Loving Bush or Stigmatizing Dissent?

"Democrats really hate Bush!" I've been hearing a lot of stuff along those lines lately from Republicans. So I've been following up on the idea a little bit.

The first one I heard advancing the notion that Democrats were somehow going overboard because of an emotional hatred of Bush was from conservative columnist David Brooks, who wrote a piece on the topic for the Weekly Standard. He also mentioned it in his regular gig opposite Mark Shields on the PBS Newshour.

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal's Weblog has also taken up the theme, for instance in this piece whose title in their archives claims, "Two years later, some Americans hate the president more than the terrorists." He says that after the 2002 elections, "the Democrats lost control of themselves."

A Congressman from Arizona picks it up for the National Review. He says, "Bush hating addles the mind and rots the senses."
Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer does a version for Time, calling it "the unhinging of the Democratic Party."

And, for the lowbrow version, who better than our friend Chuckie (CHARLIE DANIELS)?

Some journalists like to use the word "meme" for something like this, an idea that is picked up and gets repeated over and over, not necessarily because there's anything to it.

It's actually an example of conservatives attempting to stigmatize dissent.

Do some Democrats hate George W. Bush? Of course. Politics is politics. But the articles to which I referred in Part 1 argue that Democrats are generally seized with an irrational hatred for Bush comparable to the Republican obsession with Bill Clinton, from Vince Foster conspiracy theories to Whitewater to impeachment over a rather sad love affair.

So is there anything to the idea? Actually, not much. The evidence cited in the articles I mentioned above are mostly examples of Democrats disagreeing with Bush, or instances of what are, at worst, examples of partisan rhetorical hyperbole. For example, both Brooks and Krauthammer cite an article by Harold Meyerson which ends by comparing Bush to Jefferson Davis.

Now, even if one thinks the comparison is excessive, is it evidence of hate-mongering? Only if you think having someone's name associated with Jefferson Davis is an extremely scandalous thing. Brooks and Krauthammer should clue in some of their Republican friends like John Ashcroft and Trent Lott, who are known for kissing up the the "neo-Confederate" movement.

So what's going on? It's actually a continuation of a strategy articulated by Newt Gingrich during the height of his "Republican Revolution" a decade ago. As Joe Conason reports in his book Big Lies, Gingrich advised Republican candidates that when they talked about Democrats, they should "emphasize terms like decay, sick, liberal, permissive attitude, antifamily and bizarre." The Democrats-hate-Bush theme provides an opportunity for more of that.

Krauthammer's piece is a good example. Accepting it as a given that Democrats are seized with irrational hatred for Good President Bush, he describes their alleged emotions with terms like "unhinging of the Democratic Party ... contempt ... disdain ... hatred ... near pathological ... depth of feeling ... fury and bitterness ... explosive ... primal anti-Bush feeling ... anger ... seething ... loathing ... desperately ... seized with a fever." Gosh, sounds bad.

In other words, the Democrats should muzzle their criticisms andbe nicey-nice. While the Michael Savages and Ann Coulters of the world continue to howl about the alleged depravity of the Democrats.