Because this is the Dope, this may be like throwing a match on gasoline but …
I was flipping around the radio and heard Sean Hannity moderating between a Pub and a Dem. The Dem was perfectly vitriolic against a Pub Representative (can’t remember the name) that insulted Obama. OK that’s par for the course but she absolutely denied that the Dems do the same thing. Even after Hannity played some clips (so it wasn’t an obvious setup :rolleyes: ) of the Dem leadership hurling professional and personal insults about Bush Jr. durin his term she conceded that there may be a few Democrats (but not in the leadership roles) that were rude to Bush.
My personal experience from a very skewed sample (I’m a teacher so my collegues are at least 90% Dem and a high percentage of that were very left wing), I saw tons of personal insults hurled against Bush. You want to criticise his handling of Iraq from bad intelligence to no exit-plan? Fine. But I had to sit through a meeting where a teacher ranted about how this pictureproved how stupid he was, a fact “proved” by this emailI must have received at least a dozen times. I even saw a classroom teacher go into a diatribe against Bush while teaching her 6th graders but to be fair, around the same time one of my professors went into a diatribe against Bush while teaching class.
So here’s the debate topics.
Who was more personally insulting i.e. not criticizing policy or actions but rather ad hominum attack, the Dems when Bush was in office or the Pubs during Obama’s term?
Since it is clear that both sides have hurled personal insults to the other side of the aisle’s President (witness any day in Great Debates here at the Dope as an example), who is more in denial about their side’s behavior, the Dems or the Pubs?
The Dems insulted Bush, on a professional and personal level, and anyone who says they didn’t is a liar. However, there is simply no comparison between what Bush was subjected to and the volume and vituperativity of personal attacks against Obama, an uncomfortably high percentage of which are openly racist in nature, a number of those made by public officials and politicians.
I think it depends on who’s gore was oxed. If you hated Bush, then any personal insults (such as references to his facial expressions and mannerisms and pictures of him that make him look like, references, a monkey) were probably fair game and justified. If you hate Obama, then personal attacks against him (such as references to his large ears and pictures of him that make him look like, say, a monkey) are probably fair game and justified. I think the TYPES of attacks are different, but that the reasons for them are similar, and the scope seems similar to me. MMV however depending on where those horns happen to hit.
I think, though this is an impression that could be disproven, that Democrats contemned and despised Bush (and insulted him). Republicans fear and hate Obama (and insult him).
Insults of Bush seemed to be more about what he did or said. Insults of Obama seem to be more about who he is.
But there were absolutely insults, some of them hateful, directed against Bush.
I don’t think either President suffers more vitoral then the other (as the OP notes, perceptions of this probably depend on ones social group, if you hang out with liberals, you probably hear a lot more attacks on Bush then you do on Obama)
I think attacks on Obama take on kind of a weird and particularly nasty type of character though, that attacks on Bush didn’t. Attacks on Obama not only claim he has some negative personal qualities (corrupt or stupid or whatever) but that he’s part of some weird hidden Communist (or Muslim, or African-American, or whatever) conspiracy to destroy America from within.
As well as the racism, there’s also the record breaking number of death threats against Obama. The Right was also fond of death threats against Clinton; I recall a “Where’s Lee Harvey Oswald When We Need Him?” bumper sticker from the Clinton era. And some Congressman who commented that Clinton would be killed if he came to the Congressman’s home state.
Basically; the Republicans are full of racists and thugs and religious fanatics; the Democrats have far fewer such people.
I don’t think such claims were unheard of under Bush. He was part of a neo-con conspiracy to do… something. He authorized 9/11. He allowed 9/11. He will cancel elections. He wasn’t even elected!* He shouldn’t be in office!
But you didn’t see people like John Kerry running as a candidate for president saying these things. Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, did say something about how Obama has “Kenyan thinking” or something similar. Obviously, Trump rode the birther horse for a while, though I don’t think he probably should be considered a real candidate, but Rick Perry made some noises along that line, too. (Maybe there were Democratic candidates in 2004 using similar rhetoric. I honestly don’t remember and am willing to be corrected.)
*Granted that at least the “he wasn’t elected” argument against Bush is a lot stronger than the weird theories against Obama.
The Neo-Con vilification stuff got a little silly at times, but the neo-conservatives were a real group, they really held strong influence in the Bush Whitehouse and they wrote up their goals in published magazines, and the Bush administration was pretty open about trying to pursue those goals. There wasn’t a “secret conspiracy” there. If anything, they actively publicized their role and their aims.
No doubt there were some conspiracy theorizing surrounding Bush. But it was never really part of the liberal critique of Bush in the way that such theories have become part of conservative talking points against Obama.
