I'll start off by saying that I'm only twenty five, so I don't have a lot of history to go on. Barack Obama was the first person I ever voted for, and his presidency has been the first one I've followed closely. I remember George Bush, and to some extent Bill Clinton.
I do not remember George H. W. Bush, who left office when I was 3. But I think I have a pretty good recollection of at the very least public discourse up to this point.
That being said, I remember the criticism that was leveled at Bush 43: two unjust wars, two massive unfunded tax cuts, helping in large part to tank the economy. Late-night comedians and SNL made fun of his intelligence, which may or may not be a fair critique, but that was in entertainment land. Serious political discussion didn't call him out for being dim, it centered on the policy; that's become a thing of the past.
It started, as best I can remember with Mitch McConnell laying out his single most important goal:
We need to be honest with the public. This election is about them, not us. And we need to treat this election as the first step in retaking the government. We need to say to everyone on Election Day, “Those of you who helped make this a good day, you need to go out and help us finish the job.
The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.
Now that, in itself, should have given us a good idea of what was to come; and hell, it may even have been fair game at the time. Working against the president's agenda is understandable and expected, do your worst, that's how this game is supposed to be played. But something has been happening beyond just the fair-game partisan bickering.
Instead of having cordial, sound debates about issues that really matter to the people of this country, the Republican party has devolved into angry insults and grandstanding, with almost no actual substance. And honestly, that's fine; if that's all you want to do with your time in the sun, so be it, but we have to draw a line somewhere.
Whenever someone disagrees with the president these days, it's not a "misguided attempt at policy," or a "wrongheaded approach to fix a problem." Those are critiques I understand. Now, if you don't agree with the president, you call him lawless. In today's political landscape, there's no such thing as a bad idea, there are just lawless people acting with malice trying to hurt the country. If a policy isn't utterly lawless, it's unconstitutional (which, by the way is being thrown around entirely too much these days.)
So you don't agree with the president, he's lawless and he's acting outside of normal constitutional constraints, fine. That's not far enough--now he doesn't love America. That's right, he's lawless, unconstitutional, and put his family and himself through six years of this utter bullshit and two campaigns because he doesn't love this country.
At no point during the two wars we began under the previous administration did anyone ever say publicly that George Bush was un-American, or didn't love his country, even as he was intentionally misleading us into a war that claimed the lives of thousands of troops. But by all means, let's call our sitting president a Muslim-loving socialist dictator that will spell the end of this country.
I'm sure it doesn't get to him, but it gets to me. Where is the respect for the office? Where is the basic level of human decency that, if no one else, the leader of the free world deserves? Why the hell would a senator of 60 days think he's entitled to go around the president on matters of foreign policy? These are all excellent questions, probably rhetorical for now, but it has taught me something very important: those who lack ideas make up for it with hate.