mainstream of conservatism, accepted as fact without any questioning for veracity. As crazy as all these allegations seem, they were not extremist views held by a fringe. Not in the least. These were views held by the average rank and file right-winger with plenty of encouragement from the likes of then-Speaker Newt Gingrich and his cabal of Washington ideologues.

Let me say, lest people see this entry as a defense of Clinton, that I grew to thorough dislike him during his presidency. His character was poor, he was shady and he was frankly a disgrace on the office. There was so much about Clinton to dislike that was true that all of these fabricated stories, made-up scandals and flat-out lies were so gratuitous and only served to characterize many Clinton-haters as the same kinds of frothing, red-faced kooks they accuse today's Bush-haters of being. And is there more than a little hypocrisy in tolerating, ignoring and even celebrating so much of the same behavior and poor-character from Bush that these folks claimed to loathe in Clinton?

In the end, are we liberals really so terrible in our criticism of President Bush?

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