The electorate previously chosen George W. Bush as their leader. They liked him so much that they decided to vote him again. He was far from ideal, and his opposition was not precisely tight. One of the people he ran against was John Kerry, for heaven’s purpose. Perhaps therefore, he was able to persuade the majority of people that he had some respectable and good intentions.
Yet none of that counted in the democratic political and media creation, which, despite the clear choice of the public, spent this government’s two terms issuing smears against his personality, his knowledge, and, indeed, his authenticity as a political officeholder. They called him a fool, a liar, a warmonger, a war crime, and an all-around not-very-bright brother. They claimed that he did not actually get his primary election. He was, for them, something like the disaster in shorts.
They say that Donald Trump is worse than any other president in history, but tell that to W. To a technology that knows just Trump as the focus point of left-wing repugnance, the popular hatred of Bush perhaps seemed improbable, if not impossible. Even those of us who have lived through the Bush administration are left scratching because of the breadth and depth of the hostility toward him. To a degree that has been forgotten, overlooked, or conveniently skipped over, the Left attempted to discredit, dishonor, and demean Bush using much the same playbook later deployed against Trump: Namely, that he was singularly unfit and uniquely dangerous. True, during the Bush years, the Left lacked the advantages of social media, “woke” culture, and a fully fractured electorate, but its vitriol against the 43rd president was, during his eight years in office and for some time thereafter, nearly ubiquitous. The Left’s inability to accurately assess the degree of alleged awfulness of various Republican presidents or presidential aspirants is a lesson in remembering the nuances of the cultural reaction to Bush.  ,
A book called Bushisms, which was perhaps the most important book published during this time in American life, perfectly captured the president’s main contentions: that his misstatements were so obscene that they merited to be compiled in book form. The publication of the first volume of Bushisms, which included several subsequent collections, in 2001, suggests that the problem was that the media had decided he was a buffoon even before Bush had had an opportunity to rule. “ Collecting these utterances by our current president over the past year and a while, I’ve found myself asking the same question time and time again: What exactly is wrong with this guy?” wrote Jacob Weisberg, the editor and general impresario of Bushisms, in the original book.  ,
What were Bush’s sins? What would now be considered Tim Walz-ian knucklehead-dom were one of the Bush sayings that were quoted throughout the various volumes of Bushisms. ” I think — tide turning — see, as I remember — I was raised in the desert, but tides kind of — it’s easy to see a tide turn — did I say those words”? There were self-contradicting assertions:” There’s no question that the minute I got elected, the storm clouds on the horizon were getting nearly directly overhead” ). And comments meant to be gravely self-revealing:” You know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror”. Plus, there were hapless redundancies:” Our nation must come together to unite” . ,
Bush was an inelegant speaker, though a sincere one. And, because they were listening to a person and not correcting a grammar quiz, Bush voters, to borrow a phrase that would only be coined later, took him seriously, not literally. The fun the chattering classes had at the expense of Bush’s command of the language, meanwhile, revealed the source of their opposition to be at least partly a manifestation of snobbishness. Bush was viewed as a refugee from West Texas who was associated with the unsavory oil industry, despite having attended Yale as the offspring of a former vice president and president. His self-expression as a once-drinker who now abstained, as well as his status as a once-drinker, did not help him among the cognoscenti.
Such was their certainty that Bush was unworthy of the White House that certain celebrities, or “celebrities”, pledged to terminate their residency in the United States if he won in 2000, including movie director Robert Altman, rocker Eddie Vedder, and former JFK press secretary Pierre Salinger. Beyond simply opposing a candidate, this was a step. Implicit in the threat to become an expatriate upon that candidate’s election is the notion not merely that the country will suffer but will become dangerous, wicked, and uninhabitable.  ,  ,
Bush offended the best and the brightest. Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau chose to depict Bush in the form of an asterisk when he first occupied the White House in 2000 to illustrate the irregularity of his victory following the admittedly strange recount procedure in Florida. Even after 9/11, this attitude did n’t much change. Bush had missed his “world-class male model” role, according to Norman Mailer, who sneeringly claimed in a New York Review of Books article. Susan Sontag gloomily observed,” We have a robotic President who assures us that America still stands tall,” in a decree issued immediately following. Kurt Vonnegut ranted and raved about declining petroleum reserves years later when he spoke with Douglas Brinkley in Rolling Stone and finally admitted he preferred even Richard Nixon to Bush. ” Bush is so ignorant”, Vonnegut said back then. ” And I do n’t like idiotic, impulsive people. He’s not a capable human being” . ,
But bashing Bush was not simply restricted to tony publications. Over the years, Comedy Central aired not one but two sitcoms on the then-sitting president, Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s live-action That’s My Bush! and the animated Lil ‘ Bush. Even snobby sci-fi films piled on gravitas by piling on. In the prequel to the Star Wars films Revenge of the Sith from 2005, Natalie Portman’s Padme Amidala received a line that was widely regarded as a metaphor for our country under Bush:” So this is how liberty dies — with thunderous applause.” This was a sign of a fixation rather than a wickedly clever cultural commentary. The less said about the noxious 2006 assassination-themed art-house “mockumentary” Death of a President, the better.  ,
Meanwhile, the documentary film industry was rejuvenated entirely on the strength of the Bush and Bush-adjacent panic: These were the years of Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election ( 2002 ), Fahrenheit 9/11 ( 2004 ), Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room ( 2005 ), and An Inconvenient Truth ( 2006 ) — the latter not about Bush but certainly made with Bush in mind given the fact that it was written by and starring Al Gore, the man who lost (or, for this audience base, won? ) the 2000 election. Michael Moore commandeered the still-widely viewed Academy Awards to denounce the Iraq War:” Shame on you, Mr. Bush”! the well-padded auteur hollered.  ,
Hollywood had assumed that the general public would be aware of its anti-Bush sentiment for years and years. How else can the Bush-centric feature film cottage industry be reconciled? Sadly, because of the cumbersome production schedules of major motion pictures, many of the marquee Bush movies emerged toward the end of, or even many years after, the conclusion of the president’s time in office: 2008 saw the release of both Oliver Stone’s biopic W. and the TV movie Recount, the latter a rather late-in-the-game look back at the 2000 Florida vote recount with Kevin Spacey as Ron Klain. Hollywood did n’t start filming until the Obama administration, which starred Naomi Watts and Sean Penn in the laughably self-serious Fair Game ( 2010 ), which was what they had been clamoring for. Most agonizingly, Christian Bale was forced to wait until 2018 to make his acting debut in the now-defunct biopic Vice. It turns out no one at the studio had anticipated that his daughter Liz would help save the Cheney name.  ,
The kind of obsessive hysteria the Left displayed during the Bush years was an ominous precursor to our current political situation, despite the fact that invective, parody, and plain old bad press directed at public officials are indicators of a functioning democracy. It’s been reported that the electorate is at a point of exhaustion, but it seems more likely that it will be the professionals liberal establishment who are tuckedered out after a quarter-century of unrequited panic over whichever Republican is in charge of the Oval Office.  ,
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Peter Tonguette contributes to the Washington Examiner magazine.