© Reuters / Matthew EmmonsBush and his wife at the fateful football game - just a normal friendly couple
Assuming the fans' initial rage had to do with "a gay Hollywood liberal sitting next to a conservative Republican president" at a Dallas Cowboys football game over the weekend, DeGeneres stressed that just because her political views didn't align with the president who started two long and bloody wars, didn't mean they couldn't be friends.
"I'm friends with George Bush. In fact, I'm friends with a lot of people who don't share the same beliefs that I have," she said on her show on Tuesday, comparing her disagreements with Bush to disagreeing with her "friends who wear fur."
"We're all different and I think we've forgotten that it's OK that we're all different," she continued earnestly, imploring her viewers to "be kind" to those unlike themselves.
Social media users quickly reminded her that it wasn't Bush's political opinions they took issue with, but his actions while in office.
The arguments were that Bush wasn't exactly a fan of the LGBT community. "He would lock you and Portia in separate cages if you weren't both rich," pointed out one user, referring to the actress DeGeneres married in 2008, while another mentioned he had campaigned against gay marriage.
Others reasoned that when one moves in DeGeneres' elite circles, it's impossible to avoid running into a few war criminals - or suggested that part of her job was making such "monsters" palatable to the general population.
When some of Ellen's fellow TV personalities stepped in to back her up, they, too, got shredded.
DeGeneres isn't the only liberal to embrace Bush in his later years, helping him reinvent himself from a wildly unpopular commander-in-chief to a simple old man painting pictures of cats and world leaders. President Barack Obama and his aides also discovered a fondness for his predecessor after Trump came into the White House.
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