"Bush Lied!" "Bush is Hitler!" A recent respondent on a thread I initiated expressed similar hate speech and thus encouraged me to look more deeply at the War in Iraq. Since neither Blair nor Clinton are Republicans, of the right, nor conservative - yet all endorsed what Bush did - you know that Bush hatred is simply unhinged! Apparently it's not objectionable enough to have a policy of removing the Arab world's most evil ruler - it's simply the act of doing it that's despicable. Many say Clinton was hated worse than Bush - but columnist John Leo ran the numbers and finds Bush hatred many times greater as measured by the "Hitler" meme on the world wide web. Political dialog diminishes and argument declines under such coarsening - which is evident here on the board. Clinton's latest defense of Bush was this June (after June last year and last January): "I have repeatedly defended President Bush against the left on Iraq, even though I think he should have waited until the U.N. inspections were over," Clinton said in a Time magazine interview. Clinton...said he did not believe that Bush went to war in Iraq over oil or for imperialist reasons but out of a genuine belief that large quantities of weapons of mass destruction remained unaccounted for. http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/06/19/clinton.iraq/index.html New Laborite PM Toney Blair not only endorsed the war (on all the five or so grounds Bush did), he said that if the war was not on, he would encourage the Americans to do so only more deeply. (Quoted in John Keegan's recently released history, "The War in Iraq," http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0091800188/qid=1088854894/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-7404885-0148166?v=glance&s=books) So how does one explain the singling out of Bush? It's not because he's "so conservative" - his policies like expanding Medicare are too rarely conservative. (Tax cuts and War in Iraq do not a conservative make.) Thus, the mystery deepens. The US News and World Report columnist John Leo, however, has come up with a rough metric for measuring political hatred. "As a test of the state of 'Bush the Nazi' rhetoric, I went to Google and typed in 'Bush is a Nazi' and got 420,000 hits, well behind 'Hitler was a Nazi' (654,000 hits) but then Hitler WAS a Nazi and had a 75-year head start. (Computer searches like this are very crude instruments. They sweep up many references that cannot fairly be listed as slurs. But they do offer a rough idea of the amount of name-calling.) _ "President Clinton did fairly well in the Nazi sweepstakes (158,000 hits, but that's only 20,000 references for each presidential year, compared to 120,000 annually for the 3 1/2 year incumbency of George Bush.) The odd thing is that I typed in the names of every Nazi I ever heard of, excluding only Hitler himself, and the group total was still less than George Bush gets alone. ***This might indicate that either that George Bush is by far the second most important Nazi of all time, or that the Democrats and the left now require some sedation."*** http://www.townhall.com/columnists/johnleo/jl20040628.shtml Leo doesn't begin there - that's just where he winds up! It used to be that Molly Ivins was proud to be called a "Bush hater." But now Senator Robert Byrd (D) of West Virginia, Andrew Greeley, billionaire George Soros - and even a federal appeals court judge have all piled on with the same. Leo's point? Bush hating has gone mainstream - which probably explains the boxoffice success of Moore's "Farhenheit 9/11." But an old-style liberal dissents from his screed-fest, saying "Not even [Ellen Goodman] believes that the Iraq war was brought to us courtesy of the Bush-Saudi oil-money connection. Not even the rosiest pair of my retro-spectacles sees prewar Iraq as a happy valley where little children flew kites." There's no coarsening of the tongue from Goodman who says 'no' to Moore's "fan club." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24756-2004Jul2.html --Orson
