ARE YOU A Bush hater, so blinded by "primal" loathing for the president that you automatically dismiss everything he says or does?
It's one of the far right's favorite weapons: If anyone criticizes the administration, brand them a Bush hater. The implication is that no sane or fair-minded person could be appalled by this administration's policies. Any criticism of Bush must be caused by what columnist Charles Krauthammer described as "contempt and disdain giving way to a hatred that is near pathological." My column last week, for instance, generated a response from one right-wing blogger that not only mischaracterized what I said but referred to me as "Bush hating," "blinded" by "virulent" anger, full of "unreconstructed rage" and typical of the "Bush-hatred of the American left."
The right's got it wrong.
I don't love George Bush, it's true. No matter how many times I urge myself to hate the sin but love the sinner, I just can't get there. But I don't hate Bush, either. I hope that he'll never personally experience any of the "alternative methods" of interrogation he's so willing to use on U.S. detainees; I hope he'll never lose a child to war; I hope he'll never experience the soul-sapping poverty to which his administration has abandoned so many Americans.
No, I don't hate George Bush.
But I sure hate what he's done to my country.
I hate the fact that Bush and the radicals in his administration play politics with patriotism, casting critics of misguided legislation on military commissions and wiretapping as "soft" on terrorism and telling us, as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld recently did, that "moral or intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong can weaken the ability of free societies to persevere."
In Bush's America, questioning makes us weak. In my America, we value dissent and debate because we know this is what makes us strong and free.
I hate the fact that after promising to unite us, this president has done his best to divide us. In Bush's America, there are real Americans and then there are the blue states ... and the Democrats. Sometimes, as Les Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, recently put it, the White House actually seems "as interested in defeating Democrats as in defeating terrorists." In my America, we're all citizens, from Texas and South Carolina and Ohio to New York and California. And every single one of us matters.
