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Published on Sunday, October 5, 2003 by the Boulder Daily Camera
by Tom Teepen
Are you suffering from Bush hatred? Apparently it's going around, like a virus.
At least it is according to the vocal right and according to even some mainstream Republicans who know better.
To hear them tell it, the political landscape is overrun with Bush haters. This is an odd claim just on its surface.
Even his political opposites generally concede, and lament, that one of George W. Bush's strengths is his regular-guy likability. Never mind the silver spoon, prep school, Yale and Harvard. The president comes off as a down-home Joe. He bought a slightly scruffy ranch to prove it. And his first-date awkwardness with the English language? Rather than leading many to despair of him, it typically is cited as showing he's just one of the boys. So what's to hate?
Talk radio's conservative spielers and the talking-points factories of the GOP are churning out accusations of Bush hatred even so. It is the fad charge of the moment.
This is homefront pre-emptive war. The idea is to stifle criticism before it is uttered -- who wants to be accused of hatred? -- and to condition voters to discredit any criticism that does escape as more of this Bush hatred they've been hearing about.
It's an old trick and not unique to the right. Back in the 1960s and early '70s, when there really was a left of sorts, radicals issued charges of "fascism" to keep opponents' heads down.
These days, the ideological energy, and the buccaneering rhetoric to go with it, are on the right. It's all cut-and-slash.
Note that the president is using dubious executive deregulation to turn the Clean Air Act into the dirty air act, or that his Healthy Forests Initiative is a scheme to cut down trees, and you are an "environmental wacko." Mention that the administration's tax cuts lavish by far the bulk of their goodies on the already rich, stiff the poor and shift more of the tax bill to the middle class, and you are charged with fomenting class warfare -- just like Marx and Lenin.
And of course if you fret that large numbers of Americans are losing health insurance or think that maybe it would be best to keep Social Security as a public program rather than turning it over to the brokerage houses, then you are a socialist.
Bush hatred is a far more efficient denunciation. It's a blank check to cash against any disagreement with the president.
After several conservative books have capered at the top of the nonfiction bestseller lists for years, what's to explain the sudden appearance of a few books there taking sharp issue with the administration? Bush hatred explains it, so ignore their content.
And why are the Democratic presidential contenders taking issue with the administration? Because, of course, they are Bush haters. Don't give them a second thought.
Differ with Bush, especially if you do so energetically or with any flair, and you are a hater or even -- some have actually carried the matter this far -- committing a hate crime. Don't you just hate that?
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