I have often wondered where this visceral anger towards George Bush and the Republicans comes from. I don't personally feel it, but I am continually surprised by the deep negative emotional association that people (especially in Cambridge MA) appear to have.
The following quote from Brad DeLong helps.
Why do so many of us who worked so hard on economic policy for the Clinton administration, and who think of ourselves as mostly part of a sane and bipartisan center, find the Bush administration and its Republican congressional lapdogs so... disgusting, loathsome, contemptible? Why are we so bitter?
After introspection, the answer for me at least as clear. We worked very hard for years to repair the damage that Ronald Reagan and company had done to America's [fiscal policy]. We strained every nerve and muscle to find politically-possible and popularly-palatable ways to close the deficit, and put us in a position in which we can at least begin to think about the generational long-run problems of financing the retirement of the baby-boom generation and dealing with the rapidly-rising capabilities and costs of medicine. We saw a potential fiscal train wreck far off in the future, and didn't ignore it, didn't shrug our shoulders, didn't assume that it would be someone else's problem, but rolled up our sleeves and set to work.
Then the Bush people come in. And in two and a half years they trash the place. They trash the place deliberately. They trash the place casually. They trash the place gleefully. They undo our work for no reason at all--just for the hell of it.
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First, I can understand the anger of seeing work you poured your life into being screwed up. Leads to Anger, and this makes sense to me.
Now, while there are those that believe that there is some right wing conspiracy to undo any semblance of non-military non-business activity by the government, I don't believe that the Bush administration is really on that path. I do think that there has been a lot of "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" into Afghanistan, and then into Iraq. And then it gets complicated and expensive. But it's not as though the Bush administration alone created Anti-US terrorists. As one of my Russian diplomatic friends says - "No one is Blameless"
And so here we are. People are angry because they naively thought they had really solved some serious problems, and along come some older ones that had been ignored and allowed to grow into monsters and we get 9/11 and a whole lot more spending.
The Angry types on the Left should undestand that the Angry people on the Right feel that the wimpy-international policies of the Left led to the terrorism we have today. They feel that all the work they did - fight a war in Iraq (the first one), and win the Cold War was squandered into a peace dividend driven social economy of excessive exhuberance.
Me.... while I'm not angry, I'm just sad that the two sides are growing increasingly polarized. Maybe they are, but maybe it always feels that way. The exception being the one or two months after some huge crisis!
11:13:07 AM 
