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Joined: Sep 2007
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Feared by the RKMB morons 3000+ posts
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Feared by the RKMB morons 3000+ posts
Joined: Sep 2007
Posts: 3,774 |
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Joined: Sep 2002
Posts: 17,801
terrible podcaster 15000+ posts
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terrible podcaster 15000+ posts
Joined: Sep 2002
Posts: 17,801 |
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Joined: May 2003
Posts: 5,958
some RKMB'ers are Obsessed with Black People Hmmm? 5000+ posts
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some RKMB'ers are Obsessed with Black People Hmmm? 5000+ posts
Joined: May 2003
Posts: 5,958 |
Bush hits lowest approval rating yet in ABC pollPresident George W. Bush hit his lowest rating ever in an ABC/Washington Post poll released Tuesday, showing him for the first time below 33 percent approval.
"Just 32 percent of Americans now approve of the way Bush is handling his job, while 66 percent disapprove," the poll says. "Bush's work on the economy has likewise reached a new low. And he shows no gain on Iraq; despite reduced violence there, 64 percent say the war was not worth fighting, 2 points from its high."
The poll further shows that 77 percent of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track, topping a record high in early 1996, when Republican congressmen shut down the federal government in a dispute with Democrats over funding.
Bush's approval ratings have been consistent for the past nine ABC/Post polls, staying between 33 and 36 percent in 2007. While this new poll is not statistically significant, it represents Bush's first rating below the one-third mark.
Presidents Carter, Nixon, and Truman each endured a low water mark of approval lower than Bush's (at 28 percent, 24 percent, and 22 percent, respectively), but the length of Bush's slide, with three years below majority approval, has him approaching Truman's record of 38 months underneath the polls.
The depth of public sentiment, as well, weighs very heavily against Bush, with disapproval weighing in over approval at more than a 3-1 ratio. Fifty-one percent of those surveyed strongly disapprove of his presidency, while only 16 percent strongly approve.
The full poll can be read here .
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Joined: May 2003
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1 Millionth Customer 10000+ posts
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OP
1 Millionth Customer 10000+ posts
Joined: May 2003
Posts: 14,203 |
obviously the American people must hate America.
Bow ties are coool.
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Joined: Sep 2007
Posts: 3,774
Feared by the RKMB morons 3000+ posts
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Feared by the RKMB morons 3000+ posts
Joined: Sep 2007
Posts: 3,774 |
Treason is the big thing nowadays.
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Joined: May 2003
Posts: 5,958
some RKMB'ers are Obsessed with Black People Hmmm? 5000+ posts
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some RKMB'ers are Obsessed with Black People Hmmm? 5000+ posts
Joined: May 2003
Posts: 5,958 |
 Family Guy skewers Bush, Cheney 'in a galaxy far, far away'Why does Faimily Guy 'hate America'???? But really, i'm glad Bush realized his dream of uniting America. Except for that "UnAmerican" 1/3rd that is  . And supporting that idiot seems to be as UnAmerican as you get nowadays.
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Joined: May 2003
Posts: 5,958
some RKMB'ers are Obsessed with Black People Hmmm? 5000+ posts
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some RKMB'ers are Obsessed with Black People Hmmm? 5000+ posts
Joined: May 2003
Posts: 5,958 |
January 15, 2008 BOOK REVIEW 'The Bush Tragedy' by Jacob Weisberg By Joe Conason, Special to The Times IN the years that follow the second Bush presidency, many of us will no doubt continue to ask ourselves how we squandered so much of the power, prestige and wealth that were left to us by earlier generations, and why we entrusted the fate of the nation to a man so plainly unfit for that responsibility.
For, as Jacob Weisberg remarks in the introduction to "The Bush Tragedy," the price of those errors is coming due as we are forced to acknowledge that our country has been "diminished in relation to the rest of the world" and that we may be destined for "a long-term decline in American status." So great are the consequences of the rise of George W. Bush that we are likely to find ourselves sifting through the story again and again, with an almost neurotic compulsion, trying to find exactly where we went wrong.
Although the jacket copy proclaims that this book "cracks the code of the Bush presidency," such hyperbole hardly seems fair to all the volumes that came before, chiefly because Weisberg considers the same personalities and events as previous authors in ways that are by now commonplace. His approach emphasizes the lifelong conflict between the president and his father, which does not qualify as an original insight at this point, although the author deploys the usual analogies to Shakespeare's Henry IV and Prince Hal with erudition and eloquence.
In essence, Weisberg argues that George W.'s life and presidency have been shaped and misshaped by his overpowering impulses to emulate and later reject George Herbert Walker Bush, his hero turned nemesis. Where the father tended to be modest and moderate, the son insisted on being boastful and extreme. Where the father remained skeptical of overarching visions and ideological ambitions, the son came to believe in a great and divinely ordained national destiny. And where the father was deliberative and thoughtful, the son became impetuous and reckless.
Perhaps unavoidably, as Weisberg rakes through the past, he recapitulates anecdotes and quotes that will be familiar to many. Yet again, but probably not for the last time, we relive that holiday showdown at the family home, back when a 26-year-old drunken Georgie runs over the garbage cans with his car and finds himself on the doorstep, challenging Dad to go "mano a mano" as father gazes disdainfully over his spectacles. Amusing as that story may have sounded the first few times, it doesn't really tell us much about the president almost four decades later.
