The number of things that Bush has been blamed for in this world since 9/11 (even acts of God like Tsunamis, hurricanes and other natural disasters) is the stuff of major comedy. You name the horrible event, and he is identified as the etiologic agent.
He is blamed when he does something (anything) and he is blamed when he does nothing. He is blamed for things that ocurred even before he was President, as well as everything that has happened since. He is blamed for things he says; and for things he doesn't say.
What makes Bush Hatred completely insane however, is the almost delusional degree of unremitting certitude of Bush's evil; while simultaneously believing that the TRUE perpetrators of evil in the world are somehow good and decent human beings with the world's intersts at heart.
I am not personally of the opinion that the portion of the country currently dissatisfied with the President is suffering from a mass derangment. I think that the drivers of the debate on the left are intellectually dishonest and driven by prejudices which they refuse to acknowledge Yes, I'm stooping to say that people are "unaware of their prejudice" a favorite tactic of the left for years. Yet I feel it justified, and will so explain.
President Bush is not merely a man with policies with which those on the Left disagree. He is not merely a man whom they feel will, long run, make the country less safe. Leftists will, when pressed, claim that this is all that animates them, but the plain fact is that Bush was behind in their eyes not since the war, not since 9/11, not even since the beginning of his Presidency after the controversial 2000 election. Bush has been the whipping boy of a good portion of the press and especially the commentariat of the Left since he beat McCain in the 2000 primaries.
It wasn't just that McCain was and is a media darling, and that Bush a famously untelegenetic son of another President whom the press enjoyed blaming for everything in 1992. It was the manner of Bush's victory, his unambiguous appeal to the evangelical Right, the Bob Jones U. rally-the-base routine. A brash, dynamic Republican who "talked straight" and seemed to Care Deeply about Serious Issues (campaign finance "reform"), losing to a Jesus freak given to dopey malaprops oozing out of nasal Texan drawl? The disappointment in the news reports of McCain's defeats was visceral, and to date, they still haven't recovered.
This is, to my mind, the real root of what's become known as BDS. It isn't so much an affinity with the goals of jihadism as an emotional disaffinity with the man who is their most public enemy. There are many among our political and media elite, and among those on the coasts who are in their zone of influence, who simply cannot believe that a born-again Christian from Texas can ever be right about anything, ever. Decades (centuries?) of internalized bigotry of urbanites against provincials, of secular humanists against unsophisticated believers, does not vanish overnight, not even in the face of an act of war, not when the same group has drank deep of the waters of Wilsonian collective security and refuses to believe that their enemy is their enemy because he wants to be so.
In short, George W. Bush has been despised since long before the Iraq War, because he is the living embodiment of Those People, and the habit of the American media and political establishment has for some time been to mock Those People as cruel, stupid, and dangerous. His words are treated with contempt, the values he speaks for dismissed as fronts, the common enemy he wants to destroy improperly understood. They cannot take him seriously. Their self-conciet and worldview will not permit it.
We have seen this sort of thing several times before. The Right had a perhaps-milder case of it in the 90's, with the Clintons, especially Hillary, whose background and resume, from her priveleged upbringing to her work on the Watergate investigation and beyond, read like an author's creation of the stereotypical Democratic woman pol. The Left did it again with Reagan, and (oddly enough) LBJ. The Right was equally furious towards Roosevelt, though perhaps for slightly different reasons (and in any case, Roosevelt was always a much more skilled propagandist than anyone in the mid-20th century GOP could ever hope of being).
None of which is to say that there are not reasonable arguments to be made against the Administration's policies. I myself am very unimpressed with just about all of Bush's domestic work since the tax cuts. But reasonable skepticism about the wisdom of proposed solutions, without serious attempt to offer alternatives, leads one to wonder what your real interests are.
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