Tag: Congress

On Monday, in the afterglow of the media’s positive reports about the Iraqi elections, the February 7 Gallup Poll/CNN poll gave Bush a 57 percent approval rating – his highest rating since the capture of Saddam Hussein. Now, just four days later, the glow has apparently faded completely. According to the Associated Press, Bush’s approval in their latest poll is 45 percent.

Could be a polling fluke, God knows, but it’s more likely a reminder that the swing voters are still out there – and they still haven’t made up their minds about George Bush. The media says we’re a divided nation, like it’s 50/50. But it’s really more like 40/40/20, with 40 percent who love Bush no matter what, and 40 percent who absolutely do not. The remaining 20 percent – a group I like to call the “Swingsters” – are still on the fence.

Swingsters think of themselves as “independents” whose opinions aren’t captive to either party. Their judgments are not sullied by ideology, they say, but rather are based on objective analysis of the character of the candidate and his policies. The rest of us are a lot less charitable. We tend to think of them as wishy-washy and, well, dim. The central irony of the debacle of the elections last November is that this group of voters who bend with whatever breeze comes down the pike finally couldn’t bring themselves to vote for John Kerry because they believed he was a flip-flopper.

One bit of analysis we could take away from this drop in the polls (assuming its real) is that the Swingsters have very low expectations of President Bush. So it only takes one or two good press reports to get them singing his Hosannnas. During the Iraqi elections, the massive suicide attacks that had been threatened never transpired and just a few dozen voters were killed – so the elections were deemed a big success. At the State of the Union, on February 2, Bush read his speech without a noteworthy gaffe, and it was filled with even more flowery, upbeat rhetoric than most, perhaps to counter his natural, involuntary snarkiness. Plus, he did not appear to have electronic devices hidden in his coat. Another triumph. Bush also did a round of television interviews, including one with Brian Lamb at C-SPAN in which he discussed a book a book he’d read, “The Case for Democracy,” by Natan Sharansky. He’d have to be smart to read something like that. Right?

As a result, good buzz emanated from water coolers across the land and over the weekend, when the polls were taken, the poor Swingsters – who want to like Bush, they really, really do – were swept up in the euphoria. But as the week wore on, them ol’ devilish details about the SOTU speech came out. Turns out the Preznint’s flowery rhetoric hid the fact that what he really plans to do is phase out Social Security and cut education funding and veterans benefits, among other things. Disappointed again, by Friday the Swingsters had turned on Bush again, slapping him with a 12 point drop in popularity.

The Swingsters aren’t bad people. They’re just looking for a leader. Maybe they gravitate to Bush because he fulfills a familiar idea of a modern leader: the corporate division manager at the company where they work. But if the poll drop is as real, maybe he’s looking less like that guy every day.

So now will all the wingnuts apologize for lambasting folks like former weapons inspector Scott Ritter and others who dared contract the Bush Administration’s bogus claims in the run-up to the war? Not bloody likely.

Concord Monitor:

In a formal acknowledgment of the obvious, the CIA has issued a classified report revising its prewar assessments on Iraq and concluding that Baghdad abandoned its chemical weapons programs in 1991, according to intelligence officials familiar with the document.

The report marks the first time the CIA officially has disavowed its prewar judgments, and is one in a “series” of updated assessments the agency is producing as part of a belated effort to correct its record on Iraq’s alleged weapons programs, officials said.

For an agency that prides itself on providing the latest intelligence to policymakers, even the title of the new report reads like a year-old headline: “Iraq: No Large-Scale Chemical Warfare Efforts Since Early 1990s.”

Vice President Cheney (right) at the Holocaust remembrance ceremonies at Auschwitz, Poland, on Thursday.

The White House explanation for the VP’s unusual garb is that he was dressed for a hunting trip with Russian Pres Vladimir Putin immediately after the ceremony.

