I wish the Barack Obama haters would go away. But I’m not going to ask them to. Why not? Because, even though I rejoice in Obama’s victory and am eager for his administration to get underway, I understand.

I know what it’s like to feel so disappointed, so frightened, so alarmed, so furious and so outraged by the ascension of a certain someone to the highest office in the land. I know because that’s how I felt in late 2000, when George W. Bush connived to gain the presidency, with a conservative majority on the Supreme Court of the United States handing him the coup de grace.

I know because that’s how I felt in late 2004, when, at the last minute, the Bush folks recognized that the gullibility of some voters was the key to pulling ahead and, accordingly, played those folks like a fiddle, pretending that abortion rights and gay marriage were at stake in the race. They weren’t. But it worked.

I remember the anger that millions of my fellow Americans had actually fallen for the guy with his shallow intellect; his famous lack of curiosity; his avowals about “compassionate conservatism,” which, to this very day, has been neither defined nor produced. 

I was dejected and incredulous the second time, when I had hoped that four years of foppishness and a dangerous, unnecessary war would have snapped Americans out of their daze. No such luck.

To make matters worse, he had a Republican majority on Capitol Hill for six of his eight years in office. And two Supreme Court seats were his to fill.

So it has been, for the past eight years, that I have despised and resisted so much of what Bush has done. Rarely did I approve of any thing he did or said in an official capacity. I have been unhappy, dissatisfied, ashamed, forlorn, worried and hungry for any and every signal failure, hoping that it might snap Americans out of their daze.

It did, eventually, as evidenced by the abysmal poll ratings. Only, there was never any consequence beyond that. Bush seemed not to mind that most of his countrymen and women thought he was lousy at the job. Such is the advantage of arrogance.

Now, the shoe is on the other foot.

Conservatives and conspiracy mongers are freaking out over the very idea of a President Obama. They needle every weak spot they think they see. Lately, the big one has been the cooked up controversy over Obama’s birth certificate and whether he is constitutionally eligible to hold the office.

Clarence Thomas, still beholden to the angry right, put the case on the high court’s docket, despite the improbability that the Supremes would agree to hear what the strange and nettlesome petition. Their rejection will not end it. Disturbed people will forever maintain that Obama did not meet the test.

Others will glum onto the he’s-a-Muslim-in-disguise argument, mainly because of his African name and his childhood experience in Indonesia. He can show up at his Christian church every Sunday and for Wednesday night prayer meetings, and the lie will not die.

That’s just what angry, desperate people do. Their minds are made up. They won’t be persuaded otherwise.

I know. For the past eight years, I’ve been one of them.

But, now it’s my turn to greet their disdain with the three simple words they threw at us in 2000 and in 2004: “Get over it.”

And I promise to understand if that only makes them madder.

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