Day: October 13, 2005

Bush on the down low: As noted in an earlier posting by Jon , George Bush is continuing his race for the record lowest approval rating since Gallup polling began after WWII. Indeed, it appears he’s on track to reach an unimaginable low, hitting 29%, with plenty of time left to REALLY screw up.

Back in April, the Washington Post was saying Bush had already reached an all-time post-war low job-approval rating at 45% and eschewed speculating how low he could possibly go. Good thing, ’cause any bets laid back then would probably have been off by 10 points or so.

By comparison, the other presidential approval ratings in the first year of their second term include Clinton (59% approval vs 35% disapproval), Reagan (56% vs 37%), Nixon (57% vs 34%), Johnson (69% vs 21%), Eisenhower (65% vs 20%), Truman (57% vs 24%). Yeah, Nixon rated almost twice the approval as Bush, just to put George’s Icarus-like plunge into perspective.

But it’s not difficult to get way on the down low when you start off low — Bush’s approval rating just before the 2004 election was between 47% and 48%. And yet he still was re-elected.

The Prez isn’t going to satisfied with just tanking on the approval front, however, he apparently is fully committed to failure. According to the latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Oct. 6-10 among 1,500 adults, the president is “beset by problems on multiple fronts.”
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Catching hawks : The fictious case for war against Iraq was cooked up by a group in the West Wing known as the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG. It was these officials who “created the reality” that war was necessary, and who developed the talking points based on false and misleading information that the President, Vice President, then-Sec. of State Colin Powell and others used to convince the Congress and great swathes of the American people that war in Iraq was necessary.

There cannot be any greater breach of trust than that of a government wasting its country’s blood and treasure on war of whim – and yet that’s what this group of traitors did. And like all traitors, they assumed they would never get caught.

Now it appears that the special prosecutor in looking into the Bush CIA Leak may be sniffing around the WHIG’s activities, in particular as it relates to Vice President Dick Cheney, the group’s de facto head:

Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is trying to determine whether Vice President Dick Cheney had a role in the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame-Wilson, individuals close to Fitzgerald say… The investigation into who leaked the officer’s name to reporters has now turned toward a little known cabal of administration hawks known as the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), which came together in August 2002 to publicize the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. WHIG was founded by Bush chief of staff Andrew Card and operated out of the Vice President’s office…    […]

Reality sets in: It appears that polls are finally catching up with the reality that we are living through the most inferior American presidency in history. You can’t get much more mainstream than the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll:

For the first time in the poll, Bush’s approval rating has sunk below 40 percent, while the percentage believing the country is heading in the right direction has dipped below 30 percent. In addition, a sizable plurality prefers a Democratic-controlled Congress, and just 29 percent think Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers is qualified to serve on the nation’s highest court…

The poll shows that Bush’s approval rating stands at 39 percent, a new low for the president. In the last NBC/Wall Street Journal survey, which was released in mid-September, 40 percent approved of Bush’s job performance while 55 percent disapproved. In addition, just 28 percent believe the country is headed in the right direction, another all-time low in Bush’s presidency…

In addition, with 13 months until the 2006 congressional elections, 48 percent say they prefer a Democratic-controlled Congress, compared with 39 percent who want the Republicans to control Capitol Hill. In fact, that nine-point difference is the largest margin between the parties in the 11 years the NBC/Journal poll has been tracking this question.

Now the question is, will 39 percent be the ceiling for Bush’s approval rating for the rest of his presidency. (May it be a short one!)