How low can it go? If Bush’s second term is like Reagan’s and others, we’re looking at the high end of his approval ratings. Of course, I predicted it would be lower than 49% because of the world-class bungle by the White House over the Christmas tsunami disaster, but according to the AP, he’s still treading water:

Bush’s approval rating is at 49 percent in the AP poll, with 49 percent disapproving. His job approval is in the high 40s in several other recent polls — as low as any job approval rating for a re-elected president at the start of the second term in more than 50 years.

Presidents Reagan and Clinton had job approval ratings near six in 10 just before their inauguration for a second term, according to Gallup polls.

President Nixon’s approval was in the 60s right after his 1972 re-election, slid to about 50 percent right before his inauguration and then moved back over 60 percent. President Eisenhower’s job approval was in the low 70s just before his second inauguration in 1957.

…

People were evenly divided on Bush’s handling of the economy. They take a dim view of his handling of Iraq (news – web sites), with 44 percent approving and 54 percent disapproving, according to the poll of 1,001 adults. It was taken Jan. 3-5 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Even on Bush’s strongest area, handling foreign policy and the war on terrorism, people were evenly split — with 50 percent approving and 48 percent disapproving.

Over at Alternet, Lara Riscol describes 2004 as the year the rightwing showed the depth and depravity of its aversion to sex:

With a third of our HIV prevention billions promised to anti-abortion Christian-based groups, America is now exporting white weddings as social panacea from here to Africa. Masters of misinformation, theo-conservatives have spun abstinence successes into justification for their bulging billion-dollar entitlement. Abstinence works, they say, seizing upon 2004 data showing a big drop in teen pregnancy during the 90s — attributing 25 percent to abstinence and 75 percent to increased contraception use.

Duh. Abstinence from intercourse avoids pregnancy. And 30 years of peer-reviewed research says that comprehensive sexuality education delays first intercourse and reduces risky behavior once one’s sexually engaged. Not only does the data say nothing about the impact of abstinence programs, but President Clinton’s abstinence dollars under Welfare Reform didn’t reach states until 1998. Bush’s more restrictive abstinence didn’t hit the streets until 2001. Recent preliminary results actually show that abortion has increased since Bush has been pandering to its sex-obsessed base.

But it’s all about perception. Though almost no one does it — that is, sex only with one’s spouse until death do you part — the retro right has mainstreamed abstinence, which obscures its larger agenda to legislate a biblical worldview. Think The Handmaid’s Tale, or at least strict “man on top” gender roles and reinstituted enforcements of sexual morality.

But 2004 proves once again that purity politics works. In October, Bush spotlighted “real families” in Iowa when signing the Working Families Tax Relief Act. After Bush celebrated Mike and Sharla Hintz’ 13th wedding anniversary, Mike — a youth pastor and father of four — told reporters: “Where we are in this world, with not just the war on terror, but with the war with our culture that’s going on, I think we need a man that is going to be in the White House like President Bush, that’s going to stand by what he believes.”

Earlier this month, the First Assembly of God Church fired Mike Hintz for sexual exploiting a 17-year-old girl in his church youth group.

Still, conservatives perpetuate their perceived stand for moral absolutes as a salve from our sex saturated culture, and their opponents as promoters of moral relativism, or even perversion.

In the aftermath of 2004’s greatest smirch upon America, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the conservative Heritage Foundation — source of strict abstinence-only language driving funding and intervention throughout the world � syndicated a column linking the Iraq prisoner torture to liberal rot:

“With the non-judgmental, sex-crazed, anything-goes culture that we have become at home, it seems that America has set herself up for international humiliation. Our country permits Hollywood to put almost anything in a movie and still call it PG-13. We permit television and computers to bring all manner of filth into our homes. We permit school children to be taught that homosexuality is an acceptable lifestyle. We allow Christianity and the teaching of Judeo-Christian values to be scrubbed from the public square. We allow our children to be taught how to use condoms in school, rather than why to avoid sex.”

In one distorted swoop, conservatives discredit proponents of sexual health and justice with the sick, the bad, the ugly.