More on Bush Hatred

In today's New York Times, Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic reviews Nicholson's Baker's new novel Checkpoint, in which the protagonist plots to kill George W. Bush. In his review, Wieseltier addresses the broader issue of Bush hatred. I strongly disagree with Wieseltier when he tries to explain Bush hatred away as a mirror image of "conservative demogoguery". One need only refer back to the way in which many on the left treated Ronald Reagan. Plus, Wieseltier praises the Kerry/Edwards campaign for not engaging in Bush hatred, yet ignores the fact that Kerry's acceptance speech was littered with Bush-hating code words such as "misleading the nation to war" and "threatening the constitution". Still, Wieseltier makes some telling points about the deranged nature of many of the Bush haters:

The signs of the degradation are everywhere. In a new anthology of anti-Bush writings by distinguished journalists and commentators and a senator (Kennedy) and a congressman (Dingell), the pages are ornamented with exhilarating anagrams such as ''The Republicans: Plan butcheries?'' and ''Donald Henry Rumsfeld: Fondly handles murder.'' The back cover thoughtfully calls Rumsfeld a ''war pig.'' In an advertisement that proudly lists ''recent contributors,'' The New York Review of Books suddenly names Noam Chomsky, who has not appeared in its pages in decades; but this is the glory in which the journal apparently wishes to bask again. Al Gore denounces Abu Ghraib as ''the Bush gulag,'' and Moveon.org publishes a huge ad instructing that ''The Communists had Pravda. Republicans have Fox.'' And so on. All this is not much of a height from which to fall to the juxtaposition of pictures of Bush with pictures of Hitler in a recent concert by Black Sabbath, to gloss a song also called ''War Pigs.''


Read the whole article. (If you're not registered for the Times, go to Bugmenot.com first to get a password)