Lance Mannion has an excellent post refuting the right wing meme—adopted by the mainstream media—that personally disliking Bush for his personal inabilities to be a decent human being is somehow a strike against you when pointing out that Bush is not a decent human being. It’s kind of sad and telling that Lance’s post is so excellent, because he compares disliking Bush to disliking people who kick dogs, people who backstab, and people who do shoddy work and hide behind their class privilege. It’s sad because we need to compare someone who is personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people to a dog-kicker to get why he is someone worthy of being held in contempt.
Anyway, Lance is addressing the maddening idea that liberals who hate Bush have some sort of mental illness that wingnuts made up called “Bush Derangement Syndrome”. Every time I make a pointed, accurate, but emotional post about how it really, deeply sucks that Bush is so intent on winning his unwinnable war that he doesn’t care how many people he kills in the process, I get a bunch of trackbacks arguing that I couldn’t possibly be angry about unnecessary death. No, I must have a mental illness. That’s the ticket! The irony of this is that psychiatrists generally are more concerned about the mental health status of people who claim that empathy is a weakness—taken to its extreme, that is sociopathy. A real mental illness, unlike “Bush Derangement Syndrome”.
Anyway, my post isn’t about who’s more crazy than who. As a general rule, I don’t think I get too upset when someone tries to taunt me with “BDS”, and I think it’s because that I’m a feminist so I get called crazy like 400 times a day. In fact, I would argue that “BDS” is just a modification of the argument that women who dislike patriarchal oppression are crazy. It makes perfect sense. After all, the main slur on liberals is that we’re a bunch of girls. Even the latte libel is a feminizing one, in the sense that women are generally the target of criticisms about hyper-materialism, as women are seen as inherently frivolous. Having spent decades implying that liberalism is feminine in order to scare liberals into a subservient position, it makes perfect sense that as soon as liberals started fighting back, conservatives would resort to the “bitches are crazy” libel.
I think the reason that a lot of liberal bloggers are so frustrated is that the mainstream media buys right into the idea that anger at Bush is a symptom of mental illness. That’s certainly the frustration driving Lance’s post. They’re supposed to be the reasonable ones! How could they buy into such a blatant lie as, “Anger at Bush is more evidence that the angry person is mentally unstable than that Bush did something wrong”? Well, again as a patriarchy-watcher, I’m well aware of the existence of well-meaning people who just buy into it and active defenders of injustice. The upholding of the rape culture is instructive as an analogy.
First, you have the unapologetic guys who buy into the rape culture and don’t really put any effort into concealing their open hatred of women. I wrote a post about being stuck at an airport and getting frustrated at how the news media was defending young men at Duke that called a black woman by racial slurs, made jokes about slavery to her, allegedly raped her, and then joked about the rape later and fantasized about getting a chance to kill her and her friend. Their arguments for these guys is that they find it irritating to have male dominance and white supremacy criticized. That’s basically it and the rest is window-dressing. In relationship to this war and slurs against liberals, these rape defenders are the equivalent of people who run around defending the so-called Christian Bush’s waging an illegal war that’s killed hundreds of thousands by saying that Islam is a violent religion. You disagree, they call you crazy, and it’s obvious who’s the wanker in that argument.
Then you have mainstream media concern trolling about this non-existent “Bush Derangement Syndrome”. Lance quotes Ruth Marcus in the process of cheerleading Bush’s class warfare designed as a health care policy.
If George W. Bush proposes something, it must be bad. Such is the knee-jerk state of partisan suspiciousness that when the president actually endorses a tax increase — a tax increase that would primarily hit the well-off, no less — Democrats still howl.
This is probably more frustrating because you get the impression that her blindness is not as willful. Harkening back to the rape culture thing, I have a minor personal story that I think is instructive. After I was raped, I unfortunately had a long on-and-off period of suffering from what was probably post-traumatic stress disorder. It took me a long time to admit that I was suffering, and when talking to my dad about it (while he was supporting me through another period of suffering from another patriarchally-induced trauma), he looked at me all shocked and said, “Wow, I never realized it affected you so much.”
To be clear, I do not blame my father. He simply had bought into the comforting lie that rape victims aren’t that traumatized, a lie that was particularly compelling when it was his own damn child. Still, as you can gather, it was probably a lot more frustrating to hear this from my own well-meaning father than it is to read dozens of comments a day from guys openly defending the practice of rape. My dad meant well, yet I felt like a failure, because I felt like he was saying my impotent rage at what had happened to me was irrational. And I believed that on a level, because I knew he meant well.
That’s what I see going on with the relationship between liberals and the mainstream media that acts like hating Bush is irrational. They mean well, they should know better, but they are so invested in the system that they are simply blind to the fact that the only rational reaction to the needless death and suffering brought by this man is white hot anger. They see the rational reaction and call it crazy because they can’t admit the truth.
