If we fully explore this here, it will hijack this topic into another topic of Christianity vs Islam, and I think I've already taken this page further off-topic than I wanted to (sorry about that, G-man !)
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On topic, I think we've established a hatred for Bush among his liberal/Democrat critics.
And as it relates to the topic, as well as many other RKMB discussions here, I would be far more open to concede Bush's flaws, if not for the white-hot hatred (and resultant distortion of the facts) of the majority of criticism I see of Bush.
Has Bush made mistakes? Absolutely. And I hope everyone here can see that despite my sensibilities leaning toward the Bush perspective, I've voiced considerable criticism of his policies...
( a quick review:
Bush should be more public with disclosure of information, the perceived secretiveness breeds distrust of Bush, whether or not he is guilty of anything;
in hindsight, he should have had a larger occupation force to invade Iraq, to prevent forseeable looting,
Bush should be expanding U.S. military recruitment/enlistment by 400,000 or more, to insure we have the reserves to meet any situation in Iraq, Iran, North Korea or elsewhere.
And although I'm less convinced now there is a military solution possible in Korea, I think Korea should have been invaded first instead of Iraq. Iraq could have waited a year or so, but Korea was clearly more immediate. In the six months of buildup and invasion of Iraq, Korea was known to be building nuclear weapons, and Bush allowed it to happen. (Although negotiations in Korea, though currently fruitless, now include China, Japan, Russia and South Korea, and are no longer just bilateral talks between the U.S. and North Korea. Which now puts more pressure on North Korea, particularly from China, to de-nuclearize.)
** I hasten to add, I give primary blame to the Clinton administration for enabling Korea to build nukes. THAT was the time to invade Korea, in 1994, instead of Clinton giving huge concessions and requiring no verification, that allowed Korea to go on secretly building nukes. Although again, Bush had his window of opportunity that he allowed to close as well.
I'm not wild about the Bush tax cut, even though little of it has been enacted yet. And I think that tax cut should be repealed, to cover the additional homeland security and war expenses.
And although I posted a few months ago I wouldn't re-elect Bush, at this point the Democrats' bitterly partisan opposition makes me far more inclined to re-elect Bush over the forseeable Democrat alterative in 2004. )
I consider that constructive criticism of the President. As opposed to the vitriol over the last year from many (but clearly not all) Democrats.
Senators McCain, Biden and Lieberman are examples of constructive criticism.
Howard Dean and John Kerry are examples of pointlessly divisive, Bush-can-do-no-right, scorched earth rhetoric, that selfishly divides the country just so they can exploit liberal anger and get more votes.
When Democrats "hate" the President, and produce venomous, deliberately misrepresentative and highly partisan articles and speeches accordingly, they don't convince moderate Republicans. They drive them defensively behind the president.
I'm a personal example of that.
