It's obviously silly to compare the dishonest, politically motivated and destructive opposition to Obama with the principled, rational and fair-minded opposition to Bush. The comparison with Clinton is reasonable - Carter, too.
Again with your stupid partisanship. Time for a court-martial, lieutenant.
Obviously there was a certain degree of silliness regarding Bush, but largely this reflected honest disagreement with his policy - not dishonest personal hatred.
Basically, people hated Bush (from 2005-??) because they seriously and legitimately disagreed with his policy. That is exactly how politics is supposed to work. The Democrats, by and large, were even quite fair-minded about things - for instance, in the aftermath of 9/11, Democrats largely allowed Bush to go ahead with his chosen response, despite their deep and principled opposition to that approach. This was in part Bush's intimidation of opposition, but also Democrats recognised his "right to govern". Another example: Bush's totally illegitimate election was largely forgotten by Democrats - certainly, it was never made a significant political issue. Democrats hate Dick Cheney because he ordered people tortured. That's legitimate.
With Obama, the formula has been entirely reversed. The prior is "I hate Barack Obama". That is thought one, all other political views flow from that. Therefore, Obamacare is communism, despite Republicans universally supporting it a mere six years ago. In fact, this is true of all policy; Republicans do not hate Obama because they disagree with his policy, they pretend to disagree with his policy in order to justify their hatred of Barack Obama. Hence, negotiation with Obama is treason, compromise is treason, ect. It's entirely legitimate to sabotage the American economy for votes, because the biggest threat to the US economy is Obama's communist policy, which somehow caused the crisis in the first place.
And this is institutional and routine. This is as true of, say, Rick Santorum or of Rand Paul as it is of Joe who-is-not-a-plumber. The Tea party was established entirely on this principle: since Obama is a communist, anything he likes is communism. QED. (an aside; this is going to be a big problem for the party when they next win office. I wonder what they will do? Will they really try to repeal everything Obama has done - even the stuff that they the US system of government relies on, like executive orders- and purge all Obama appointees? Or will they just memory hole all the details, as they have the Carter administration, and just remember the slogan "Obama bad, four legs good"? My money's on the second. I fully expect Paulcare to be identical to Obamacare, minus the Medicaid increases).
This is deeply illegitimate and totally dishonest. A political system cannot run on that view. This is why the opposition to Obama is destructive- not because it goes too far (as with Clinton) or because it uses strong language (Bush) but because it's irrational.