55 Responses to “Bush Derangement Syndrome”
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I was having a conversation recently with my sister about some horrifying things that happened to me decades ago, and she, like your father, said she had no idea that I was going through all that back then. But why should you, I said, I was trying to hold it together and not let anyone know I was a basket case. She’s not a mindreader. Perhaps a similar circumstance for you and your father? Just a thought.
For a bunch of right-wingers, they sure do act like like old-style Soviet Communists:
Today, the Bush League and their fellow-travellers claim that “no sane person would criticize the Big W.”
Why does George Bush hate truth, justice and the American Way in favor of Stalinist-style personality cults?
Agreed, muddy. But why do we feel that pressure? For the same reason that people feel pressured to nod sagely when Bush suggests killing more people and saying, “Now, let’s hear him speak his piece.”
The sane reaction is to go apeshit on him.
No, anger and hatred at Mr. 28% Election Thief is not insane. Impeaching a popular President for the crime of lying about a blow job is insane, particularly when it drives your party to its lowest level ever. Ever notice that the ones who wax most eloquent about “Bush Hatred” are the ones who were most guilty of Clinton Hatred? Methinks they doth project too much.
The first time I heard the term, I assumed it referred to Bush’s derangement.
I think that the thing about anger at Bush and his cronies and handlers is, like the one about the inherent craziness of women who dare to dislike patriarchy or the one about the inherent craziness of people who dared to be soviet dissidents, ultimately a matter of claiming power. There’s the unmarked (or default) position in every dialog, which typical belongs to men/whites/christians and so forth, and the marked position, which is taken by the freaks. (Nicely tautological, ain’t it)
Getting to define which position is “mainstream” and hence invisible to examination, and which positions are marked as odd is in some ways the social power from which all others flow.
So if you map it to a typical dysfunctional family, Bush is like the parent/uncle/aunt/cousin at the holiday dinner who keeps talking about how much better the country would be if those lazy blacks/jews/women/gays weren’t collecting all that welfare or taking all the good jobs or getting all uppity and disturbing the peace. And liberals, in this narrative, are the ones who have the temerity to point out how offensive and inappropriate such talk is. I.e., the ones who get asked, “Why do you insist on making trouble?”
Hint: no one in the mainstream media asks why Dick Cheney or Rush Limbaugh or some other rightwing nutcase is so angry about the latest things that they decide to be outraged about.
It’s an uphill fight to claim that unmarked position.
I usually explain that I don’t *hate* Bush. I loathe him. Despise him. Am frustrated and infuriated by him. Feel embarrassment at belonging to the same species–much less the same country–as him.
Bush is the posterboy for why hereditary rule is a bad thing, a compelling argument against social promotion in schools and business, and the prime example of what your kids turn into if you let them bully their second grade classmates with impunity.
I can’t even call him a sack of shit: at least shit provides some usefulness to the world. No, Bush is just dregs: that nasty sludge left over in the bottom of the barrel after all the wine is pulled out. It’s undrinkable, useless, can’t even be used for vinegar, and if you don’t scrape it out of the barrel before the next batch, he’ll ruin that, too.
I have been startled by how many people seem unaware that “Bush Derangment Syndrome” is just like the old Soviet diagnosis of “sluggish schizophrenia”. This article is a great overview of the use of psychiatric diagnoses to control dissent and whistleblowing, mostly in legal cases but of course it has a rich history in politics and patriarchy. The classic feminist work on the subject is The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar.
I can explain some of the people not understanding opposition to Bush.
See, go to the rightwing blogs. You’ll see them talking about enemies who hate us, who want to wipe out our way of life, people who would cheerfully die for a chance to hurt us enough.
These people are horrible, dangerous threats. No questions asked; they are horrible, horrible people, and we need to protect ourselves against them.
Here’s the question: how many are there?
Are they common? Or are they a tiny fringe of folks?
If you believe they are common, well, it’s not too hard to get behind a big, transformative policy of warfare in the middle east. I mean, there are a lot of people out there who we need to fight and defeat!
(There is a fallacy about this, though: if you think they’re *that* common, what makes them think that this transformative war that will create a democracy will protect us? But let’s ignore that.)
But there aren’t that many. You know it. I know it. Everyone who is willing to think for a moment, and dig in, knows it.
There’s probably less than one in a thousand, meaning that, all we have to do is make sure that the other 999 out of each thousand think it would be terrible to do something big and nasty to the US. Big conspiracies aren’t invisible; one of those other 999 people will see something or learn something, and contact the police and avert the plot.
Assuming, of course, that we fight the war on terror in an intelligent manner.
But the Republicans pushed the other paradigm, and chose to play on people’s fears, rather than being strong leaders.
That, I believe, is the root of part of the claims of BDS. That’s how you get people talking about “how can you hate Bush, when our enemies cut people’s heads off!”
