I must confess: I am mystified at this deep-seated antipathy for Bush. I suppose it’s because of what he represents: conservative government instead of government by the liberal intelligentsia. Somehow, his occupancy of the White House has become a cultural cause celebre for the partisan left, a virtual war of those who hold liberal views (not always bad, in themselves, by the way) against those who hold more conservative ones. I guess the liberals who dominate the two coasts and the national media fear the religious right – and see the current conservative dominance at the federal level as the ascendance of such religious thinking in the body politic.
Certainly Bush has made it clear that he holds religious beliefs. But what’s wrong with religious people winning elections and running things at times? They have as much right to be politically involved as anyone else and certainly as much as those whose “religion” is an unabashed secular liberalism that finds traditional religious beliefs somehow frightening and abhorrent.
Our country was built to withstand the winds of democratic change. What’s got me worried, though, is whether, in this critical time of national testing, it will be able to withstand the windbags of anger and innuendo.