NO, JONAH

In a post today, Jonah Goldberg says:

For a great many of us — journalists, bloggers, citizens etc — this story has absolutely nothing to do with Bush. This is my own personal sense of it, but I don’t think very many people who are wading into the Rather story care about what Bush did thirty years ago. I’m sure quite a few of them even dislike Bush a great deal or they aren’t supporting him. Andrew Sullivan (who’s got a good outraged post today) despises Bush. Howard Kurtz is no partisan. The good folks at ABC News are never at the VRWC bingo night Etc, etc.

I think he’s right in his basic point. But I do want to quibble: I do not despise Bush; and I think it’s highly unhelpful to conflate criticism of this president with hatred. I noticed this last night watching Shep Smith on Fox News introduce a segment on Kerry’s criticism of the president as “Bush-bashing.” Yes, there is Bush-bashing. Michael Moore, for example. But there’s also Bush-criticism. I have never met the president, although I know a few people close to him. But he seems like a nice enough guy to me. I’m angry at the way in which he has clearly botched a war I believe in and want to succeed. I’m mad that he has ended fiscal conservatism for a generation, attacked gay civil rights and empowered the religious right. But that doesn’t mean I despise him. I’ve written plenty of fawning things about him in the past – as well as sharp criticism from as long ago as the spring of 2000. I just think he has failed in the most fundamental task set before him: to win the war in Iraq – the primary front in the war on terror. I think he failed to prepare sufficiently, has been too slow to correct error, and has a dangerously out-of-touch attitide to the growing crisis. My anger is deeper because I once believed and hoped. But it is not hatred.