Posted by
Always To The Right on Monday, January 19, 2009 8:55:21 PM
American Thinker: Bush and the Bush-Haters
There is one thing certain to go through Barack Obama's mind during the
inauguration: at one point or another, while glancing at George W.
Bush, he will consider the treatment that Bush got as president and
hope to God he suffers nothing even vaguely similar.
It
can be stated without fear of serious argument that no previous
president has been treated as brutally, viciously, and unfairly as
George W. Bush.
Bush 43 endured a deliberate and planned
assault on everything he stood for, everything he was involved in,
everything he tried to accomplish. Those who worked with him suffered
nearly as much (and some even more -- at least one, Scooter Libby, was
convicted on utterly specious charges in what amounts to a show trial).
His
detractors were willing to risk the country's safety, its economic
health, and the very balance of the democratic system of government in
order to get at him. They were out to bring him down at all costs, or
at the very least destroy his personal and presidential reputation. At
this they have been half successful, at a high price for the country
and its government.
Richard M. Nixon probably stands as the most hated president prior to Bush.
With Reagan, the coterie was even smaller and more isolated.
Bush is alone at being attacked and denied support from all quarters --
even from many members of his own party. No single media source,
excepting talk radio, was ever in his corner. Struggling actors and
comics revived their careers though attacks on Bush. A disturbed woman
perhaps a half step above the status of a bag lady parked outside his
Crawford home to throw curses at him and was not only not sent on her
way but joined by hundreds of others with plenty of spare time on their
hands, an event covered in minute-by-minute detail by major media.
While FDR was accused of having engineered Pearl Harbor (as if even an attempted
attack on the US would not have been enough to get the country into WW
II in real style), no president before Bush was ever subjected to the
machinations of an entire conspiracy industry. The 9/11 Truthers, a mix
of seriously disturbed individuals and hustlers out to pull a
profitable con, accused Bush and his administration of crimes that put
the allegations against Roosevelt in the shade, and with far less
rational basis. These hallucinations were picked up the mass media,
playing the role of transmission belt, and various fringe political
figures along the lines of Cynthia McKinney.
But even this pales in light of the actions of the New York Times,
which on its downhill road to becoming a weekly shopper giveaway for
the Upper West Side, seriously jeopardized national security in the
process of satisfying its anti-Bush compulsion. Telecommunications
intercepts, interrogation techniques, transport of terrorist captives,
tracking of terrorist finances... scarcely a single security program
aimed at Jihadi activity went unrevealed by the Times and -- not to limit the blame -- was then broadcast worldwide by the legacy media. At one point, Times
reporters published a detailed analysis of government methods of
searching out rogue atomic weapons, a story that was no doubt read with
interest at points north of Lahore, and one that we may all end up
paying for years down the line. The fact that Bush was able to curtail
any further attacks while the media as a whole was working to undermine
his efforts is little less than miraculous.
As for his
own party, no small number of Republicans (not all of them of the RINO
fraternity) made a practice of ducking out on their party leader.