Amanda:
There’s a tiny bit more to it than that. There’s also that bit of “but if it was that bad, we’d have known… right? I mean, we wouldn’t… we couldn’t have missed it, could we?”
I had a strong emotional reaction once when reading The Brother’s Karamazov. I said to a friend that I guess Fyodor was just a generally rude and nasty person, and all, because I hadn’t quite seen him do anything really, you know, evil, nothing so purely wrong that we’re supposed to hate him.
Now, I’d already known that he’d raped Lizaveta, and that was why Smerdyakov was one of the brothers… but it just hadn’t registered. Of course, the way it was written, it was all supposed to be common supposition, and not proven that he’d done it, and that’s the point. Dostoevsky didn’t label it rape, and never explicitly said it was him, and there were no other obvious cues that I was supposed to be horrified[1].
When my friend pointed this out, I was stunned that I’d been able to blow that part off. Had she not pointed that out, I could have easily glossed over that point, even though all the relevant information was in my head.
That’s where the mainstream media is.
[1] If you’ve never read TBK, don’t worry, I’ve just basically told you everything you need to know to understand this response. And, any spoilers included happen early in the book, so you still have many hundreds of pages to enjoy, spoiler-free.
JP/LHW:
Which makes about as much sense, logically speaking, as “how can you hate Bush when your dryer generates that much static cling?” or “how can you hate Bush when apples are on sale for $1.99 a pound?”
This is why logic and rhetoric need to be re-introduced as required subjects at all levels of our educational system. It doesn’t take much brainpower to recognize a non-sequitur that blindingly obvious, but half the country still doesn’t get it.
JP/LHW:
Of course, this argument also ignores the fact that Bush is the very reason why “our enemies” are out there cutting people’s heads off.
So it’s a complete load of bollocks on more than one level.
No… because Bush Understands The Threat. Bush is Fighting The Terrorists.
You should be on your knees, kissing his feet, because he is a Strong Leader Who Will Protect Us.
And sure, if you disagree with him, you might argue about this or that, but how could you be so *angry*?
Those folks aren’t stupid. (Well… they’re not *all* stupid.) Everything that Bush is doing wrong pales in the face of He Is Fighting The Terrorists.
The sad reality is that some people never learn to think at the level of concrete reality. Nothing they think has any relation to concrete reality whatsoever. So if something goes wrong in that sphere — the sphere of reality — these people don’t know what to do except to make their resolve firmer, in order to somehow bring it into line with what they think the deities require. By pleasing their deity, they hope to change their fortunes, making reality change from bad to good. But as for concrete reality? They have no way of dealing with it, itself. Hence they only ever make it worse when they try to fix it.
I don’t hate Bush. We only hate people who are on an equal or superior level to us. What I have is neverending contempt for the man. Pure disdain and contempt. He is someone who was provided with an incredible range of opportunities, and he has managed to squander every single one of them through his stupidity, pig-headedness, anti-intellectualism, and insistance that his ego is the only thing that matters. He refuses to admit he has failed, is continuing to fail, and will drag down the US into irrelevance and darkness if he continues on this swaggering swathe through the Middle East.
A fool, a knave, a stupid gudgeon who surrounds himself with panderers and lickspittles, a frightened little boy continually running from responsibility, a dimwit who babbles scraps of cliches and thinks he is a “great statesman”, a pusillanimous coward who had Daddy engineer him a bolt-hole during Vietnam and then crept out to beat his breast after the bullets stopped flying.
Hatred? You rate yourself too highly, Mr. Bush.
“The first time I heard the term, I assumed it referred to Bush’s derangement.”
That’s Executive Dysfunction Disorder (as in:he has, and is).
This BDS is the spin, the defense of the terribly insecure, the schoolyard bully. It’s a marvelously succesful bit of reality manipulation — we lefties often actually buy into this, thinking “well gee maybe they have a point….” As someone earlier mentioned, no one on the “right” questions the insane angry rantings of Malkin, Coulter, Limbaugh or Cheney because they fit the righteous masculine, Rambo-esque ideal.
fuck ‘em.
“Of course, this argument also ignores the fact that Bush is the very reason why “our enemiesâ€? are out there cutting people’s heads off.”
“Your enemies” were killing people long before Bush became president. Do you think they’ll stop once he’s out of office?
I’m certainly no fan of Bush, but I think that your post was a perfect example of BDS (it does exist, but to a much lesser extent than Clinton Derangement Syndrome).
I’m quite sure the kid who pointed out that the Emperor was naked was called crazy too.
Anything that is against a social consensus (real or created, as in the RightWing tunes of the Mighty Wurlitzer), that disrupts a fantasy with reality, will be called crazy.
