BUSH Hatred "Insane"? (WSJ)

ANGRY LEFT

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. EST

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.

more at:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110010861

In the past, "hatred" and anger were messages for our representatives. When we expressed our loathing and our outrage, it was with some underlying knowledge that they'd be forced to respond. But that's gone now, and all we've got left is the hatred. And it grows like an infection, an unlanced boil. The release-valve of representative democracy seems to have been welded shut. WTF does this Murdoch mouthpiece expect, that even "intellectuals" are content to be continually shat upon just because they should be smart enough to know better? On the contrary. Unlike the "non-intellectuals" who are home watching Price Is Right and waiting with bated breath for the next Britney Update, the cranial set is actually smart enough to know when they're getting royally reamed up the pooper by a system -- a "leader" -- who has utterly failed them.

No one likes to be unfairly lumped into a group. It's the old "If Johnny jumped off the bridge, would you want to jump of the bridge too?" thing. Georgie has jumped off the bridge, and we're smart enough to know not to follow him, but the media is there at every turn yelling "JUMP! JUMP!" Consequently we all look like total idiots to the rest of the world, lemmings willing to follow our dick-wad non-intellectual president over the cliff. And we fucking hate it.

.

This guy has been benefitting by hanging onto the coat tails of a regime persistently whispering sweet thoughts into his ears.

God FORBID this ambitious man loose his rap.

He is just a "ho". It is so obvious a blink is not necessary to evaluate this man's drive.

:rofl:

Not.

.

of the WSJ - it stinks. This is a crap article.

n/t

I don't know about other people, but I don't hate George Bush, I pity him. I hate what he and his cronies have done to this country. If the guy who wrote this can't penetrate that fact, then he's an idiot, or being deliberately obtuse.

and all those associated with him.

I hate what * has done to this country. I hate his arrogance, superiority, and his I-don't-give-a-shit attitude. I NEVER understood that "guy you'd like to have a beer with" bullshit they pedaled to get his sorry ass in office.

This is new to me. I have never hated politicians like I do the * administration. I do not want them to just leave office (if they do, and in my worst nightmares, I wonder if they will relinquish power). I want them held accountable and I want them to answer for what they have done to this country.

to hate what's killing you and your country.

:thumbsup:

the fact that I sincerely believe he is mentally ill and needs treatment badly (though I'm not sure there is any treatment for the likes of him). That's not to say he's 'not guilty by reason of insanity'; he knows what he does. Bush will also certainly go down in history as the worst US president to date, and that is no small matter; I can't imagine anything worse for him than the harsh treatment he will get after he leaves office. So it's pity, but it's the sort of "Oh how utterly pathetic can you get??" kind of pity. He'll certainly get what he deserves, some day.

I wish I could say the same, that I pitied * instead. I guess I have been paying too close attention the last seven years, and I just hate * and company, and everything they stand for.

Also, this article is still crying about "Bush Hatred"... It will be NOTHING compared to what they'll unload on Hillary if and when she gets the nomination.

And may I add I certainly have no love for those necon rightwingnut CINO (Christians In Name Only) assholes who still support * and his criminally corrupt neofascist regime.

I guess I'm just fucking crazy. :crazy: :crazy:
But don't call a shrink. I like myself this way!!

who see nothing wrong with bush and his band of criminals.

biggest deficit ever.


Now who's insane?

Lying to start a war, stealing 2 elections, outing a CIA agent (treason),
domestic spying, and allowing his friends and associates to loot the
federal Treasury for their personal gain might leave me open for hatred.

Iraq
1,109,00 dead
2 million fled the country
2 million homeless
8 million w/ out food & water
3,800 dead Americans
36,000 Americans have had to be air lifted out of the
country for wounds, injuries, illness, or mental problems.

:toast:
Cheers to being "insane"

...this column would easily have ran under the previous management too.

The WSJ editorial pages were an infamous conservative screed-zone. And remain so.

Come now, passive aggressivity is the hallmark of Repukedom. And yes, it does get people angry.

