I've dissed a lot of Presidents in my time. Richard Nixon? Used car salesman. Ronald Reagan? Couldn't stand the man. Dubya? The name tells you everything.
Nevertheless, I did have moments of a strange empathy for Nixon. Reagan - I must admit, I couldn't stand listening to his voice. And I thought he was about as deep as a Barbara Cartland novel. And Dubya? He was the guy who takes the bar stool next to yours and asks come here often? what's your sign? Until the first plane hit the North Tower. When he turned into a full-fledged penny-dreadful Western. Remember this?
Even so ...
When the Iraq war started - which I opposed with every fiber of my being - I hoped that maybe he was right. I even hoped that the military would be as quick and efficient as Rumsfeld said it would be, I hoped that the Iraqis would greet us with flowers and baklawa. I hoped they would find at least ONE weapon of mass destruction. Even if it meant a statue to GBW, even if it meant I had been wrong and they had been right.
Because what American wouldn't want this to work out? What American wouldn't want our military to be all they could be? What American wouldn't want the people of Iraq to become all Dubya wanted them to become? Improbable as that outcome seemed. I do write fantasy. Had my imagination failed me? I had to wonder. For a minute or two.
Because it wasn't so. I was right. There were no WMD. We didn't perform a surgical strike of redemption. We engineered a train wreck. If there was a wrong decision to make, we made it. Oh, I didn't like Dubya, not at all, and I would have felt mightily chagrined if he had been right all along, but I hoped I was wrong because it was better for our country if I was. It was better for the Iraqis.
That's what I don't get about the right wing here. They hate Obama. They just hate him. They aren't dissing him because of policies with which they disagree. I'm not even certain they actually disagree with some of the policies. They simply want him to fail, no matter what. No matter the cost to the country. It has been their number one policy directive since his election. Do not let him succeed. Strike him down. Discredit him. Erase him. Like the Egyptians did to Akhenaten.
I dissed Dubya, oh how I dissed him. But I didn't want him to fail. I didn't want him erased. I hoped his wars would turn out better than I thought they would. I hoped No Child Left Behind would leave no child behind. I hoped for the success of the policies that were begun with high hopes just as I made my displeasure with things like privatization of Social Security known to my Congresscritters.
I hoped for the best for my country, our people, and those people whose lives we entered. I didn't hope for failure just to discredit a President.
