How Much Damage Yet To Be Accomplished?

WHY WE HATE BUSH
Wed Sep 24, 8:01 PM ET

By Ted Rall

It's the Stolen Election, Stupid

NEW YORK--"Have the Democrats totally flipped
their lids?" asks David Brooks in The Weekly
Standard, quasi-official organ of the Bush
Administration. "Because every day some
Democrat seems to make a manic or totally
over-the-top statement about George Bush, the
Republican party, and the state of the nation
today."

True, Democrats loathe Dubya with greater
intensity than any Republican standard-bearer in
modern political history. Even the diabolical Richard Nixon--who, after all,
created the EPA, went to China and imposed price controls to stop corporate
gouging--rates higher in liberal eyes. "It's mystifying," writes Brooks.

Let me explain.

First but not foremost, Bush's detractors despise him viscerally, as a man.
Where working-class populists see him as a smug, effeminate frat boy who
wouldn't recognize a hard day's work if it kicked him in his self-satisfied ass,
intellectuals see a simian-faced idiot unqualified to mow his own lawn, much
less lead the free world. Another group, which includes me, is more patronizing
than spiteful. I feel sorry for the dude; he looks so pathetic, so out of his
depth, out there under the klieg lights, squinting, searching for nouns and
verbs, looking like he's been snatched from his bed and beamed in, and is still
half asleep, not sure where he is. Each speech looks as if Bush had been
beamed from his bed fast asleep. And he's willfully ignorant. On Fox News,
Bush admits that he doesn't even read the newspaper: "I glance at the
headlines just to kind of [sic] a flavor for what's moving. I rarely read the
stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read [sic] the news
themselves." All these takes on Bush boil down to the same thing: The guy
who holds the launch codes isn't smart enough to know that's he's stupid. And
that's scary.

Fear breeds hatred, and Bush's policies create a lot of both. U.S. citizens like
Jose Padilla and Yasser Hamdi disappear into the night, never to be heard from
again. A concentration camp rises at Guantánamo. Stasi-like spies tap our
phones and read our mail; thanks to the ironically-named Patriot Act, these
thugs don't even need a warrant. As individual rights are trampled, corporate
profits are sacrosanct. An aggressive, expansionist military invades other
nations "preemptively" to eliminate the threat of non-existent weapons, and
American troops die to enrich a company that buys off the Vice President.

Time to dust off the F word. "Whenever people start locking up enemies
because of national security without much legal care, you are coming close [to
fascism]," warns Robert Paxton, emeritus professor of history at Columbia
University and author of the upcoming book "Fascism in Action." We're
supposed to hate fascists--or has that changed because of 9/11?

Bush bashers hate Bush for his personal hypocrisy--the draft-dodger who
went AWOL during Vietnam yet sent other young men to die in Afghanistan
(news - web sites) and Iraq (news - web sites), the philandering cocaine addict
who dares to call gays immoral--as well as for his attacks on peace and
prosperity. But even that doesn't explain why we hate him so much.

Bush is guilty of a single irredeemable act so heinous and anti-American that
Nixon's corruption and Reagan's intellectual inferiority pale by comparison. No
matter what he does, Democrats and Republicans who love their country more
than their party will never forgive him for it.

Bush stole the presidency.

The United States enjoyed two centuries of uninterrupted democracy before
George W. Bush came along. The Brits burned the White House, civil war
slaughtered millions and depressions brought economic chaos, yet
presidential elections always took place on schedule and the winners always
took office. Bush ended all that, suing to stop a ballot count that subsequent
newspaper recounts proved he had lost. He had his GOP-run Supreme Court, a
federal institution, rule extrajurisdictionally on the disputed election, a matter
that under our system of laws falls to the states. Bush's recount guru, James
Baker, went on national TV to threaten to use force to install him as president if
Gore didn't step aside: "If we keep being put in the position of having to
respond to recount after recount after recount of the same ballots, then we just
can't sit on our hands, and we will be forced to do what might be in our best
personal interest--but not--it would not be in the best interest of our wonderful
country."

Bush isn't president, but he plays one on TV. His presence in the White House
is an affront to everything that this country stands for. His fake presidency is
treasonous; our passive tolerance for it sad testimony to post-9/11 cowardice.
As I wrote in December 2000, "George W. Bush is not the President of the
United States of America." And millions of Americans agree.

Two months after 9/11, when Bush's job approval rating was soaring at 89
percent, 47 percent of Americans told a Gallup poll that he had not won the
presidency legitimately. "The election controversy...could make a comeback if
Bush's approval ratings were to fall significantly," predicted Byron York in The
National Review. Two years later, 3 million jobs are gone, Bush's wars have
gone sour, and just 50 percent of voters approve of his performance. If York is
correct, most Americans now consider Bush to be no more legitimate than
Saddam Hussein (news - web sites), who also came to power in a coup d'état.

And that's why we hate him. Tweet