I totally agree about people on either side needing to demonize someone just because they don't reach the same conclusions. It's childish.
As Lincoln said, "you can please some of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time but you can't please all of the people all of the time." There are some people who will not like anything that Bush did just because he is a Republican. There are some people who will dislike everything that Obama has done or will do simply because he is a Democrat.
I think that Bush did realize that a lot of liberal-minded people didn't want to go to war, he just didn't care because those folks weren't going to vote for him no matter what. Also, Bush didn't go into Iraq because of Islamic terrorism. He went into Iraq because of Saudi oil. It was clear that maintenance of US forces in Saudi Arabia was not viable (infidels in the sacred land) as it was causing too much trouble for the Saudi government. The troops were in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in order to prevent Hussein from invading again. Next time, he would not bother with Kuwait but would go directly for the mother load. So, to protect Saudi oil from falling into Hussein's hands, Hussein had to go. Justifications followed. I wonder if he could have gotten the support of the public if he had explained this.
I don't think that lumping anti-consumer/pro-business credit card and mortgage loan are in the same category as health care. I don't think that keeping companies from screwing consumers is a bad thing and I don't think that most people would disagree. I also think those things didn't play much of a role in the election, which is a mistake by the Democrats. They could have touted how the Republicans opposed reining in corporate abuse. Certainly, health care was a big thing but I don't know how big of a negative it really was to the voters (only 19% said it was an issue and the responders didn't indicate if they are in favor of the changes or against). This was probably a lot more important to the Republican leadership than to the voters. The polls say that this was primarily a vote on the economy. The economy sucks so the party "in power" gets punished. However, now that the Republicans are in power in the House, they will claim that the vote was a mandate on all of the crap they talked about when it was largely just "fix the fricking economy."