I’ve been called crazy all my life…
Excellent, Raging. You noted, I hope at length, when I pointed out that given a choice between someone with compassion who opposes unnecessary murder and someone who is blase to it, a real psychiatrist will rank the latter as the one more likely to be mentally ill? It’s called sociopathy. Now your sociopathy is a part of a movement sociopathy, and you may not be sociopathic in your daily dealings with people, but it’s worth noting that lack of empathy is not a sign of mental health, but the opposite.
If George W. Bush proposes something, it must be bad. Such is the knee-jerk state of partisan suspiciousness that when the president actually endorses a tax increase — a tax increase that would primarily hit the well-off, no less — Democrats still howl.
How about because GWB has not maded a single major proposition that was generally good for anyone outside of the top 1% and the largest industries?
(small business? surely you jest! Education? With unfunded mandates? etc.)
The real, long-term operational derangement in what passes for mainstream political “thought” in our country, is the cult of the Infallible Middle. The objective derangements of the Bush Administration, so obvious to anyone who isn’t caught up in the cult of US nationalism uber alles, is a logical outcome of our long-manipulated political culture that has for centuries pretended that, due to the perfected balance of our political system which we assume a priori to have already taken all reasonable arguments into consideration in the course of democratic politics, by definition anyone deviating from “the middle” must be delusional.
Actually, when you take into consideration the powerful biasing effect of a stratified class system, it is quite unreasonable to presume that consensuses emerging among the power elites automatically take due consideration of the interests of the non-elite majority. In fact, if you take a look at the history of US politics, it is quite clear that we have in fact been run largely for the benefit of the propertied elite, and it is only occasionally that the interests of the masses have been heard from, let alone acted on. Furthermore, the general public has never actually directly controlled the government to any significant extent; all the generations on which we look back and see wise, far-sighted policy that entails some sacrifice on the part of the elites in favor of a more general view of the national interest, these policies have been implemented by factions of the elites in the face of much more radical proposals with a significant mass base outside the acknowledged political mainstream. The “radicals” are not admitted to power, but diluted versions of their proposals, with many strings attached to guarantee that their implementation will still favor the elites who had no part of their initial formulation or the agitation for them, are enacted instead.
The gross asymmetry then between the perception of sanity when looking left versus looking right has pretty much always been in place at least since the adoption of the Constitution. The Constitution was in fact framed with an eye toward reining in what looked like rampant and destructive left-wing radical populism to its major framers and advocates. Thus, we have had movements in our history which were quite violent on the side of authoritarianism that have been given a pass; when these extremists have retained power for generations, as in the Jim Crow period in the South (not to mention the generations of legal slavery before them) we are taught to simply take pride that we’ve grown beyond such unpleasantness–until the pendulum swings back and people who voice very similiar proposals have to get very far to the right of the consensus indeed before we’d consider outlawing them. But the mere advocacy of leftward radicalism is enough to earn its proponents the historical brand of crazy extremists, and to fully justify all the harshness of the right.
The doctrine of the Infallible Middle makes some pragmatic sense in eras where the extremes are active, such as during the Great Depression. Our current situation though began to be set up after (indeed, during) WWII, when the leftists were held to muting their activism for the sake of winning the war, and afterward driven out of the social mainstream by the McCarthyite witch hunts, which were merely the most flamboyant extreme of a general campaign by the right to undermine the legitimacy of free thought that happened to be critical of the capitalist foundations of our society. With the potential for a real Left undermined, the scope that their more radical alternative gave to liberal moderates to uphold their enlightened style of managing capitalism was also undermined, and the sanctioned “middle” began its long rightward drift.
We are now reaping that particular whirlwind. With no place to legitimately stand and criticize the malfunctions of our society from a populist standpoint, the rightists have an unnatural advantage in offering sweeping deep proposals. These are quite far removed from any objective possibility, nor do they give the majority any concrete advantage, but they do promise big changes, and in the absence of any rational program many people cling desperately to the hope that some movement that is allowed gives them some opportunity, even if it is just a gamble for each individual.
At this point, the US Right has exhausted all the easy placebos. We’ve seen “tax relief” and it is now evident that what most people get back in paper tax cuts is taken away again in reduced vital services, including undercutting the rule of law itself. We’ve seen race baiting, and it is obvious that no amount of beggaring non-whites will give much real opportunity to “white” people. We’ve seen the effort to blame all society’s ills on the poor, the disabled, women, queers, or ethnic minorities who get out of line–these tried and true scapegoating measures may well continue to gratify in the absence of any real hope, but I do think that the majority understands pretty clearly that if these categories aren’t likely to include them already (as they generally do, one way or another) the next increment in scapegoating probably will. And we are falling back on the Cold-War era standby (which has a much older pedigree than that) of the wicked, depraved yet insidiously capable Foreign Devil, the Peril of some color or other other than White. To do this in these days of global capitalism triumphant and rampant requires quite a lot of smoke and mirrors.
The moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the current ruling elite comes from their having already undercut the legitimacy of every possible rival, within the system. We have no place left to go except to either try to leave the system or fight to reclaim it as something belonging first of all to all the people, and only if it is in our general interest, to the propertied elite. There really isn’t anyplace left to run to.
Just redefine the phrase.
Bush Derangement Syndrome:
How the world becomes fucked up when George Bush is in charge.
In all fairness, the vocal liberal community does possess some degree of irrational, knee-jerk suspicion and rejection of anything Bush does, and an equal irrational, knee-jerk acceptance of anything negative he is said to have done. This is natural and human; we’re inclined to deny benefit of the doubt to people with demonstrably unappealing records. But it also leads to embarassing incidents like the false hysteria over the supposed creationist agenda being forced on the Park Service in the Grand Canyon: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-shermer/how-skeptic-magazine-was-_b_38896.html
It’s disingenuous (but unsurprising) for the right to universally portray any exasperation at Bush as evidence of this non-logical hate-thought, and fallacious (but unsurprising) for the media to give it the reflexive okay-whatever nod of tacit approval. But it’s disingenuous of us to pretend that we don’t have a fringe that is a bit loose with the superlatives and Hitler-comparisons, folks will lionize Chavez simply for his opposition of Bush. For that matter, it’s fair to say most of us have something of a predisposition to outrage where he’s concerned. The right’s reaction to Clinton is a good parallel, and however hypocritical it is for those same people to turn around and mock such a reaction in others, it’s not a reaction I particularly want to see in myself.
So the gruntings of “BDS” may be the territorial calls of dumb animals; but it’s folks on our side of the fence who are keeping those critters well-fed.
Aside from ideology and whose ox is being gored, how is BDS different from CDS?
Clinton haters hate him for getting head in the oval office. We hate Bush for sending thousands of Americans to their deaths, killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, curtailing civil liberities, politicizing science, destroying the surplus…
Wordmeister is back…
Just in time for “Best Writer” Koufaxes (LOL), Lance gets back to business: Why we don’t like him Seriously, that is exactly the way we all feel. And Lance knows how to put it in words. Perhaps even words that……
Dan will have his own answer, but come on.
We’re not completely stupid, nor are we insane, and to throw the “perfect example of BDS” thing out is utterly wrong.
Maybe there are people with a pathological hatred of Bush and could be diagnosed as such. Maybe, what, six or seven in the whole population?
No, you are proving Amanda’s point. It is clear to me that what Dan meant was that “the people who are making the decisions are making the kind of decisions that lead to people cutting people’s heads off, and then using it as the excuse to make those decisions.” And the fact is, that right now, and for the entire course of this war, it has been Bush either making those decisions or choosing very clearly to rubber-stamp and be the face of those decisions.
AND, it is a radical departure from the way that sort of decision has been made by the Presidency in the past, for at least a generation.
Dan’s problem is that the DECISIONS are being made the way they are. They suck, they are killing people, they are unsupported by logic, and they are very, very clearly achieiving pretty much the opposite of what they are claimed to be doing.
And, the fact is, those decisions are being made by Bush. It isn’t “Bush Derangement Syndrome” to point that out. Do you honestly believe that if McCain (or Gore or Kerry, for that matter) had been elected, and in some bizarre turn, was making exactly the same decisions, that all the “Bush haters” would be heaving great sighs of relief and saying, “Well, that’s okay, then?”
People do not hate him because he is Bush. They hate what he is doing and shows every sign of not only continuing to do it, but of making it worse.
If your neighbor was throwing rocks in your windows and it upset you, would that be “because you hate your neighbor” or because the bastard keeps throwing rocks through your window? If a guest said to you, as you stood in rage looking at yet another shower of glass, “see, you are angry at him. That just proves you have no right to an opinion of this rock throwing thing,” how would you respond?
The “logical” consequence of BDS is to declare that nobody who vehemently disapproves of what the President does is allowed to criticize him, and that even the people who disagree with him are suspect, so the only opinions that have any possible validity are those of the people who agree with him, because, by definition, they are the only sane ones.
That sound a lot like the Soviet thing above to me.
The Republicans have taken the “cult of personality” farther than ever before, and totally conflated “how you feel about the President” with “whether you agree with what he is doing.” Look at how often they trot out the “our foreign policy must be right, because of what a great, decisive, confident, Christian guy he is” stuff in the polls. But you can’t then turn around and discredit the opinion of the other side for exactly the same reasons you support the opinions of your own side.
. . . gutting the new source review for air pollution, cutting veterans benefits, imposing a gag rule on worldwide family planning efforts, selling our future to China, interferring in local education with unfunded mandates, groping the German head of state, refusing to negotiate - ever, publicly naming a covert CIA agent, . . .
