WHY WE HATE BUSH (It's the Stolen Election, Stupid)

NEW YORK--"Have the Democrats totally flipped their lids?" asks David Brooks in The Weekly Standard, quasi-official organ of the Bush Administration. "Because every day some Democrat seems to make a manic or totally over-the-top statement about George Bush, the Republican party, and the state of the nation today."

True, Democrats loathe Dubya with greater intensity than any Republican standard-bearer in modern political history. Even the diabolical Richard Nixon--who, after all, created the EPA, went to China and imposed price controls to stop corporate gouging--rates higher in liberal eyes. "It's mystifying," writes Brooks.

First but not foremost, Bush's detractors despise him viscerally, as a man. Where working-class populists see him as a smug, effeminate frat boy who wouldn't recognize a hard day's work if it kicked him in his self-satisfied ass, intellectuals see a simian-faced idiot unqualified to mow his own lawn, much less lead the free world. Another group, which includes me, is more patronizing than spiteful. I feel sorry for the dude; he looks so pathetic, so out of his depth, out there under the klieg lights, squinting, searching for nouns and verbs, looking like he's been snatched from his bed and beamed in, and is still half asleep, not sure where he is. Each speech looks as if Bush had been beamed from his bed fast asleep. And he's willfully ignorant. On Fox News, Bush admits that he doesn't even read the newspaper: "I glance at the headlines just to kind of [sic] a flavor for what's moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read [sic] the news themselves." All these takes on Bush boil down to the same thing: The guy who holds the launch codes isn't smart enough to know that's he's stupid. And that's scary.

Fear breeds hatred, and Bush's policies create a lot of both. U.S. citizens like Jose Padilla and Yasser Hamdi disappear into the night, never to be heard from again. A concentration camp rises at Guantánamo. Stasi-like spies tap our phones and read our mail; thanks to the ironically-named Patriot Act, these thugs don't even need a warrant. As individual rights are trampled, corporate profits are sacrosanct. An aggressive, expansionist military invades other nations "preemptively" to eliminate the threat of non-existent weapons, and American troops die to enrich a company that buys off the Vice President.

Time to dust off the F word. "Whenever people start locking up enemies because of national security without much legal care, you are coming close [to fascism]," warns Robert Paxton, emeritus professor of history at Columbia University and author of the upcoming book "Fascism in Action." We're supposed to hate fascists--or has that changed because of 9/11?

Bush bashers hate Bush for his personal hypocrisy--the draft-dodger who went AWOL during Vietnam yet sent other young men to die in Afghanistan (news - web sites) and Iraq (news - web sites), the philandering cocaine addict who dares to call gays immoral--as well as for his attacks on peace and prosperity. But even that doesn't explain why we hate him so much.

Bush is guilty of a single irredeemable act so heinous and anti-American that Nixon's corruption and Reagan's intellectual inferiority pale by comparison. No matter what he does, Democrats and Republicans who love their country more than their party will never forgive him for it.

The United States enjoyed two centuries of uninterrupted democracy before George W. Bush came along. The Brits burned the White House, civil war slaughtered millions and depressions brought economic chaos, yet presidential elections always took place on schedule and the winners always took office. Bush ended all that, suing to stop a ballot count that subsequent newspaper recounts proved he had lost. He had his GOP-run Supreme Court, a federal institution, rule extrajurisdictionally on the disputed election, a matter that under our system of laws falls to the states. Bush's recount guru, James Baker, went on national TV to threaten to use force to install him as president if Gore didn't step aside: "If we keep being put in the position of having to respond to recount after recount after recount of the same ballots, then we just can't sit on our hands, and we will be forced to do what might be in our best personal interest--but not--it would not be in the best interest of our wonderful country."

Bush isn't president, but he plays one on TV. His presence in the White House is an affront to everything that this country stands for. His fake presidency is treasonous; our passive tolerance for it sad testimony to post-9/11 cowardice. As I wrote in December 2000, "George W. Bush is not the President of the United States of America." And millions of Americans agree.

Two months after 9/11, when Bush's job approval rating was soaring at 89 percent, 47 percent of Americans told a Gallup poll that he had not won the presidency legitimately. "The election controversy...could make a comeback if Bush's approval ratings were to fall significantly," predicted Byron York in The National Review. Two years later, 3 million jobs are gone, Bush's wars have gone sour, and just 50 percent of voters approve of his performance. If York is correct, most Americans now consider Bush to be no more legitimate than Saddam Hussein (news - web sites), who also came to power in a coup d'état.

Fw:

THINKING THINGS OVERAngry Democrats: Lost Birthright
Why they hate Bush as much as Republicans once hated FDR.

