Andrew Sullivan posts the following from a reader.
I have a hard time listening to Republicans say that the Democrats cannot transcend their anger. They use stupid catch phrases like “Bush Derangement Syndrome” to discredit people (not just Democrats, according to most pundits, you too suffer from BDS, Andrew). There is a special amount of irony in the party that spent over 200 congressional hours investigating Clinton’s Christmas card list and less than 10 investigating how we got into the Iraq war accusing the opposition of being driven by blind hatred.
I now live in a country where the president and vice president have the power to detain an American citizen off of the street, send him to a secret prison, torture him, and detain him indefinitely without him ever hearing the charges against them. We have been lied into a war that was executed with criminal incompetence, our economy has been devastated because of lax oversight of banks giving out bad loans, we have lost a major city and the list goes on and on.
My anger isn’t driven by irrational hatred. In 2000, I considered myself a Republican. But now that party stands as an affront to everything that America stands for. I have every right to be angry.
Emphasis added.
Now, I am not saying that anger at Bush isn’t justified. However, I think this letter is a good microcosm of why we shouldn’t toss the keys over to people who are acting out of anger. Almost every rant labelled “I hate X; here’s why,” would be better titled, “I hate X, which is why I blame X for the following.”
First, “our economy has been devastated because of lax oversight of banks giving out bad loans.” Now, even if you accept the premise that the subprime crisis has “devastated” the economy, which I don’t, it seems to me that the banks who made the loans and the lenders who took them out would have to get a large helping of blame for it before we moved on to Bush and the Republicans’ plates.
As for Katrina, I too was quite angry at the federal response. But that was the humanitarian crisis in the immediate afermath. When a Category 5 hurricane hits a large city that is below sea level, it’s going to cause a lot of damage, regardless of who is president. Maybe there should have been better levees in place, but again I think the line of blame for that extends for some time before you get to Republicans and the president.
Again, I’m not saying that people don’t have a right to be angry at how Bush won and has conducted his presidency. But I also think critics are right that following the counsel of those consumed by anger isn’t wise, either. And when someone makes such off-target accusations in the course of making a case that Bush hatred is rational, well, let’s just say I’m unconvinced.
