I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it. I think his policies rank him among the worst presidents in U.S. history. And, while I'm tempted to leave it at that, the truth is that I hate him for less substantive reasons, too. I hate the inequitable way he has come to his economic and political achievements and his utter lack of humility (disguised behind transparently false modesty) at having done so. His favorite answer to the question of nepotism--"I inherited half my father's friends and all his enemies"--conveys the laughable implication that his birth bestowed more disadvantage than advantage. He reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school--the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it. I hate the way he walks--shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks--blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo-populist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. I hate his lame nickname-bestowing-- a way to establish one's social superiority beneath a veneer of chumminess (does anybody give their boss a nickname without his consent?). And, while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more.

There seem to be quite a few of us Bush haters.

I still can't stand to watch him on TV, although occasionally I can mute the sound and turn on the closed-captioning and that's OK for a while, until I start reading the arrogance inherent in his body language and then I have to stop. When he comes on the radio in the morning, I reach out of the shower and turn him off -- if the price of getting the headlines is listening to him.... well, that's just too much to pay, I'd rather spend the day uninformed.

I couldn't stand Nixon either, but it was nothing like this.

To be a liberal today is to feel as though you've been transported into some alternative universe in which a transparently mediocre man is revered as a moral and strategic giant. You ask yourself why Bush is considered a great, or even a likeable, man. You wonder what it is you have been missing. Being a liberal, you probably subject yourself to frequent periods of self-doubt. But then you conclude that you're actually not missing anything at all. You decide Bush is a dullard lacking any moral constraints in his pursuit of partisan gain, loyal to no principle save the comfort of the very rich, unburdened by any thoughtful consideration of the national interest, and a man who, on those occasions when he actually does make a correct decision, does so almost by accident.

True, but I wonder what "correct decisions" Chait is referring to?

(It's hard for me to thing of one, just as it's hard to think of any program put through by Bush which actually serves to solve a real problem. Instead, they're all, for the most part, wolves in sheep's clothing, programs that are either ideologically-mandated or designed to service the GOP's clientele, but gussied up to look like solutions to actual problems.)