Today I got an email forward from a friend of mine, one that called itself an “INTEGRITY TEST.” The set-up was that you are a professional photographer covering a hurricane in Miami, and while taking pictures of the raging floods you see George W. Bush ready to go down for the third time. If you put the camera down, you’ll be able to rescue him, but you’ll lose your shot at a Pulitzer for chronicling the last moments of the most powerful man on Earth. And so the INTEGRITY TEST asks you the following, hugely important question:
Would you shoot in color, or black and white?
Yeah, I know, uproarious. I got sent this by an Ivy League graduate, who himself received it from another Ivy League graduate. The funny thing about it is that I don’t doubt at all that they’d actually leave Bush to die–and that they’re far from alone in this, too.
So what’s the deal with the borderline-pathological hatred that so many people have for President Bush? I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately. As someone whose presidential voting record thus far runs Clinton 96/Gore 00, who supported all of Al Gore’s recount efforts in Florida, and who bashed the Pres. with the best of them up until, well, you know, I still cannot fathom why highly educated and articulate grown-ups across the country (well, across the coasts) literally would like to see him dead. Here are some ideas:
1) The conservatives who demonized President Clinton are reaping the whirlwind. I do think this is a significant part of it all. The bad feelings left over from the Republican Revolution, the idiotic impeachment proceedings, the “trail of bodies from Little Rock to Washington,” et cetera, were absorbed by the country’s most doctrinaire left-liberals, and now they’re just vomiting it back out all over the rest of us, only with a different President serving as ipecac.
2) War. I’d imagine that in the post-Vietnam United States, any war, under any president, will be incredibly polarizing. The odd combination of totally unprecedented war (the War on Terror) and directly precedented war (the Iraq theater of same), making hostilities seem both dangerously unpredictable and frighteningly repetitive, probably doesn’t help either.
3) The election debacle. This is where the tipping point occurred, and the role of “foaming-at-the-mouth partisan loony-tunes” shifted from being played by conservatives to liberals. It certainly was bad to see an election be decided by a party-line vote of the Supreme Court; it was also bad to see it won in a state that Al Gore really did win (although his myopic demand to recount only certain counties would have produced the very Bush win he was trying to avoid). But is the election enough to prevent people from engaging in debate with the ruling party and its President in good faith? For some, apparently, the answer is yes. In a time of unprecedented conflict, when the American mainland has been attacked by a foreign power for the first time since the War of 1812, people are still so angry about the hanging-chad debacle that they’re ready to throw out the electoral college (thus ensuring that only about a dozen states, if that, will ever factor into presidential politics again) and have themselves convinced that new voting machines are part of a Republican plot to steal “more” elections.
4) Bush is a lousy public speaker. To the Ivy League types that form the core of the Bushatred movement, this is anathema. It kind of was to me, for a while, though it was always more funny than anything else. I’ve certainly read little to convince me that behind closed doors, Bush is anything but an agile and adroit manager, very much at the helm of his administration. But his verbal gaffes–even the mere fact that he just isn’t silver-tongue–radiate “UNQUALIFIED UNELECTED PUPPET” to many people.
I happen to think that Bush has done great things foreign-policy wise. My vote is far from being locked up, though; just by way of a for instance, if he ends up lobbying for a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, my vote will go to the Marijuana Reform Party faster than you can say Jack Robinson. But I’m not going to begin joking about how if I had my druthers he’d be dead, and I’m probably going to have a hard time taking seriously those who do.