B.D.S. should actually be written out as BUSH DISGUST SYNDROME. I feel visceraly ill every time I see that smug smirk. The man has been an utter failure at every thing he ever tried, most especially ‘leader of the free world.’
The Orwellian doublespeak and similar attributes which have overtaken our government are truly astounding.
For example, when Wolf Blitzer recently asked Cheney if he had any response to Focus on the Family attacks upon his pregnant lesbian daughter, Cheney pretended outrage that anyone should presume to ask the question. Not outrage that anyone had attacked his pregnant daughter for her homosexuality. Not outrage that the attackers were supposedly his allies. Not outrage that the party in which he is supposed to be a leader has a fundamental loathing of his own daughter. But outrage that someone would actually bring it up.
The Bush.* administration has long used terms and means reminiscent of fascism, e.g., continued references to the U.S. as “the homeland,” the A.G.’s recent fudging about whether habeas corpus is actually guaranteed by the Constitution, extreme secrecy and surveillance, and using value-packed terms to thwart application of logic — If you criticize Bush., you don’t Support our Troops; if you’re not With Us, you Support the Terrorists; we need to Fight Them Over There, so we aren’t Fighting Them Here; Democrats don’t want to Win; Mission Accomplished, etc.
Now if you criticize Bush.’s policies, you’re just plain crazy. Can you get more ad hominem than that?
*Ever since reading “On Bullshit,” I have considered the word, Bush, to be an abbreviation of the same because so much of what comes out of the White House is simply Bush. Thus, every time I type Bush. I receive a little frisson of pleasure at its utter aptness.
Brilliant!
Raka, I, too have a knee-jerk reaction against anything Bush does. It comes from watching him turn everything he touches into shit. Since I haven’t seen him actually execute - or even attempt to execute - anything that sounded remotely like a good idea with any competance whatsoever, yes, my initial reaction is ALWAYS distrust and suspicion. Is that insane?
I would rather have a knee-jerk reaction that assumes everything Bush does is stupid than have the utter lack of empathy, that when combined with the sense of entitlement that not only the administration but a good portion of this country has in overabundance, allows them behave so immorally (while, of course, claiming that they are the only ones who could possibly be moral).
Maybe it’s just me…
Geeno,
Exactly — I don’t need to read every horoscope in every paper to know astrology is crap. And I think it’s perfectly safe to say at this point that there’s just not good evidence that W is capable of doing any good….
I think whenever anyone accuses a liberal of BDS, that accuser should just be asked, “So, what do you think of Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid?” I suspect that what will erupt is a baseless personal attack that evinces every aspect that they claim to be extant in BDS and then some. She’s power hungry. She’s been planning this forever. She just married Bill Clinton (and stayed with him, since they especially hate her for that) so that she could run for President. In short, her motives are suspect, and her ends, well — need they even be mentioned? They’re so horrible, every right winger seems to know them without mention — because they just insert her face where “Red Menace” used to be in their fear collage. And yet, what has she really done to deserve any of that hotheaded reaction? She’s been a moderate Democrat and a woman with enough self-delusion to run for the Presidency, just like many of her brethren.
With respect to Bush, he does things practically daily to deserve opposition. Things of substance and lasting, horrible effect. Torture. Warrantless wiretapping. Judicial appointments to change the face of American jurisprudence. Appropriations of power to the Executive branch. Deficit-generating tax cuts and inflation of the debt, weakening our leverage against the horrible human rights and environmental record of China, holder of the vast majority of our debt issuance. Rollbacks of governmental oversight over industries that exploit natural resources and expel into our air and water. Rollbacks on civil rights for women and gay people. Appointments throughout the administrative infrastructure to make women’s reproductive healthcare dependent on the opinions of people whose religion governs their policy choices. Policies ignoring the separation of church and state. These are demonstrable, irrefutable changes, with which no rightist would brook a factual disagreement. But yet they fly very much under the mainstream radar, and if they are acknowledged they are generally seen as small issues, even if they have an enormous impact on the future of our republic. And it’s all separate even from the big guns, the horrible mistakes made in executing the campaign in Afghanistan and choosing to undertake and prosecuting the War in Iraq.
The Bush administration’s approach to any of their deeds has been to deny the existence of the deed until it can no longer be denied, and then to deny its importance until they’ve created a distraction to buttress their argument of unimportance. The CIA sends terror suspects to secret prisons in Eastern Europe to be tortured? Nah, doesn’t happen. Oh, there are photos? Well, maybe it happened, but look — the President wants to spend $10 billion to go to Mars! And the threat level has been raised to orange! Surely, that secret prisons thing isn’t that big of a deal anymore, right? And we’re at war, remember? With the terrorists? Yeah, they’re out to get us, and we know there’s a threat, because we raised the level to orange! …by the time a few more news cycles go by, the secret prisons story is gone, replaced by some other part of this parade of horribles. It is not insanity to recognize a consistently-played strategy that is detrimental to the country. However, calling people insane for their powers of observation is another in a long list of efforts on behalf of the right that could be characterized as self-serving, fascist and Orwellian without a scintilla of overstatement.
