Bush Dislike as a Disease?

Posted on June 16, 2006 in Citizenship Journalists & Pundits Liberals & Progressives Stigma

Appearing on MSNBC’s Situation with Tucker Carlson (2/14/06), conservative talkshow host and film critic Michael Medved linked an Oscar nomination he disapproved of to a mental illness he called “Bush hatred”:

“This Bush hatred is a disease, and it’s completely obsessive. And it’s reached the extent that if you take a look at movies that are nominated for the Oscar this year, one of the frontrunners, in fact the frontrunner for best foreign language film, is a film made in the Palestinian Authority.”

“Bush-hater” has been a favorite epithet of Republican partisans since 2003. A Nexis search shows the term appearing 45 times in 2001 and 38 times in 2002, before burgeoning to 493 mentions in 2003, mostly near the end of the year as discussion of the 2004 presidential campaign began in earnest. The term went stratospheric during the election year, with 1,340 mentions, before settling down to 621 in 2005.

As Medved’s peculiar analysis demonstrates, the Bush-hater tag—especially when coupled with words like “disease” and “obsessive”—is meant to pathologize and marginalize opponents. After all, to be called a “hater” in itself suggests irrationality, and commentators like Medved leave little doubt that they see their opponents as actually imbalanced. Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer (9/26/03) described Ted Kennedy’s blaming the Iraq War on White House “fraud” as evidence of “blinding Bush hatred” and “partisanship on its way to pathology”; MSNBC host Tucker Carlson (10/20/03) warned of the “crazed monomania” resulting from “Bush hatred.”

When I criticize my liberal and progressive allies for using the language of psychiatry to attack political opponents, it is largely for two reasons: to end the perpetuation of stigmatizing language; to establish that my disorder is not an evil but a disease; and to stop associating people who suffer from mental illness with kooky ideas. I do it because I believe that liberalism and progressivism are founded on compassion and that such language is not compassionate.

I do not believe that conservativism is compassionate as it exists today. There is every evidence that it believes that our illnesses are to be beaten or shamed out of us or dissolved by the introduction of pills into our system. It lacks a sense that illness is difficult and just doesn’t go away.

Read Steve Rendell’s article about the pathologizing of political opposition to Bush. More could be said here, but it is a beginning.