This is a kind of confession: I know I’m not supposed to; I know that it’s not nice and that we should accept our political differences; but I do “hate” George W. Bush. That is, I find his demeanor, his voice, his ideas (such as they are), his policy pronouncements—I find them all more than distasteful; I find them disgusting. They affect me deep down, in a particularly visceral way.

Why should I deny this? It’s true for me, and probably for millions of other Americans. We do find George Bush hateful. To deny this is a type of dissembling that weakens our opposition to him and to the effects of his governance. It’s not enough to say, “I hate his policies, but not the man himself.” I want to be clear about this: I hate the man himself.

Let me be clear about something else: I do not hate conservatives as such. Some are hateful; some are lovable; some are merely ill-informed and naïve, people who lack the time, the inclination or the energy to think things through, people who dedicate most of their energies to looking out for what they consider their own interests.

While it would not be accurate to say that “some of my best friends are conservatives,” it would be accurate to say that many people whom I like and even admire (for some of their qualities) are conservatives. For example, I admired Dwight Eisenhower and I respect John McCain. And some people (including even me and certainly including the two aforementioned) are conservative about some things and liberal or even radical about others. I puzzle over the blindness and lack of perceptive acuity of right-wingers (especially about George W. Bush). But I don’t believe they are necessarily bad people. I’m willing to engage in quiet dialogue with them about what is best for our country and its people.

To the extent that I think George Bush is a “bad person,” it is not because he is a conservative per se, but because of his behavior as president.

First, there is his almost incredible rigidity, his implacable division of the world into good and evil persons, countries, ideas (us and them). This rigidity is manifest most dramatically in his refusal, one might almost say his inability, to moderate his position when it becomes untenable. Anyone, even a president of the United States, has a right to be wrong, to make mistakes. But to deny mistakes after they have been exposed is a character flaw.

Take two issues: the president’s claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, and his repeated assertion that Iraq and al Qaeda had a working relationship prior to the events of September 11. Both of these claims have turned out to be manifestly not true.

What does the president do when the facts come out? According to Jonathan Schell, writing in The Nation, Bush engages in

monotonous repetition of the falsehood in the face of manifest evidence to the contrary and then a redefinition of words (…confounding actual weapons of mass destruction with mere “programs” for building them), and throughout a tireless insistence that they [the president and his associates] were right, detached alike from information and the meaning of words. [The president] seems to believe that truth consists not of correspondence of word with fact but of an implacable consistency armed with self-righteousness.

Self righteous people are not easy to deal with in private life. They become downright dangerous when associated with the power and inherent prestige of the presidency. It is truly depressing that so many people seem to see Bush’s rigidity as strength and toughness.

Then there is the president’s smarmy, unctuous, religiosity, his suggestion that he speaks directly with god and that god speaks through him. Any president who drags god into politics is asking for trouble for himself, for the country and for god herself. We need to keep the two separate. George Bush has been responsible for some pretty unChristlike actions since he took office. There is no reason to doubt him when he says that religion helped him get his alcoholism under control. But beyond that, it is more important to see how he walks the walk rather than how he talks the talk. “Drag God into politics, the irrepressible Molly Ivins wrote recently, and you “ruin his reputation in no time. ..I have seen too many Psalm-singing, Bible-quoting Holy Joe hypocrites to think these frauds improve the tone of our public life. Getting snookered by some canting humbug is even more depressing than getting snookered by a plain old crook.”

Then there are his policies, which reward the rich and punish the poor. (You know that George W. really meant it when he told a group of wealthy supporters that they were (and are) his “base.”) Of course they are. That’s why he was selected for the presidency by his “base” and provided with hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign support, despite his manifest deficiencies in intelligence and judgment. After his massive tax cuts to wealthy taxpayers, and his innumerable favors to his corporate sponsors, his administration has slashed support for vulnerable groups in our society—programs such as housing assistance, child care, veteran’s assistance, Head Start, vocational education, temporary assistance for needy families –even as he purports to be a “compassionate conservative.”

The thing that makes all this so offensive, is not the policies themselves so much but the deep lack of empathy for ordinary, struggling Americans that his policies represent. His refusal to acknowledge the high cost in human lives and physical destruction of his war policies, his attempts to distance himself from the human costs of the Iraq war and of his social and economic policies, suggest that this is an empty, callous man, interested in power but not in people.

Remember that Bush is an American aristocrat, despite his efforts to paint himself as a Texas cowboy. Yet something seems to be missing from his moral makeup that is often present among such people, and that is a sense of commitment to the well being of the larger society and of weaker, less fortunate people, some quality of empathy that was present in Franklin D. Roosevelt and even in the entire Rockefeller clan (As Kevin Phillips’s study of the Bushes entitled American Dynasty reveals, the Bushes as a family have seemed much more interesting in grasping than in giving.)

Perhaps hate is not quite the right word; perhaps its not good to hate anyone or anything. Perhaps we Bush-haters, too, should be tolerant of human frailty, and assume that Bush is not a bad person but merely mistaken. But there comes a time when dislike, disgust, disfavor, detestation, etc., are inadequate. Perhaps hatred is all that’s left.