the Bush Hating meme.
Hatin' the games not the playa.
I was pleased to see the word meme surface again the other day. Hadn't heard it in a while. Meme, why it's like a flash mob for words, or something like that. Pervasive around the web logging world, above it and below, ubiquitous as all your base are belong to us ever was - is the Bush Hating Meme. Bush hating is not strictly writing or pronouncements featuring disparagement of the President. It is the thing named; apprehended, turned and termed. It is a statement. It is an accusation. And it beggers the question: is there a torrent or even a current of irrational anti George W. Bush commentary welling up over the landscape. Well there are the books. Michael Moore's books: Stupid White Men, and Where did my Country Go. Al Franken's book : Lies and the lying liars who tell them. David Corn's book The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception. Paul Krugman's book The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century as well. There are probably others I don't even know about. In addition there have been critical articles appearing in newspapers and magazines. Several. There is even a group of men who are running campaigns to take his job as leader of the world away from him, and many others who support them. I believe this faction call themselves "democrats".
Many of those who talk of Bush Hating seem to have trouble separating irrational personal hatred from simple criticism of the administration and its policies, and lump and damn all things together as one. I will try to keep them distinct. In the post Dixie Chicks era of enforced quiessence, perhaps they have become too used to the sound of their own voices only . All the speech and writings against Bush is referenced to this administration and their war. If he were not part of the current administration; no one in America would be writing a word about George W. Bush. It speaks to the conservative, very conservative heart of this administration. To the arrogant, imperious, & bullying nature of Bush 41 that they do. An adminstration that came to town to pick where Reagan left off, with scarcely a nod in the direction of his father's presidency, and a determination to wash the Clinton administration (if possible the Carter, Johnson, Truman, Roosevelt, and Wilson administrations as well) from history. Until very recently they had no qualms about their aggressive nature and would speak of it in terms of great personal pride. Some of these books listed above have been in manuscript or development for a while. When they were first shopped around there were no takers. For the better part of the last two years the administration controlled the agenda and debate to a remarkable degree, if there seems to be a flood now it is because a manufactured dam has released.
Let's narrow the focus toward the theses as David Brooks states it The Presidency Wars :
Have you noticed that the furious arguments we used to have about cultural and social issues have been displaced by furious arguments about the current occupant of the Oval Office
The phrase and phenomenon 'Bush hating' was already in use by the time Jonathon Chait used it in an article that brought this into center court
The New Republic Online: Mad About You. Here is a quote that brings out all the flavor of that piece. David Brooks samples this same quote for his 30 Sep 03 piece (op cit), but not as fully.
He reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school--the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it. I hate the way he walks--shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks--blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo-populist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. I hate his lame nickname-bestowing-- a way to establish one's social superiority beneath a veneer of chumminess (does anybody give their boss a nickname without his consent?). And, while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more.
Chait goes on to point out examples of shock and awe among Republican pundits on encoutering attitudes like Chaits. Let me turn one of these around directly from Chaits article (I'm perfectly willing to let professional journalists who are getting paid and have proofing departments at their disposal do the heavy lifting. Cut me a check, I'll start hanging out in libraries)
"Democrats are seized with a loathing for President Bush--a contempt and disdain giving way to a hatred that is near pathological--unlike any since they had Richard Nixon to kick around," writes Charles Krauthammer in Time magazine.
Chait prefaces this with the comment: Conservatives have taken a special interest in the subject. That is an understatement. You have to ask if Krauthammer really believes - can possibly believe - what he has written.
Even Brooks in his article while he does acknowledge that a cascade of Clinton-bashing books hit the lists in the 1990's in his argument that the culture wars are taking an ad homin turn to presidency wars. Then takes subsequent pains to portray Criticism of George Bush as something new and different
The culture warriors were passionate about abortion, feminism or prayer in schools. But with the presidency warrior, political disagreement, cultural resentment and personal antipathy blend to create a vitriol that is at once a descendant of the old conflicts, but also different(emphasis added).
The very next line is his direct quote of Chait: I hate President George W. Bush . It is not hard to see which way he wants his argument to point. I like David Brooks. I think he is a reasonably fair man. But at times his writing becomes cute, too cute and this is one of those times. In his last paragraph responding to what he admits is the obvious question. He says he tried to bring up these points during the Clinton administration, but not loudly enough, which he now regrets as the weeds of public discourse close in over the rostra. I accept his statement as sincerly felt.
Yes, it is true that some of what was said and done about President William Jefferson Clinton during his presidency may be taken as having been arguments against the man. It is true that part of me does not care, what then, is said about President George W. Bush. Part of me wants to see him and Vice President Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, Bolton, and Wolfowitz et al. tarred and feathered and ridden out of D.C on a rail, With Bill Kristal riding out on Amtrak behind them. Payback is a genuine mother. Gentlemen, that should have been in your notes!
Brooks seems aware of this. Others, Krauthammer for instance, do not. This is either scurrilous or defective of these people. In general there has been a great reluctance to deal with what was done to Bill Clinton. I fault Clinton for being contemptibly unwilling to deal with his appetites, a bring-it-on call to his enemies. It was a revelation of a chump nature he could never quite overcome. I recall faulting him for letting his personal problems led him to take his eye off the ball - off the job he was hired to do - be president (I recall trying to explain this to my friend Kei Nomaguchi, a sociology grad student from Japan, during the impeachment hearings, who was inclined to view it all as simply American public theatre). I believe this led to great harm. To inattention when inattention could not be afforded. Further thinking back to a book I read many many years ago, I don't blame Queeg and his rattling balls so much as I blame the Cain mutineers. Republicans in general seem loathe to own up to the reality of things like the Arkansas Project. Bush Hating != Clinton Hating not by a long shot, not yet at least. It is neither as deliberate, organized or as funded.
Perhaps this is why Brooks transforms his culture warriors into internet warriors and marks them for special opprobrium: The quintessential new warrior scans the Web for confirmation of the president's villainy. He avoids facts that might complicate his hatred. He doesn't weigh the sins of his friends against the sins of his enemies. By this does Brooks include Matt Drudge and the Freepers, any of the thousands of rabid warblogs that existed recently, does he include sites like the one I saw the other day written by a couple of NC college kids referring to the LA times story on women who said they were groped by Schwarzenegger as puke journalism and predicting the LATimes would lose massive readership for it. (I'd like to see these boys call up Ken Starr and his deputies and explain the puke nature of their beings to them, I'll wait). Or does Brooks just mean the type of Internet writer who keeps Trent Lott's truly racist words in play till the more reasonable professional media are forced to deal with it. Gives pointers to foreign news sources that actually cover antiwar rallies. Notes Pat Robertson's repeated declarations that he thinks a nuclear device needs to be set off in the State Department.
Who again are the insane terrorists that VP Cheney says we must defeat any cost? Robertson was talking to Joel Mowbray author of Dangerous Diplomacy: How the State Department Endangers America's Security this last time. This is a book that has been advertised extensively on the Townhall.com website which reprints articles by conservative columnists. See the Novak link from my 03 0ct post.
In the end what this is about is Republican fear that the democrats will cohere most effectively around a candidate who stakes out a strident populist position. So they are sending out clouds of agent orange against grassroots dissatisfaction displaying any degree of passion a candidate could seize upon. It is worth pointing out that many democratic commentators feel as well this is a dangerous route for the party to take, reflexive militancy being inherently unwise. Maybe this is really no different from what David Brooks is saying - allowing him to substitute 'nation' for 'democratic party' if he needs to. I will continue to consider the passional of dispassionate political institutionalism.
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