The New SteveSilver.net

Confessions of a Not-Quite Bush Hater

I've been talking a lot lately about how I've gotten more anti-Bush in the last few months. While I still support what we're doing in Iraq, the gay-marriage amendment proposal infuriated me, and I'm not that much more keen on the FCC's "indecency crackdown," and even less so on Ashcroft's new anti-porn initiative.

So I got to thinking that, despite all the questioning I've done over the years and all the time I've spent wrapping myself in iconoclasm, maybe I'm really still just a liberal at heart. However, whenever I start to feel that way, I come across other people -even, or perhaps especially, those I love and respect- who get me thinking the opposite.

Take my Passover seder last week, for example. Now perhaps it was the Manichewitz, but my family, God bless them, for the first time made Bush-bashing part of the Haggadah- over the course of the evening I heard our president compared to Pharoah, called "The Eleventh Plague," and also heard comparisons made of the Jews-in-the-land-of-Egypt to Iraqis-under-the-American-occupation. I only raised my voice when someone tried bringing the Palestinians into the equation...

(The other big political argument of the evening was when some of the feminists at the table raised an objection to the inclusion of male pronouns for God in the Haggadah. My position is that God was undisputedly a male from the dawn of time until around 1985, when He magically became gender-unspecific, but I'm thinking I'm one of the few people left in the Reform Movement who believes that).

Anyway, don't worry Grandma, I had a wonderful time at the seder regardless. But the questioning of my lukewarm support for our commander-in-chief continued when I returned to work this week. Now I should preface by saying that while I am yet to work in The Official New York Elite Media With Its Liberal Bias and Cocktail Parties, even a 75% liberal such as myself has generally been the most conservative person in every one of my journalism offices. I've never worked with anyone who admitted to voting for Bush, and in my last job was the only person in the office who openly supported the war in Iraq (though when the chairman of the company visited from the London office several months later, he gauged our opinion about the war and concluded by saying, of Saddam, "I'm so glad we got rid of that bastard!")

Without getting into specifics, I'm happy to say my current office is refreshingly apolitical, though yesterday I was reporting a story related to legislation signed by the president, and called a source who is a generally well-known expert on that particular law. I asked him the questions I had, and the first thing he answered was something along the lines of, "obviously, we haven't had a constitution in this country since George Bush became president."

Now unlike some, I don't get "offended" when people say things like that. It's perfectly legitimate, in a pluralistic democratic society (which, yes, we still are), criticizing the president is perfectly okay, even admirable. But this strikes me as a "Stop the Police State" kind of situation- if this really were no longer a free country, wouldn't people be afraid to say things like that, especially to a reporter?

Relax, Bush haters- you're not about to be thrown in a gulag for your beliefs. And while I certainly respect your opinion, sorry- I don't share it. Bush may be ineffective, he may be unintelligent, he may even be bad for the country- but he's not Pharoah, he's not Hitler, and he doesn't represent the end of American democracy. Sure, you may not like what he's done, but if he loses in November, all of it may be undone within months- that's what's great about America.

So in the meantime, I apologize for not participating in the Bush-trashing parties that so many of you like to throw.

Posted by Stephen Silver at April 9, 2004 08:16 AM