Posted on 12/26/2008 6:46:21 AM PST by vietvet67
The Bush hatred we are seeing in the media today belongs in the long catalogue of human psychopathology -- not rational behavior. The latest version is the shoe-throwing incident in Iraq. Iraq happens to be a hot war zone, in which tens of thousands of innocent people have been killed by hidden bombs. Bush' protective detail had no way of knowing whether an assassinaton attempt was under way, in just the way Saddam tried to assassinate George H.W. Bush, Sr. At the end of his two terms of office, the President flew to Iraq, into harm's way, knowing the dangers, to hold an open press conference.
But our media harbor such bitter hatred for him that they turned a potential bomb-throwing incident --- by one of their own --- into a joke, just another reason to sneer at the President. If anybody threw a cream pie at Obama, screaming headlines would be launched for days afterward. Nothing but sneers followed the potential attack on George W. Bush, which he fended off with his usual grace and humor. I have never known a US president to be treated as disgracefully as this one. The political case against him is based almost entirely on media falsehoods, slanders, and greed for power. Not much rationality there.
Our public melodrama is therefore being driven, not by facts and reason, but by the most primitive emotions that prey on human minds. Human brains haven't changed much in the last thirty thousand years. Homo sapiens is a lot more prosperous species than ever, but prosperity just allows those ancient demons to come out more freely. If we were huddled by a small fire in a cave, hungry and miserable, we could not indulge our fantasies as much as the pop media now allow themselves to do. Prosperity permits our primitive urges to flourish on the public stage.
President George W. Bush is being crucified in the public square in spite of his plain decency and goodness, and in spite of his remarkable success in winning two difficult wars to protect this nation from harm. All wars are hard; all wars involve mistakes and self-correction. All wars, if they are to be won, come at a cost.
While it is natural enough for conservatives to be upset by the blatant unfairness of the propaganda media --- indeed, by their visible madness --- if we just take a little mental distance, we can easily see an ancient anthropological drama: The crucifixion of the reigning king, along with the messianic glorification of a new one, who will surely rescue us from our media-driven despair. (Of course the new king will also grow weaker in time, in spite of his charismatic magic ...) This is the stuff of Shakespeare and Sophocles. George W. Bush's "head is bloody but unbowed," to quote the poem Invictus, ("undefeated') the Victorian answer to political witchhunts.
The novelist Mary Renault described the whole ordeal in her classic story, The King Must Die. Renault based her tale on legends of royal sacrifice from the ancient Mediterranean world --- in Greece, Asia Minor, Crete, Italy, and elsewhere. Read it if you want to understand Bush hatred and Obama worship. Her source was Sir James Fraser's remarkable book, The Golden Bough. While anthropologists have backed off Fraser's claim that king sacrifice is universal, the respected scholar James D. Brown argues that the evidence favors "Oedipal rebellion" as a universal among native peoples studied over more than a century. We no longer hang our kings physically, but the Left and the media act just like the lynch mobs of old. Listen to their voices and you'll hear the ancient roar of the mob.
We can watch the tragicomedy of our psychopolitics unfold and still keep some perspective. Think of it as a stage play like King Lear, and pray that reason prevails in the end. The Leftist media are actors playing the ancient role of the politically envious, who exist in every tribal culture where the head of the clan sleeps uneasily, fearful of plots and assassination attempts. All politics is not just local, as the Washington saying goes, but deep down it is tribal.
What is hopeful today is what was hopeful at the American founding: the use of constitutional means to channel our loves and hates into a fairly reasonable course of common action. The majority of Americans are pretty sane and rational; they don't trust the political class, and they are deserting the Big Media in the tens of millions even now. The American Founders knew all about vulgar mobs, and lived to see them in the French Revolution of 1789, with Napoleon rising on top of the revolutionary chaos to explode into a mass war of conquest in Europe. The Founders despised all that. They designed the Constitution to steer a steady course in spite of mobs and demagogues. It has worked magnificently for two centuries, and with luck and courage, it will hold.
Alexander Hamilton famously said, "The people? The people is a great beast!" But that was not accurate: We are all "the people," as the Declaration of Independence tells us. "The people" are the source of all good and bad things. The people -- properly balanced by a constitutional apparatus -- have brought prosperity that was unimaginable two hundred years ago. The people harbor wisdom and common sense in a way that snobbish elites soon forget. Conservatism is skeptical about human nature, but not cynical or despairing. Nor do we look to messianic leaders like Barack Obama to solve our problems. We look to muddle through, to give individuals the space to grow and succeed, to stand against the mobs, to fail at times, and then to fight again.