We’re no more insane for despising the actions we observe from the Bush administration than Max Cleland was the moral equivalent of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein for wanting to vote for a version of the act creating the Department of Homeland Security that included civil service union protections.
I really think there’s more to it than Bush’s record, which I agree has been miserable. Much of the BDS existed BEFORE his record existed, or before much of it existed. Some people inspire this kind of visceral reaction and some don’t.
Bush 1 didn’t
His son does.
Carter didn’t (even though his record was, in many ways, as bad as Bush 2’s).
Reagan did.
Clinton did, even though his record is not nearly as bad as Carter’s.
Ford didn’t, except when he pardoned Nixon, and that was substance based, and quickly faded.
Nixon - Ha - the King of viseral reaction.
JFK did, and now he could pretty much run as a Republican.
As ol’ Bob Somerby has tirelessly documented over at the Daily Howler, most MSM pundits have spent the last 15 years demonstrating conclusively that they are unable to understand politics as anything other than a personal popularity contest.
So naturally they ascribe any feelings voters might have about a politician’s policies and competence to irrational adoration or hatred, as the case may be, because they are literally incapable of understanding any other motivation.
Love it.
I do follow this neuro-science stuff but still learned from this post that —
Sociopathy..at the extreme is in fact total failure to develop (or have ) empathy.
Hadn’t thought of the two as opposite poles but ’tis true.
All getting very well lined out with fMRIs, PET scans, transcranial magnetic wipes etc
Such actual-physical! centres present in lots of the ‘higher ‘ mammals.
Certain really deprived individuals simply don’t have this wiring…AND are capable of terrible deeds. Sociopaths [I recall J’Lo’s ‘The Cell’].
They cannot! see or feel others
Or that the girls (chimp or human)… tend to have a better developed empathy than guys…OR decent guys impelled to ‘manliness’ repress it….probably.
To one degree or another …empaths.
They generally do see and feel others.
But the apologists; “….. the mental health status of people who claim that empathy is a weakness…” are neither. They are simply bad people excusing bad behavior…Bush’s.
And the Whole World! despises Bush…so I am reminded of the proud mother remarking at a Fourth of July Parade….
“Look!…everybody’s out of step except my Johnny.”
And she and the wankers you cite live in exactly that same Jon Stewart ‘Opposite World’. So fuc*k ‘em.
Sorry…long….took up space.
Raging moderate:
Show me the numbers. Take your time. I’ll wait.
Granted. But this is the equivalent of one person saying “that guy’s a murderous drug dealer who spends all his time beating up women and kicking puppies and picking his nose,” and another person saying, “Aha! He doesn’t pick his nose! Therefore you’re crazy!”
Chuckle. On another blog, I mentioned my distaste of how another commentator is part of the group of folks trying to set this country to being at war with itself.
The response was that this nation protects the right of people to “savage” it, “like I just did”.
I didn’t say anything about the country; I spoke of particular (named and unnamed) *people*.
I swear, Colbert couldn’t have come up with a better response.
There are so many times where, if you could just hold up a Mirror of Truth to these folks, they’d collapse in a gibbering heap.
This reminds me of a coversation I had with my Bush-supporting uncle a few months back. He’s actually a somewhat reasonable person*, and after a conversing for over an hour, I got him to admit that he thought the Iraq war was bullshit. However, he quickly followed up by saying that what he really couldn’t stand was that he felt that the way liberals talked about Iraq made him think that they were actively “rooting for the US to lose the war.” What’s so ridiculous about all this is that whether or not I “want the US to win the war” is completely irrelevant (even though it’s also bullshit); the point is that there is no way we can “win the war.” I feel the same way about Bush, honestly even if all liberals do have a knee-jerk hate of Bush (which I don’t think they do, at the very least it’s a well-reasoned hate), it doesn’t change the actual facts of inept presidency.
*Mind you, his semi-reasonableness makes his stance as a replublican even more ridiculous, it’s just that I can actually complete a full sentence in a political debate with him before he shuts down and starts spewing party line, which is more than I can say for most conservatives I know.
If George W. Bush proposes something, it must be bad.
Based on experience, that strikes me as a reasonable assumption.
I agree with those above who propose to redefine BDS.
My definition: The inability to rationally evaluate Bush’s proposals on their merits, since Bush is Righteousness Personified.
