Remember when you couldn't even criticize w without getting called a traitor?

[Philosoraptor]

I do. What a difference a war makes. They said he out teflonned teflon ron reagan, bullets bounced off him, Winston Churchill returned to praise him with Abe Lincoln right behind him. If you even dared to criticize bush, you were instantly called a traitor, unpatriotic, accused of helping the terrorists win, and stoned.

Now it's perfectly okay to mock the prince of death and failure again without fear of waterboarding or electrocution of the private parts. Do you remember those days when bush was the greatest thing since sliced white bread?

And look at the big hero now. I never ever thought I'd live long enough to see the day when Americans snapped out of their nine eleven induced hypnosis and took a good hard look at this president and what he's done to us all.

I'm glad I lived to see it, that's all.

[saigon68]

1. "BRING EM ON" shouted the AWOL CHIMPANZEE

[PDittie]

2. Remember when Ted Koppel tried to read the names

of the fallen on the air (and Sinclair stations refused to broadcast it)?

We've come a long way from then (granted, we never should have gotten so far down the wrong path).

[Cocoa]

3. FAIR did a nice piece on the "Bush Hatred" propaganda

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2895

Extra! May/June 2006

Bush-Hating Nation
Anatomy of an epithet

By Steve Rendall

Appearing on MSNBC’s Situation with Tucker Carlson (2/14/06), conservative talkshow host and film critic Michael Medved linked an Oscar nomination he disapproved of to a mental illness he called “Bush hatred”:

(quoting)
This Bush hatred is a disease, and it’s completely obsessive. And it’s reached the extent that if you take a look at movies that are nominated for the Oscar this year, one of the frontrunners, in fact the frontrunner for best foreign language film, is a film made in the Palestinian Authority.
(end quoting)

“Bush-hater” has been a favorite epithet of Republican partisans since 2003. A Nexis search shows the term appearing 45 times in 2001 and 38 times in 2002, before burgeoning to 493 mentions in 2003, mostly near the end of the year as discussion of the 2004 presidential campaign began in earnest. The term went stratospheric during the election year, with 1,340 mentions, before settling down to 621 in 2005.

As Medved’s peculiar analysis demonstrates, the Bush-hater tag—especially when coupled with words like “disease” and “obsessive”—is meant to pathologize and marginalize opponents. After all, to be called a “hater” in itself suggests irrationality, and commentators like Medved leave little doubt that they see their opponents as actually imbalanced. Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer (9/26/03) described Ted Kennedy’s blaming the Iraq War on White House “fraud” as evidence of “blinding Bush hatred” and “partisanship on its way to pathology”; MSNBC host Tucker Carlson (10/20/03) warned of the “crazed monomania” resulting from “Bush hatred.”

The trope calls to mind Newt Gingrich’s GOPAC memo, the mid-’90s document put out by the then–House speaker’s political action committee that cynically advised GOP colleagues to use words such as “sick,” “destructive” and “traitor” to denigrate their political opponents. If you can establish that your opponents are irrational or deranged “Bush-haters,” according to this strategy, then there is no need to marshal serious rebuttals to their criticisms.

more...

[Philosoraptor]

4. Gosh, where do liberals get all that hatred from?

One of my favorite repub queries.

[pretzel4gore]

5. who's medved conning?

he franticly denounces the hatred of his and the rest of the pigmedia's boytoy, but maybe he and they are the goddam perverts here

[jazzjunkysue]

6. Yeah but it didn't stop me, and those haters have now had to eat crow.

I'm being nice to them, anyway...But my Bring Them Home Bumper Sticker went on the day Kerry conceeded, and it's still there. Mine's not magnetic, and it's obvious. It feels good, now.

[boobooday]

7. Bully for us

We never shut up. And we were right.

It's too bad it took so long, but I'm glad the Bush = sacred days are OVER.

[no_hypocrisy]

8. Yeah, until about four weeks ago. n/t

[emanymton]

9. I _AM_ A Traitor To Lies And Failures! And I Do Not Care ...

who knows it.

For the record, I am not anti-Bush. I am for USA.

When shrub moves to his next undisclosed location after leaving office, I will not think about him. I know the people will have soooo much work to do to fix his failures. It is not hatred of the man that makes me angry, it is his failures I hate.

Bush Lied. People Died. Media Cheered.
.
.
.
§

[GenDem]

10. It really is a new dawn.

The people have finally woken from a long slumber. I sometimes do a double take when CNN or MSNBC is playing in the back ground of my life and I happen to catch a talking head criticizing the failed Bush policies. I have to rub my eyes and pound on the side of my head, because I didn’t think this day would ever come.

I’m glad it has, but I blame the third estate for waiting until we’ve lost almost 3000 to finally report. They have played a supporting roll and are guilty of enabling * and hiding the truth from the citizens. The people may have come around much sooner if we had a press that wasn’t bowing down to the boy king.