Whenever conservatives see yet another mob movement from the Left, we feel it is our obligation to stand in opposition. It is not unpatriotic to criticize the messiah of the moment -- though the Left will say so. It is our duty. We can do so with reason, with humor, and with clear thinking about the bad ideas the Left seems to carry around like a scratchy case of the fleas.
President Bush is not a theoretical politician. He is a practical man. He has constantly made the best decisions by his lights, sometimes against his own ideals, because reality sometimes makes things like war necessary; sometimes it makes massive bailouts necessary. The conservative question is always, "What is the realistic alternative?"
The end product of conservative politics is a mix of realism and idealism. Bush has liberated some fifty million Muslims, including one Arab journalist who just hurled his trendy hush puppies at him in an ancient gesture of contempt. That man is alive today because of George W. Bush -- Saddam would have fed him screaming into a plastic shredder. Compared to Obama and the corruptocrats, Bush will soon look like an American hero. Just watch it happen.
Christopher Booker's The Neophiliacs: A Study of the Revolution in English Life In The Fifties and Sixties was a very good examination of this phenomenon.
I don't the feeling that there is enough Bush to love or hate -- that he's substantial, that there's as much there to get worked up over. Maybe there was once, but now he's more of a ghost or an irrelevance than anything else. That very smallness or absence or irrelevance may be one thing that angers people, even those who agree with him about some important issues.
Today's so-called liberals are actually much more closely aligned with the Utopian socialism you describe. A majority of Americans support just this kind of state-ism.
Obama is clearly in the Utopian socialist tradition. He is not a Constitutionalist and is not by any stretch a classical liberal. As for his temperament there are conflicting reports. Suffice it to say his mettle will be tested.
I have no reason to believe that our Constitution is sacrosanct. It has been profoundly subverted for more than 100 years and is, to my thinking, perilously threatened by the very populism you describe as seminal to the rise of tyrants in the 20th century.
Chinese peasants are little differentiated from the mass populas of our great urban centers. The threat of riot by millions has quenched any serious investigation of the character or qualifications of the O. Parallels are striking.
Spot on!
Here in Oz we are assaulted on a daily basis by media hacks gibbering their irrational hatred for Bush and giggling like squealing schoolgirls over anything to do with Obama.
The media's disgusting treatment of Bush makes me sick to my stomach as these asshats corrode what's left of any respect for the office.
Much of the crap spewed at Bush sounds awefully similar to the poison fed to Palistinian kids about Jews being pigs and monkeys...and 'sheeple' gobble it up and spit it out like it's gospel truth.
No doubt W has his faults but just how well could anyone do with both hands tied behind their back and leftist idiots screaming 24/7 in each ear?
I fear for America and I fear for the west and I'm thankfull to God that I know where this is headed.
I agree with you about our Constitution being threatened but I would not underestimate the will of those ready to come to its defense should push come to shove. The "masses" may love their unearned benefits but we love our freedom more.
I don't honestly know what the hell we've got in Obama. If he were of the classic dictator type I'd be more worried about his intentions. He's not stupid, which is a plus, but he's clearly in over his head, which is to say that in this day and age, articulation is valued over wisdom. I'm more concerned about the really evil bastards who have ridden his coattails and/or funded his victory.
The bottom line is that I want this country to succeed and to the degree that Obama pisses off his leftist supporters and steers a more careful path, I would be cautiously optimistic. The one hope I have for him (and it's tenuous, I admit) is that he is still young and impressionable enough to change his mind when confronted with challenges whose resolution depends upon a choice between what is right for the nation and what is politically expedient.
If by some miracle, he were to truly decide to be President of all the people, we might be able to get through this period without untold damage. Stranger things have happened. The Presidency changes people, perhaps because of an awesome awareness of responsibility that dawns on its occupants, or alternatively, because they quickly come to realize their limitations as executives and as human beings to affect matters beyond their control.
The resigned Bush of 2008 is not the same man we elected in 2000. Remember the swagger? The strike he threw on oppenning day? Carrying the book “Bias” after exiting AF1? Remember the Bush of “Mission Accomplished” in the flight suit?
Then came the compromising Bush: “The No child left behind” advocate. The champion of classless Ted Kennedy’s Education Bill. The $100 billion to fight AIDS in Africa. The biggest entitlement prograam in 40 years - the Medicare RX plan. I suspect he thought this would make him popular with Democrats- but they gave him nothing in return. His myopia was limited to keeping us safe here at home, but no border fence, no changes to immigration policy and no massive deportation of illegals.
Bush lost the opportunity in the first 6 years of his administration to set the country on the right track and squandered the opportunity. His energy plan included more nuclear, clean coal and offshore drilling should have been passed by congress in 2001. Bush also failed to correct problems he inherited from #42 and was criticized for Kyoto, SALT, Arsenic levels in our water.
