In this post, a commenter says:

…it is apparent that you hardly ever criticise Bush for anything. You are primarily concerned with the nuttier fringe of Bush’s opposition and what they say. The end result is that although you claim that there is a lot to criticise about Bush, you never say what it is, nor spend much time on it.

What you don’t seem to acknowledge on your blog is that significant portions of the anti-Bush population is _not_ the nutcase moonbat fringe, but people who supported the president but changed their minds because of things that they found they did not like. But you seem to clearly divide the country into “us” and “them” and the only “them” that you acknowledge is the nutters.

A lot of people supported Bush up to the middle of last year, when several things happened. For one, it became clear that Iraq was not getting any better and Bush’s pronouncements about it seemed to indicate that he was the only person who did not recognize this. Then there was the Harriet Miers Supreme Court choice, which convinced a lot of conservatives that Bush was more interested in helping friends than in making decisions based upon sound conservative (and intellectual) core values. And then there was hurricane Katrina and the aftermath, where the entire response seemed muddled and confused. For me, I could substitute “terrorist bomb” for Katrina and conclude that this administration would do as bad a job responding to a terrorist attack as it did responding to a predictable hurricane. That caused me to lose all faith in the president. (And the continuing deterioration in Iraq has not helped change my mind.)

Sure, there are a lot of crazies saying crazy things about Bush. But a) they are not the majority of his non-supporters, and b) they are not the ones who hold political power in this country. So why be so concerned about them, when the problems are with the people in charge?

I am concerned with that because the “nuttier fringe” seems to have become the mainstream of the Democrats, and it gets a lot of air time.

I have criticized the administration, and linked to others’ criticisms with approval often–I suspect you just haven’t noticed. I thought that the Harriet Miers nomination was one of the biggest blunders of his presidency, and I’m livid that amid all the out-of-control spending that he’s actually encouraged, the first thing that he could find his veto pen for in five years was stem cells (not that I think that this should necessarily be federally funded). I think that it was a travesty and in fact a dereliction of duty and violation of his oath of office that he signed McCain-Feingold when he said himself that it was unconstitutional.

I remain furious that Bush didn’t can George Tenent when he came into office, that he allowed Norm Mineta to remain in charge of Transportation for so long after he refused to profile, that he allowed the TSA to drag its feet for so long on arming pilots, that he allowed that idiot who insisted on dress codes for air marshals to remain in place for so long, only recently ending that inspired idiocy.

I think that the Department of Homeland Security was a disastrous mistake (and the reorganization that it entailed was one of the reasons that the federal Katrina response was laggard, though I never have high expectations of federal bureaucracies). Will it respond well to a terrorist attack? Probably not, but I don’t blame George Bush for that. As I said, I have low expectations for big government, regardless of who’s president, and losing faith in a president because a bureaucracy acts like a bureaucracy is silly, though people tend to do it anyway (it was one of the reasons that Bush’s father lost to Bill Clinton). I wish that the administration had used 9/11 as a justification to refocus the federal government on the things that it’s really responsible for and good at, and cleared the underbrush of a lot of the nonsensical things that have accumulated over the decades. Instead with the connivance of the Chuck Schumers of the world, it became an excuse to continue nonsensical things like the Drug War, and grow the government.

There are many other things for which I could criticize the administration, if I had time, and if there was a point. I have said these things, many times, over the years. As I said, for some reason people only notice when I bash the mindless Bush critics.

But my problem is that we are war, and much (even most) of the criticism coming from the left is purely partisan and unserious (if it were a Democrat doing many of the things that Bush, along with his “compassionate conservatism,” has done they’d be praising him as a tough president, instead of vilifying him). I shoot down these spurious critiques in order to clear the field for rational criticism, of which he’s quite worthy. I’m not a Democrat (though I was one once), but I’m not a Republican either (and never have been), and I can certainly understand why Orson Scott Card is upset with his party.