As a left-leaning independent, I was constantly depressed with the way people talked about Bush and mocked him, attacked him personally, etc. I even remember them attacking the first lady for being frigid, robotic, or something along those lines. It disgusted me.
I don’t think I can honestly and objectively measure vitriol and outspoken hatred, but the main difference is probably that Obama has Fox News at his throat constantly, while Bush didn’t really have a mainstream media channel constantly attacking him. Conservatives claim that CNN and MSNBC were unfair to him, along with the networks, but if they were liberally biased against Bush, it was no where near the level of how Fox treats Obama. So I think that may be one of the reasons why Obama seems to get a worse shake than Bush did.
But then you have the rise of the tea party, and I honestly wonder if that all would have happened if Hillary had been elected instead.
I think drewtwo99 nails it with the mention of Fox news. It is an entire network dedicate to shitting on Obama and Bush had nothing that even came close. In fact, after 9/11, the press seemed to go pretty easy on him.
Yes there are some that have a racist anti-Obama agenda, but I’m sure that we would be seeing this Birther BS if Obama were white with a French father and rumors that he was born in Nice, Grover Cleveland ring a bell? It was all about how we could get the opponant to lose and is someways similar to what both sides did during Bush v Gore viz. what can I do to beat my opponant regardless of what the facts are.
I also disagree that the racism is overt. I hear a lot about the race card but don’t see many Pubs play it. I think the "overt"ness in you statement is what I had happen to me during the primaries. I talked about how I didn’t think Obama was experienced enough for the modern-day presidency and on at least 3 different occassions I was accused of being a racist and one that stands out had a Dem say to me that me saying he was “inexperienced” was another word for “being a nigger” :eek:
Refresh my memory please. Which “forged documents” are we discussing here?
If you’re talking about GWB’s National Guard service record, I believe it was later proven to be valid.
SS
I think that’s exactly what he’s talking about…and I don’t recall Rather being vindicated. If you have a cite I’d appreciate it, since I haven’t heard anything like that, and thought Rather was STILL under a black cloud over the event.
This is one of those “your side does it too, all sides are equally guilty!” bullshit things you see a lot in politics.
Compare Bush in '04 through '08 with Obama in '07 and '08. Bush was getting criticisms for doing shit like presiding over the greatest financial collapse in 80 years and starting a pointless war that killed hundreds of thousands of people and made refugees of millions.
Obama was getting criticisms before anyone knew who he was. And it wasn’t based on things he’d actually said or done, it was based on complete bullshit. He’s a kenyan sleeper cell terrorist socialist. He hates America. etc.
So on one case, you have criticisms for shit someone has actually done, after they’ve known enough about him to make the judgement. In the second case, you have vitriolic hatred against a guy that people don’t even know anything about on issues that are completely made up.
But yeah, all sides are equal so neither is worse than the other.
Yeah, because people didn’t start criticizing Bush until '04. :rolleyes:
9/11 bought Bush some good will, but he came into office with his “Shrub” character established. Bush got criticized for his Quayle like verbal prowess. Obama didn’t get any reprieve, not even when Bin Laden was killed on his watch. Coming in to office, Obama was mostly known for his oratory, which was turned on his head with the TelePrompTer nonsense.
There was a lot of character stuff directed at Bush - the Bohemian Grove stuff and the like. And, of course, the chimp comparisons. But I don’t think the vitriol was there from the get-go. BushII was viewed as dumb but harmless until Iraq, I think, and then the Florida election debacle, and only really vilified thereafter. Whereas Obama has been attacked with completely racist shit since his candidacy.
High-profile Republican leaders question Obama’s birth in Hawaii, refer to him as “socialist” etc. To say “Democrats do the same” because some blogger posted a picture of a monkey is wrong.
The press didn’t just “go pretty easy” on Bush. They bought his lies, hook, line and sinker. The country would not have been so eager for the foolish adventure in Iraq if the “liberal” media had actually been “liberal” and doing its job.
The (allegedly) forged documents were about true facts that impugned GWB. These facts (about his shirking as an airman) were not in real dispute but the propaganda machine managed to make the story about Dan Rather, with GWB’s shirking forgotten. This is their habitual trick: Clinton’s initiatives were turned into the Lewinsky story; climate change was changed into the (absurd) allegation that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet. (It seems likely to me that the forgery was a Rove plot from the beginning. He has a history of such things.)
And I would ask: If it happens to be true that Rove, Cheney, and Bush are as incompetent and hypocritical as some say, is telling the true story just hurling partisan insults?