Bush was extremely lenient with his dissenters.
He even let them make movies about people planning to assassinate him, publish books to the same effect, and basically use free speech in ways that this administration seems to consider criminal.
I don’t think Bush was “lenient with dissenters”.
Bush, for all his faults, was a freedom-loving American who happened to be President and didn’t let the fact that he was President get in the way of his love of and understanding of the basic freedoms of America.
He truly believed in the right to dissent. It had nothing to do with being “lenient”.
Lenient is almost the wrong term for how Bush tolerated the insane left. The single most frustrating part of being a conservative was to go out into the world and defend the man and his administration when he wouldn’t defend himself. He let the left fling poo all over him.
I do get your point however.