The born-again Bush
In a later chapter scrutinizing the president's religiosity -- and the political uses to which he has put his piety -- Weisberg informs us that the accepted version of Bush's midlife evangelical rebirth, midwifed by the Rev. Billy Graham, is false. The man who brought him to salvation was instead a more obscure and eccentric character named Arthur Blessitt. But the Graham fiction and the Blessitt tale were both told by, among others, Craig Unger in "The Fall of the House of Bush," which arrived in bookstores a couple of months ago.
More compelling, from historical and psychological standpoints, is Weisberg's investigation of the fraught relationships among the men of the Bush and Walker families, whose own contrasting characters set the stage for the devolution of the dynasty. The president's forbidding but upright grandfather, Prescott Bush, who served as a liberal Republican senator from Connecticut, evidently could not abide the Walkers, a flashy, arrogant and dissolute clan from the Midwest who pursued wealth and pleasure without the slightest interest in public service. It is the Walker character -- aggressive, impatient, competitive, charismatic and sometimes mean, according to Weisberg -- that found expression in George W.
In these Oedipal clashes and inherited flaws, Weisberg finds the roots of the president's attraction to figures such as Vice President Dick Cheney and recently exited political boss Karl Rove, who have played such fateful and ultimately destructive roles in his White House, conniving to manipulate a man who could not match them in intellect or industriousness. By sketching in their backgrounds, he demonstrates how Cheney developed the overweening theory of absolute executive authority that led to Guantanamo and worse, and why Rove elevated a plan for permanent partisan domination above the interests of the administration and the nation. The irretrievable turning point came when Bush allowed Rove and Cheney to fashion a "war presidency" that sought unchallenged power and rejected bipartisan cooperation.
Here again the author is telling stories that many readers will have heard before, but he analyzes the central disaster of the Bush administration with skill and seriousness. He does so, moreover, from the perspective of a "liberal hawk" who, as editor in chief of Slate magazine, endorsed the invasion of Iraq, which he now compares with Vietnam as a policy catastrophe.
Giving him his due
Although Weisberg does not hesitate to criticize the president and his associates, he also takes pains to give them their due. He portrays Bush as a sincere advocate of reform in race relations, education and immigration, and as a Christian whose personal conduct was improved by religious conversion. He intends to make no radical critique of the Bush dynasty and the Republican right, and in his wish to seem objective, he sometimes ignores or dismisses the most damning episodes. While glossing over the case of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, for example, he seems to exonerate the president of any complicity for "outing" her, despite clear evidence otherwise. Weisberg claims that Bush only "came to realize that Rove had misled him about [Rove's] involvement" in the leak of Plame's identity. More broadly, he takes little interest in the corporate and political structures that have employed the Bushes to achieve their own ends.
But it is precisely because Weisberg struggles for objectivity and fairness that his deeply negative conclusions are so damning. We will look at George W. Bush again and again, and the portrait will only get darker.Joe Conason, a columnist for the New York Observer and Salon.com, is the author, most recently, of "It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush."
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Joined: Sep 2007
Posts: 3,774
Feared by the RKMB morons 3000+ posts
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Feared by the RKMB morons 3000+ posts
Joined: Sep 2007
Posts: 3,774 |
It doesn't matter Who'. Haven't you heard that the "surge" (aka paying off the enemy) is working?
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Joined: May 2003
Posts: 5,958
some RKMB'ers are Obsessed with Black People Hmmm? 5000+ posts
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some RKMB'ers are Obsessed with Black People Hmmm? 5000+ posts
Joined: May 2003
Posts: 5,958 |
19%!!!!Concerns over Economy Push
George W. Bush's Overall Job Approval to New LowGeorge W. Bush's overall job approval rating has dropped to a new low in American Research Group polling as 78% of Americans say that the national economy is getting worse according to the latest survey from the American Research Group.
Among all Americans, 19% approve of the way Bush is handling his job as president and 77% disapprove. When it comes to Bush's handling of the economy, 14% approve and 79% disapprove.
Among Americans registered to vote, 18% approve of the way Bush is handling his job as president and 78% disapprove. When it comes to the way Bush is handling the economy, 15% of registered voters approve of the way Bush is handling the economy and 79% disapprove.
A total of 78% of Americans say the national economy is getting worse and 47% say the national economy is in a recession. A total of 42% of Americans, however, say they believe the national economy will be better a year from now, which is the highest level for this question in the past year. This optimism does not spread to improvements in household financial situations as 17% of Americans say they expect their household financial situations to be better a year from now, which is the lowest for this question in the past year.
The results presented here are based on 1,100 completed telephone interviews conducted among a nationwide random sample of adults 18 years and older. The interviews were completed February 16 through 19, 2008. The theoretical margin of error for the total sample is plus or minus 2.6 percentage points, 95% of the time, on questions where opinion is evenly split.
Overall, 19% of Americans say that they approve of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president, 77% disapprove, and 4% are undecided.  Oh look, he’s finally succeeded at something outright.
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