BY ROBERT L. BARTLEY
Monday, September 22, 2003 12:01 a.m.

To protect democracy, three judges of the far-left Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals have just canceled elections in California. The last horselaugh, I'd hope, for the Democratic charge that Republicans are subverting democracy. As we saw in this space last week, the charge was already a pretty silly explanation of the patent anger surging through the Democratic primaries.

The anger must have deeper, perhaps subconscious roots. So let me put the Democratic base on the couch and offer my own speculation. The party's most ardent adherents are angry because they feel they've lost their birthright.

That is to say, base Democrats think of themselves as the best people: the most intelligent and informed, the most public spirited, the most morally pure. This self-image has become more than a little shopworn over the years, and now George Bush's conservative Republicans threaten to strip it away. Inevitably such Democrats are angry.

Consider the purely political side: The Democratic Party held the House of Representatives for 40 years and the Senate and White House for most of an era reaching back to World War II. Today the Democrats' last toehold on political power is the ability to muster 40 votes to sustain a filibuster in the Senate--a not-so-democratic tactic it is using in unprecedented ways to sustain the judicial imperialism on display with the Democratic appointees on the Ninth Circuit.

The party's future bids further decline, despite the narrowness of the 2000 presidential election, and despite the Republican president's momentarily fading poll numbers. In the 2004 elections, the Senate races include 19 seats now held by Democrats and 15 held by Republicans. All but maybe two of the Republicans seem safe, while three Democratic incumbents have already announced their resignations. Of the 19 Democratic seats at stake, 10 are in "red" states carried by President Bush in 2000.

The midterm 2002 elections have been largely overlooked, further, but were a historical Republican success. Almost always an incumbent president's party suffers congressional losses in its first midterm elections, but the Republicans regained Senate control and added to their House majority. The nationwide House vote was 51% Republican and 46% Democratic. In state legislatures, Republicans gained 141 seats, winning a nationwide majority for the first time since 1952.

Looking at these results, Michael Barone speculates in the new edition of the Almanac of American Politics, "It may be that history will record the years 1995-2001, when there was parity between the two parties and when Clinton was re-elected and Al Gore came so close to being elected, as a Clinton detour within a longer period of Republican majority, something like the Eisenhower detour in majority-Democratic America." This is no sure thing, as Mr. Barone quickly notes. National security was a big Republican plus in 2002, and conceivably it could become a liability in 2004. But still, the specter of a generation in the wilderness haunts the Democratic primaries.

Beyond mere politics, the fading birthright becomes a matter of self-identity. It's possible, we've witnessed, to assert moral superiority while defending the Clinton perjury, sexual escapades, vanishing billing records and last-minute pardons. But politicians, pundits and intellectuals with this record shouldn't expect much moral deference from the rest of us. Indeed, inner doubts about their own moral position is one obvious path to anger.

Even without the Clinton problems, the Democratic Party has descended into a collection of interest groups not bound together by any ideals. So we see scions of inherited wealth berating the "rich," meaning those successful at earning their own money. We see supposed champions of civil rights standing in the schoolhouse door to prevent vouchers that might give a break to black children in the District of Columbia.

We see a highly qualified potential judge filibustered into withdrawal precisely because he's Hispanic, and therefore a threat in ethnic politics. We see that once a martyred president urged us to "share any burden," his brother now belittles the war that toppled Saddam Hussein throwing around reckless and irresponsible charges of "bribing" foreign leaders--his own personal past, by the way, having produced remarkably little reticence.

Yes, above all the war; the self-identity of the Democratic base is still wrapped up in Vietnam. In fact Vietnam started as a liberal, Democratic war, so turning against it had to be justified by assertions of a higher morality, especially among those with student deferments from the draft. The notion that military force was immoral, even that American power was immoral, was deeply imbedded in the psyche of Democratic activists everywhere.

Now comes George Bush asserting that American power will be used pre-emptively to avert terrorist attacks on America, to establish American values as universal values. This so profoundly challenges the activists' self-image that they can only lash out in anger. Not many of them actively hope the U.S. fails in Iraq, of course, but they are in a constant state of denial that it might succeed.

What's more, this challenge is brought to them by a born-again MBA from Midland, Texas. This is a further challenge to their image of the best people, secular Ivy-league intellectuals. And to twist the knife, President Bush actually comes from an aristocratic family and went to prep school, Yale and Harvard. He has rejected these values for those of Texas.

Current Democratic anger will likely in the fullness of time prove to be the rantings of an establishment in the process of being displaced. Come to think of it, they sound like nothing so much as the onetime ire of staid Republicans at Franklin D. Roosevelt as "a traitor to his class."
Mr. Bartley is editor emeritus of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

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