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Notes -
Sounds like you were a respectable person, the intended audience of the respectable shock in the mainstream media?
I remember the edgy young adult / teenage leftist people I knew not cheering, but being incredibly smug. Vibes of some analyses in leftist newspapers were "akshually, the US foreign policy is at fault here". But I think many people may have their memories confounded by the opposition to Iraq war few years later. Condemnation and anti-American sentiment were much more widespread then. Freedom fries and all that.
GWB was supposed to be the herald of evil white evangelical regime, controlled by Dick Cheney and/or Skull & Bones, who was opposed to the Science, such as teaching evolution in schools and opposition to stem cell therapies. The Handmaid's tale the tv series was not yet made, so nobody made references to it, but it illustrates the mental space.
And all the above is certainly different than the situation with Israel today. Same leftist not-longer-young adult crowd seriously believes (or act like they believe) that Israel is really equivalent to apartheid era South Africa and moral people should oppose it and support Palestinians with the same enthusiasm and moral force as they supported Nelson Mandela. I don't personally know anyone who cheered on their public real name social media, but their relief was palpable when the war in Gaza began and they could again earnestly concentrate on complaining about the evil crimes of Israel.
I mean Israel in the West Bank is inching pretty close to full apartheid. Keeping people in permanent stateless limbo in a swiss cheese of disconnected towns. And the Gaza treatment is fucked up too in that they and Egypt essentially don't allow freedom of movement out of Gaza.
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