The first CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll since President Bush’s “news” conference on April 28 shows that former Andover cheerleader has failed again to rally the American public behind his plan to phase out Social Security. In fact, while 81 percent of the respondents agreed that the program is broken, only 35 percent liked the President’s approach. The poll also showed that Bush received an over-generous 48 percent approval for his job performance.
The news conference came after the President campaigned for his plan to end Social Security for 60 days at staged events packed with his supporters in mostly Red state venues. The White House hoped the events showcasing the President would gin up positive coverage on local news channels, but this plan apparently backfired.
What is difficult to calculate is how many viewers of local news coverage came to see Bush’s plan for what is – an attempt to make the Social Security safety net disappear in order to gain partisan advantage. Republicans don’t give a damn if we end up with millions of elderly Baby Boomers living in cardboard boxes in 20 years. Their stated goal is to end the two party system in the United States. By destroying Social Security, they will remove it as a reliable arrow in the Democrats’ quiver of political issues.
These are the same craven political masterminds who sent us to war in Iraq primarily to ensure that Bush would be a “war president” and thus win reelection in 2004, and who are about to destroy the parliamentary rules of the US Senate, thus laying waste to the last institution of civility in our republic, in order to pack the courts with Talibani judges who can be relied upon to roll back civil rights.
Democrats – and especially the MSM – dare not speak the truth about the Gops’ true goals lest they be labelled “librul” by corrupt conservatives like Rush Limbaugh and Tom DeLay and millions of their dittohead followers. And that factor, the demonization of the word “liberal” by the Right, may be the neatest trick of all. Shunning the liberal label has become so reflexive that it forces the Republicans’ opponents and their watchdogs to censor themselves, without any means for reprisal.