Utlimately Bush failed to engage the public in a meaningful way, misused the bully pulpit and left the media and Hollywood define the narrative.
That is, the liberals impute to themselves only the highest motives, in a futile attempt to deny their own aggression, which they devalue and would shun. But the aggressive drive is no respector of libidinal objects and is characterized by a peremptory quality which overrides superego constraints.
Because he has suppressed awareness of his aggressive intentions, the liberal under threat is unable to manage or moderate his aggression as normal persons can, but rather sinks to the deepest hog-wallows of hostility and hate.
This embroiled narcissism is a remnant of the most infantile of dynamics, and the least susceptible to the influence of maturation.
George Bush is a target because simply put his integrity generates a narcissistic threat to the liberal's sense of superiority. All liberals instinctively know that whether he could parse a sentence or not, and his obvious blunders notwithstanding, he is still ten times the man they will ever be. This incites infantile narcissistic rage at the hypothalamic level of the ancient reptilian brain.
The fascinating truth of this can be seen in the almost eerie replay, the liberals' reaction to Sarah Palin. Their hatred of her is radioactive and exceeds even the Bush derangement syndrome.
As with Bush, she threatens every liberal by being integrated and fulfilled, and unforgivably, a woman to boot. She is the living ideal of all that feminism pretends to seek; thus her very existence exposes the leftist lie behind the women's "movement," as it evolved into the malignant force it came to be, and discredits the entire feminist project.
Happy New Year!
I absolutely love President Bush. And I know alot of other people that do too. The thought of him not being in the Whitehouse is very depressing for alot of us. I will miss seeing his pictures in the “Day in the Life of Pres Bush” section of FR. The left hates him because he is a good decent and moral Christian man. I admire him and will miss him so much.
LOL. Is he still here???
GWB pity party-circle the wagons ping
A moral man does not cause large numbers of folks to die unncessarily in a grotesquely mismanaged war. The entire Bush mythology falls apart once you look at the 3rd raters he has relied upon to execute his policies. Harriet Miers and that FEMA idiot are more or less par for Bush appointees with Roberts, Alito and Gates being the very clear exceptions. Read "Angler" about how Cheney ran a selection process to ensure 3rd ratership among political appointees.
A moral man does not take $700B from the American people and give it to a few cronies on wall street.
W doesn’t have any cronies on Wall Street. He’s always hated Wall Street and that’s one of the reasons he’s achieved such poor economic results.
It matters not what you say about Bush, it wont change my mind. You can post as much hatefilled comments here as you want to. I know that no President is purfect. I dont blindly agree with EVERYTHING Bush does. But overall I admire him and I always will.
I'm not a Bush hater, but I don't respect him as a leader either, and it's precisely because there was a "realistic alternative" to the invasion of Iraq. What he needed to do was wait for events to develop, the quintessential conservative stance. Saddam very well may have blundered his was into provoking nearly the whole world into supporting action against him if Bush had waited a year or two. There was no rush, no emergency. Bush knew the WMD thing was mainly BS, as Paul Wolfowitz admitted years ago, but which many Bush supporters now conveniently forget.
Bush decided he had to act now because he thought he had to capitalize on 911 war fever. It was dissipating by 2003, but hadn't yet disappeared.
George Bush took us to war because he hated Saddam, and he mistakenly believed his family's hatred and the national interests of the United States of American were one and the same. It was a great, tragic mistake, and history will not forgive him for it.
R.I.P. / U.S.A.
His popularity dipped after his reelection.
Anyway, I hate him for kneecapping the Republican party. Obama and the rat congress are the fault of him and his administration (along with RINOs in Congress). Such a waste of on opportunity. He’s the RINO Emperor. Spend spend spend spend. Illegal immigrant? Welcome aboard!
Bush didn't have a conservative bone in his body, and after 8 years in office, he leaves much of this country a smoking wreck.
Happy New Year. Should be an interesting one.
I don't care that he isn't articulate. I care that he has filled his administration with 3rd raters who have done a epithet deleted poor job of executing key policies that are important to the welfare of the United States.
Bingo. Whether or not getting involved in Iraq was the right thing to do is one of those grand historical questions that will be debated centuries hence. While I don't agree with the decision, in hindsight, that is not my criticism of the man. My criticism is the mangled execution by 3rd raters - largely screened by Cheney BTW - because they were politically reliable - rather than having the war and the reconstruction run by first rate professionals is an example of his smallness and absence. Executive execution is about a lot more than making the big decision and leaving everything else to your minions however unfit for their roles they probably are.
Execution of everything in his administration has been mangled by 3rd rate minions. And this from the party that was supposed to know how to run things.
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