Cool trick: In any he-said-she-said situation, if the man is one who’s lying, he won’t usually bother to refute the woman with facts or logic (especially if his case is weak). He’ll attack her personally, usually impugning her sanity (or less often, her chastity). And it works appallingly well when his audience is mostly other men and the sort of women who are afraid someone might call them a feminist. (Remember Anita Hill?) So when you hear a man talking about how some woman is crazy, unless she’s literally depending on meds to keep it together, you can reasonably assume that he’s lying through his teeth. (This is far more reliable than that meme about using the passive voice.)
Anyway, this BDS crapola is sort of the same mechanism.
I’ve never felt compelled to apologize for loathing Bush, especially to a bunch of evangelical scat-munchers who writhe and howl like extras in “The Crucible” at the mention of Bill Clinton. Besides, as Edward Sorel once said, “Until I think of someone I’d like to kill, I can’t get out of bed in the morning.” George W. is my alarm clock.
“Show me the numbers. Take your time. I’ll wait.”
Just off the top of my head I can think of:
1993 - World Trade Center Bombing - 3 dead.
1998 - US Embassy bombings - over 200 dead.
2000 - Bombing of the USS Cole - 17 dead.
Again, I’m no fan of Bush, but to claim that he is “the very reason” that terrorists attack Americans is silly (he’s one of many reasons). It’s no different than those on the right who blame Carter for the terrorism that is occurring today.
“Now your sociopathy is a part of a movement sociopathy, and you may not be sociopathic in your daily dealings with people, but it’s worth noting that lack of empathy is not a sign of mental health, but the opposite”
I’m a sociopath because I don’t believe that Bush is “the very reason” that terrorists kill people?
“The right’s reaction to Clinton is a good parallel, and however hypocritical it is for those same people to turn around and mock such a reaction in others, it’s not a reaction I particularly want to see in myself.
So the gruntings of “BDSâ€? may be the territorial calls of dumb animals; but it’s folks on our side of the fence who are keeping those critters well-fed.”
Hear, hear. Hypocrisy should always be condemned, regardless of the political leanings of the hypocrite.
RM, for some reason your list seems devoid of beheadings carried out in Iraq. You seem to have at some point mixed calling Bush on his responsibility for putting Americans in harms way in Iraq with blaming him for pre-existing terrorist groups.
And I believe your sociopathy comes from being unable to fathom the emotions of those who have been hurt by Bush’s actions those empathic enough that they can feel said emotions.
Of course it is. So is condemning me for saying something that I didn’t actually say.
Well, that’s not “silly” so much as “sociopathic.” QED.
… speaking of the “but they behead people!” argument, I’ve never understood why that is supposed to be worse than our military kicking a taxicab driver to death because they thought it was funny to hear him cry out to Allah in his pain. I guess for some people, it isn’t the cruelty of the action, but the belief that Americans are human and others just don’t matter. And that sort of thinking disgusts me as much as Bush does.
Let’s face it. Some people are just hateful.
I don’t hate Bush. I could never hate someone I don’t personally know. But I dislike almost everything he’s done in office, and think he’s a terrible President, and tell people that all the time on my blog. Somehow I doubt the right-wingers would spare me from accusations of BDS based merely on my lack of hate however.
tzs, I just wanted to say that your response reminded me of some of the best literary examples of righteous indignation. Wonderful stuff.
As for “Bush Derangement Syndrome”, I think the derangement in question is the right wing insistence that we judge each and every action of Bush’s in complete isolation, ignoring entirely the history of his past actions and their consequences, and indeed ignoring the passage of time altogether.
How else could we end up with right wingers insisting, as at least one has in comments on this blog, that there is some hypocrisy in Democratic opposition to the “surge” proposal? “Well, you’ve been saying all along that we should have used more troops, and now that Bush is going to, you don’t want ‘em!” I hear some of them say, in all seriousness, apparently unaware of the fact that, when the Democrats originally insisted that Bush should use more troops, this was three years ago, and circumstances were vastly different. Moreover, circumstances have changed so much that, what would have worked (maybe) three years ago, is now utterly futile. But to the right wingers who espouse these arguments, such a simple thing as the passage of time seems not to have registered.
The absolute childishness of this mindset can’t be overstated. I’m not using the term “childish” solely to mean selfish and shortsighted, but in a literal way: as anyone who has studied child development knows, young children, from toddler age sometimes up to kindergarten, often have difficulties understanding the passage of time, cause and effect, and that circumstances change based on what has happened before. Most children grow to understand these fundamentals of existence by the time they get into school, but apparently some do not.
That I associate this form of stunted development with the right wing is no accident. I happen to believe that a great many of the incomprehensible actions of the right are explicable once we understand them as a form of immaturity. Rampant sexism and homophobia call to mind the early adolescent “girls are grody!” mindset, and the profound discomfort with one’s own sexuality; blind nationalism and devotion to symbols and people regardless of their failings sounds an awful lot like “you were talkin’ about my momma!”; and the desire to beat up anyone who they disagree with sure sounds like “my daddy can beat up your daddy!” to me.