He's either had his head firmly embedded up his arse, or he's feigning outrage, 'I'm shocked, SHOCKED at the disgusting Bush hatred!'<---like that. I think it's probably a bit of both. I'm sure they called the Hitler haters crazy, too.

Perhaps Berkowitz heard Republicans speak warmly and fondly of Bill Clinton but I sure as hell didn't! :grr:

...another conservative "pointy-headed "intellectual", "ivory tower" welfare case.

What's the quote? "None have such difficulty understanding as those whose paychecks require that they do not understand"?
Something along those lines, at any rate.

And this country and the world is fucked with him as Idiot In Chief.

Everything he touches turns to shit.

and put another nickel in R. Murdoch's pocket.

Bush had a (D) after his name. The right wing nut jobs at the WSJ would be bouncing off the walls with anger and demanding his forced removal from the White House.

The double standard these people have is incredible.

because of who he was? Jealousy?

It'd be cool to have someone debate this strawman opinion with some facts and watch him start jibbering.

No one hates bushit cause they're jealous of a little, over self-inflated fucktard, fartboy.

They hated him and were out to get him from the second he was elected. Why? Because he took poppy Bush's second term away? If not that, then what? I gave Jr. the benefit of the doubt when he became president. I thought he was stupid, but didn't realize he was dangerous. He's earned every bit of my hatred.

Fuck you Berkowitz, and fuck the right-wing rag you rode in on.

the anti-Democratic faction's hatred is fed by limpballs and limpballesque airwaves of gigantic proportions.

You'd think their hate-fest toxic view of the world would turn "undecideds" off and I guess Clinton's impeachment polls weren't anywhere near as low as bushite and nixon. They have the corporatemediawhores, too..so you can imagine if we had a free press how their insipid little acts would go over.

get out the way.

:spray: :thumbsup:

going to ask why bushit hates The People so much he takes away money from Autism, Heating the Poor, Water Projects, ect, and spends the money on killing People in Iraq.

.... Clinically psychopathic. :crazy:

my Father (R.I.P., Dad) hated Hitler when we had to go drop his bomber's load down on innocent people's heads several times a week between 1942 and 1945...

Take THAT, sycophant enablers at the WSJ! :mad:
.

A sychophantic wsj flunkie who worships at the altar of corporatewhores. Corporations don't "hate" bushite ..only the People. What a coincidence that bushite is fucking over(as in killing and stealing from them) the People and showering corporations with gifts.

what a moron

the "batshit-crazy-angry-hateful-left-blinded-by-their-own-rage" meme is kinda 2004-ish...certainly they can do better than dusting off that oldie?

This sound bite to me is the kind of thing you hear from someone that doesn't love America, a cut and runner that doesn't believe people deserve and want freedom, certainly not patriotic, the kind of tax and spender, who doesn't want victory, wants to understand the terrorist instead of kill them, wants them to kill us over here instead of over there, doesn't put poor people first... yeah Bush hatred really made rational discussion in Washington impossible. Time to put food on the family.

the progressives that they are too passionately partisan after they have subjected us to years of the likes of Limpballs, Coulter, Savage, etc. and complete dominance of the media. These people's dictionaries don't have entries for irony.

Example: Bush did not lay wreath at tomb of unknown soldier, so he got ripped for it. Last year he lays one, got ripped for that (not worthy to be there, etc).

And I see that shit all the time.

Now making fun of him is ok in my book :)

they were the biggest most angry mother fuckers toward dems, libs and progs I had ever seen. They fucking "won" and were still pissed off.

Yet moron* totally fucks over the country and we have to question why we hate the loathsome son of a bitch*?

yeah, that's fucking logic for you.

:eyes:

according to most polls.

That's more than just a few progressives and intellectuals.

...whore like Bush?

The hate I encountered here in my neck of the woods was astounding. There were individuals calling for his assassination. That's what I mainly fear of a Hillary nomination - that will just fuel their irrational hatred down here.

"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."

The Florida Supreme Court would not have decided the election. Counting the ballots in Florida would have decided it.

