shrub has earned the HATE & Disrespect

Bush Earned Our Hate
by Harley Sorensen

I would like to say a kind word about George W. Bush: He's usually not as dumb as he pretends to be.

Acting dumb is Bush's style. He likes to sandbag people. He plays dumb, people underestimate him and, all of a sudden -- wap! He nails them.

People say I hate Bush. That may or may not be true. I use the word hate a lot, but I think it means different things to different people. Genuine hatred is not high on my list of personal emotions. If I consider someone bad, all I ask of them is that they stop being bad. If they can do that, I have no further quarrel with them.

The point I hope to get to in this little essay is that those of us who dislike Bush did not simply get up one morning and decide we were going to hate him. He had to earn our antipathy.

And he's done that. In spades.

One of my initial thoughts, when I became aware of Bush early in 2000, was, "He seems to be a Republican I could vote for." On first impression, he seemed to have all his father's good qualities and none of his bad. So he started out on my good side.

But then, during his election campaign, I started to dislike him when I realized he was campaigning with focus-group slogans rather than real ideas. He said he was "a compassionate conservative," a bit of nonsense that attempted to satisfy both liberals and conservatives. He said he was "a uniter, not a divider," which was clearly phony, as events have shown. Americans are about as divided now as they were during the Civil War, and most foreign countries are scared to death of Bush's quirky, violent decisions. And Bush said he was "a reformer with results," another nonsense slogan designed to charm people who don't listen too closely.

Looking at the surplus Bill Clinton left behind, Bush said he'd give one-quarter of that windfall "to the people who pay the bills. I want everybody who pays taxes to have their tax rates cut."

When that surplus vanished, Bush cut taxes anyway and sent "refund" checks out with borrowed money. And the big beneficiaries were people in Bush's circle: the rich and the very rich.

I started to get angry with Bush when he started his term as president by effectively cutting off American funds to foreign organizations that might provide abortions for poor people.

Deliberately restricting a medical procedure to people in need is hardly compassionate.

Bush quickly made it clear he was going to pander to America's fourth branch of government, the Christian fundamentalist extremists. By doing so, he showed his contempt for one of the most important principles set forth in our Constitution, the avoidance of a state religion.

It wasn't long after that turn that Bush, for patently religious reasons, put a damper on stem-cell research. His actions effectively stopped American scientists from finding life-saving treatments through such efforts. In my opinion, Bush's decision was cruel and inhumane, but certainly worthy of a man who had once mocked the pleas of a woman about to be executed in Texas.

That was it for me. His total disdain for environmental protection was frosting on the cake. Even though the proof kept coming, I didn't need any more evidence of his lack of concern for human life outside of his elite social group.

The current national discussion on Bush revolves around his decision to go to war with Iraq. If you give him the benefit of the doubt, he was given faulty information about Saddam Hussein's weapons capabilities. But he still made a deadly mistake. You don't send American boys and girls off to be killed without knowing with absolute certainty that it's necessary. Bush, hell bent on both avenging Saddam's attempt on his father's life and proving he's a better man than his dad, gambled. He gambled, and our kids lost.

Now, every time I hear a report of troops killed in Iraq, or in Afghanistan, the site of a neglected war, I grow livid.

(Whatever happened to the Powell Doctrine, which insisted that we shouldn't go to war except as a last resort, that a clear risk to national security must exist, that we must use overwhelming force if we do fight, that the decision to fight must have strong public support and that we must have a clear exit strategy?)

Hatred for a Republican president is not a knee-jerk liberal emotion. Opposition, yes, but not hatred. This Bush fellow is a special case.

Harley Sorensen is a longtime journalist. His column appears Mondays. E-mail him at [email protected].