It's the wars fault,

I was just watching an interview with Michael Gerson on C-SPAN's Q&A. He was George Bush's speech writer and is generally believed to be one of the better speech writers in modern history. During the interview he was asked why G W was hated so much. His reply was basically to blame the war, then he went on to say how he didn't understand it because he thought Bush great, blah blah blah... I was kind of surprised the first time I heard the war being so openly blamed for Bush's popularity (or lack of) by someone who supports the war. It seemed like a refreshing bit of honesty rarely heard out of the warmonger side.

I did say first time however because this is about the third or fourth time I have heard that excuse. It has now become clear to me that this is just a convenient excuse to blame dismal poll number on one mistake rather than a whole presidency. If you can sum up the hatred for the guy with one thing he doesn't seem that bad. However that is just not the case at all. He was widely hated before the Iraq war ever got started. Even though his poll numbers were in the fifties there was still a large number of people who just flat out hated his guts.

In my opinion the hatred goes back to the first election. He beat out McCain using some dirty tactics in the primary and then went on to win in the general with one of the most controversial results in the history of the country. Then he went on to run the country solely for the half of people that voted him, leaving the rest of us to build up a hatred the would take the rest of the population five more years to realize.