BTW, I doubt very much LBJ or Nixon enjoyed inflicting torture, pain, death. Wanton Boy's eyes gleam when he talks about killing. He displays eerie, hellish smiles. And that's only one of the reasons why I hate him.

by the state governments through the SOS offices and county BOEs. Who has jurisdiction over them?

It's almost as if he is purposely missing the point. The result is high-falootin' claptrap.

Hating blowjobs in the WH is one thing...hating an unjustified war is despicable in the eyes of Journal ed board.

... in its handling of legal issues that have arisen in the war on terror."

Oh, yes. Tut, tut. Those pesky "blunders." So inconvenient. They are just silly mistakes, not part of a larger neocon strategy of massively expanding the power of the executive branch while neutering all legal opposition to tactics of torture and full corporate domination.

:eyes:

This idiot is at The Hoover Institution. It figures.

back when he was in office.

Sad how much BS morons will buy, if it's published.

i was ready to give this piece some serious thought, then i looked up his credentials.

This guy is proof that there is a great future and fabulous wealth awaiting you if you sell your soul and shill for the elite. Where to begin?

"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."

NO reason to distinguish your point here, eh Mr. Professor of Law? Perhaps it is not a disagreement over good vs. evil. Perhaps it is instead a disagreement over a side that publicly opposes torture, but privately tortures and seeks to avoid ANY repercussions for defining down what constitutes torture v. a side that is fed up with paying for the privilege of fascist monsters to give themselves hard-ons over the ability to torture with impunity. No...it is as simple as you made it sound, I suppose.

"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."

Hard for any sane person to argue Bush since doing so immediately brings up torture, and perhaps your fellow dinner guests were put off by the fact that "rational" discussion of such an abhorrent practice should not be conducted at one of the top universities in the world by a "distinguished" professor of law, since, you know, torture is illegal and a "war crime".

"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. "

Dissembling facts to prove a point, I see. Yes, since the entire election process was completely corrupted by the Bush election machine, where his brother governed the state and the head of his efforts in the state controlled the actual vote counting process, Gore sought relief in the courts because that was his only option to bring out what was really going on.

"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. "

Of course there were equal protection concerns, but Gore was advocating the use of selected hand recounts so as NOT to drag out the process in a statewide hand recount. Under those specific facts, the fucking answer is to correct the flaw in the solution by ordering a statewide hand recount and suspending the certification of the ballots by the SOS. The correct solution is NOT to have the fucking vote count stopped prematurely.

"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."

The real issue was whether you want to have the US Supreme Court set a uniform standard of vote counting in the state of Florida or allow Florida to set their own standard via the courts and the SOS. The US Supreme Court went beyond that to prevent the state of Florida from deciding their own standard, which meant that no standard was adopted and thus the equal protection violations were still present. This of course also prematurely ended the vote count as mandated by the state courts.

Citing Judge Posner's bald-faced lie underscores precisely why liberals are so fed up with this bullshit. Posner is smart enough to know that wasn't the real issue...nor is he too dumb to figure out that the equal protection violations were still present after the Supreme Court stopped the recount. When someone repeatedly and incessantly lies in order to dumb down the level of discourse while propagandizing the general public, it gets under our skin.

"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?"

Yes, and the fact that Bush has not changed policy one fucking iota sine the election defeats this argument completely. In other words, "go to the public and get support for what you want to do. If they agree, great. If not, they can go fuck themselves since I am going to do what I want anyway".

"But from the common progressive denunciations you would never know that the Bush administration has rejected torture as illegal. "

I love the dissembling! "Torture is illegal, we don't torture, but don't ask us about specific techniques nor try to conduct oversight of what we do...oh and by the way we want retroactive immunity AND never-ending immunity for all the toruting we never did and do not continue to do. " You got me there, Professor. Hard to see why ANY liberal would have trouble with that amazing analogy.

"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."

Except for the fact that we don't know exactly what is going on because the worst crimes are conducted in secret and the whistleblowers are silenced in one way or another. Oh and they hide/destroy evidence. So yes, if the judiciary that they by and large control determines that, under the scant evidence that Bush has graciously allowed them to see, decides that the executive branch has overstepped its bounds constitutionally, then Bush wil give them lip service and stop publicizing what they are doing...they'll still do it of course, they just won't make a big deal about it. And of course Congress can still go fuck themselves because there still won't be any oversight.

