Not speaking as a Bush supporter -- I'm just not sure what the balance is here. Plenty of people on this board accused Bush of fascism when he was in power. Obama's presence naturally is going to draw the same kind of heat from the other side of the aisle.
It seems like whoever is in power -- regardless of race or ideology -- is going to piss off their opponents. Not sure what role race plays.
but Bush
is a war criminal. i mean, he is. he's admitted as such. he says he'd do it again.
he authorized torture.
these signs are typical agitprop, but they're far more credible than Obama = Stalin, or Obama the "lyin' African."
you can equivocate as far as both sides wave anti-intellectual signs, but they are not equivalent in content. to pretend that "they're all the same" is not to think very hard or read very closely.
Having been at more than a few ANSWER protests, I can say with dead-on certainty that phrases like "Christofascism" were tossed around like beach balls.
oh, but that's totally fair. i used that in here. Bush gave James Dobson veto power over SCOTUS nominees. the Christian Right was far, far more influential then than they are now, particularly in Bush's first term. he talked frequently about listening to a "higher father" and being a born-again and you had Ashcroft covering up breasts on statues and the demonizing of gay people and the very active courting of conservative evangelical protestants. the man said his favorite political philosopher was Jesus, for chrissakes.
And you couldn't swing a dead cat without hearing charges of fascism and references to the Right as a form of Nazism. Funny, I seem to remember some threads about that in FYM back in the day. Plenty of comments about Bush's southern heritage too.
Bush doesn't have southern heritage. he's a blue-blood yankee who moved to West Texas -- hardly the south. he's not like George Allen, trying to reclaim an idealized antebellum past that never existed. so, no, there wasn't anything about Bush's "southern" past. you very well could make the argument that the base of the Republican Party is in the South, and that it's the party of Dixie, and you could look at voting returns from the 2008 election and be absolutely correct. it was only in certain areas of the south where McCain beat Obama greater than Bush did Kerry. we'd be fooling ourselves if race weren't a part of that.
the Hitler/Nazi comparisons have always been wrong, and those have always been called out in here by the regular protesters. the only difference, i can see, is that the Hitler comparisons to Bush were made in regards to foreign policy (invading nations for fabricated reasons), rather than domestic policy (health care).
Again, whoever's in power -- left, right, or center -- is going to get it from whoever isn't.
and you can pretend it's all the same and feel as if you're above it all, but that's really not the case.
(Did you attend the Benji Schul for Peepul Who Spel Gud? 'Cause I'm currently enrolled in his Punct'iuatshun.,*Clas.)
