Bush hating: For the record

I am on record (in the USENET archives at groups.google.com) saying, in November 2000, "What's the big deal with George W. Bush being elected? A moderate conservative is not some evil demon, and besides, he has all his Dad's old people to run things so things should be run pretty well." Sure, he was a draft dodger just like Bill Clinton (who I *also* did not vote for). Big freakin' deal.

The first 9 months of the Bush Administration were rather uninspired but so what? In my opinion, the fact that the government didn't do much during that 9 months was a feature, not a bug. Government should move slowly and only with a general consensus of the people, rather than precipitously and in ways that can cause real harm to many people. But then September 11, 2001 came. Then we got the so-called Patriot Act attacking America's freedoms and I started getting nervous. John Ashcroft going after sick people and girly magazines rather than after terrorists. Then an invasion of a country that had never attacked America and was no threat to America and Hans Blix's team had even verified that Iraq had no WMD at the time we invaded, had visited every possible factory that could be used to make WMD and found no 'there" there, but it didn't matter because Baby Bush had a hard-on about Saddam, and all I could say there is, "Well, I guess we're an empire now, let's hope the Bushies actually have a plan for the occupation that'll prevent an insurgency against American soldiers and a civil war between the Sunni and Shiites", after all that's why President George H.W. Bush had not sent the troops on to Baghdad, because there was no plan for dealing with the problems of occupation. Then the slowly dawning awareness that not only did they not have a plan, they even decried the notion that they needed a plan, until disaster slowly slipped upon us and the insurgency and civil war that George H.W. Bush had predicted in 1996 was upon us. Then Katrina, where the federal response was incompetent and days late and often kept real aid out due to bureaucratic bullcrap, like the line of Cajun fishermen pulling boats from Lafayette that were turned away by Homeland Security goons that could have saved hundreds of lives in the flooded-out streets of New Orleans.

It's not George W. Bush that I hate. Frankly, George W. Bush isn't worth hating. He's just another overpriviliged frat boy in over his head, like so many other overpriviliged frat boys that I met when I was in college. He's too pathetic to hate. What I hate is what he's doing to our nation. It's the bloody freepin' incompetence that I hate. It is the lying that I hate, such as the continued lies that we invaded Iraq to "disarm Saddam" when the U.N. inspection team of Hans Blix had already discovered (and Bush's hand-picked inspectors later verified) that Saddam had nothing worth disarming other than a few missiles with a 50-mile-too-long range. It is the spending money we don't have like a drunk sailor that I hate. I don't care that Bush's politics are not mine. What I care about is the damage that his incompetence, his borrow-and-spend budget-busting, his useless and horrendously expensive wars of foreign occupation, are doing to our nation and its future.

- Badtux the Libertarian Penguin