"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."

Yes, all these points I just mentioned, where I completely destroyed your entire argument, are mere irrational responses to Bush instead of his actual war crimes. I failed to offer any actual reasons of why I rationally and fully hate this fucking administration and what it has done to the country. So yes, let's be pals and just agree to disagree since our disagreements are minor. I say torture, you say swimming lessons. I say war crime, you say not but give me infinite immunity.

Is this a response you are sending along to Mr. Berkowitz?

Just the type of rebuttal I was hoping to find in this thread.

This smug neocon picks a fight, then says people are crazy when they fight back. The longime Bush apologist has turned his whining into this calculated attempt to dismiss Junior's low approval ratings by trying to make it look like it happens to everybody. More than that it is a sinister attempt to marginalize all criticizm of the administration as 'insane'. Not only is he pretending surprise at widescale anger at neocons just like he who lied us into the invasion of Iraq to support their twisted ideology, he wants us to believe the sentiment is unreasonably felt by only a radical few of us.

Related discussion at Daily Kos: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/11/14/75841/215

There's plenty of Bush hatred outside the "intellectual elites" circle.

George W. Bush has EARNED every ounce of it. It's about the only thing he has ever earned for himself.

(I can't, too much bile-inducing horseshit), find some Bill Clinton hate from their editorial page and let the author of this tripe know about it.

"Oh my, this unseemly hatred of Bush just makes me want to curl up with my special fuzzy blanket and a big box of Puffs Plus (snif)".

A stratregy that started almost before Scalia's signature was dry on the papers signing our nation over into the custody of these dangerous assholes.

It sure seemed to play better for them though back before their boy President Fubar hadn't yet demonstrated to the entire world his special combo of criminality and incompetence. Back when they were all still basking in the orgiastic fantasy that this little ignorant prick would somehow rise above his lifelong pattern of failure and incompetence to be the bestest president ever!!!!!1!

At this rate they'll soon be assuring us once again that Bush reads books.

perpetual war, and so many other ways this president has trashed this country which is implicitly reflected in their attitude with their claim that to hate him is insane.

These insane people shouldn't be allowed to control our so-called "free press".

which makes him all the more hateable. It's not insane or irrational at all, it's a natural outcome of an unredressable injustice.

Just like 70% of the population.

:crazy: :silly:


Isn't everybody who can think? :shrug:

After that its a freakin' string section.

:nopity::nopity::nopity::nopity: :nopity::nopity::nopity::nopity:
:nopity::nopity::nopity: :nopity::nopity::nopity:
:nopity::nopity: :nopity::nopity:
:nopity: :nopity:

"CRYYYYY me a RIVeeeer ...."

Floss regularly.

And that's your reasoning behind this bullshtein?

Petey, Petey... Life aint Faux News, and the script doesn't let you look all resolved n badass. You got stomped by someone smarter than you and it's time to whine (what else) cuz somebody didn't know he was supposed to play Alan Colmes to your Hannity.


Poor fella. :rofl:

And so they want us to nobly swear off all this energizing, productive Bush-hate for the sake of the tone of our political conversation. Even after everything they've said about us all these years.


My response: Dream on, Berkowitz! The shoe's on the other foot now.

millions of ordinary working class people loathe him just as much. People recognize his contempt for them and that he doesn't respect them. Hatred of * is the sanest and most rational thing going out here. It will be the catalyst for change.

who stole his elections and is now running an EVIL regime capable of the worst brutality and taking away all our rights! I AM NOT INSANE!!! DO YOU HEAR ME? I AM NOT INSANE DUE TO THE VERY SIGHT OF THAT FRAT BOY PRESIDENT WHO MAKES ME WANT TO BANG MY HEAD AGAINST THE WALL IN ANGER!!!]

:dunce:

We can all rest assured that you have our best interests at heart for you are a great member of the Party.

murderer with no substantiation, was perfectly rational.

PLEASE!!!