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Patriotism is usually defined as the love of one's country, and in this sense Bush-bashing, or the criticism of any president for that matter, is simply not unpatriotic. Anyone who truly loves their country will accept their nation for what it is, with both its excellent points and its faults. Nationalists will try to deny those faults or blame them on people who try to fix them, but patriots will identify and focus on those faults in an attempt to make the country they love a better place, and all too often those faults include the mistakes of our elected officials.

In this sense, there are few things more patriotic than criticizing the president. The people of the United States are incredibly lucky to live in a country where making fun of important political figures is entirely allowed by law and has become an important part of political discourse. People should not be afraid of politicians, politicians should be afraid of the people and publicly criticizing and even mocking them is a part of this. It is a method of expressing discontent for individuals that we voted into office to represent our interests and not their own. When a politician goes back on this, it is the patriot's duty to make sure that that person knows what they did wrong and why it was wrong. It is unpatriotic to sit around and do nothing while elected officials make a mockery of the nation and go back on promises to uphold the constitution and try to make the country a better place.

All of this applies very strongly to George W. Bush. Though he is no longer in office, his reign was one of the most disastrous in the history of the United States and the people of America need to be strong enough to recognize it as such and condemn its choices and its excesses. Nobody likes to be in the wrong and nobody likes to apologize but when it comes to the last eight years the policies of the Bush administration have made this country an exponentially more dangerous place to live in while getting soldiers killed in unrelated foreign wars all while driving the economy into the ground. It would be unpatriotic to just sit back and let this happen without taking some sort of action to alleviate the wrongs that have been perpetrated during Bush's administration. Speaking out is the least that a patriot could do.

Freedom of speech is essential to the American way of life and it is absolutely necessary for any patriot to exercise that right when their elected officials, including the president himself, become a threat to this nation.

Learn more about this author, Robert Harden.
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