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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: CYBERKEN who wrote (713645)	11/17/2005 8:12:17 AM
From: ChinuSFO	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

No, instead it is Bush is Dead (politically) Note the last line, the punch line in this one. Very well said by a conservative reporter. Bush can't handle the truth In one of the most intellectually incoherent major speeches ever delivered by a minor President, George W. Bush last week blamed "some Democrats and anti-war critics" for changing their minds about the war in Iraq and now saying they were deceived. "It is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began," the President said. Yes, sir, but it is even more deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how history was rewritten in the first place. It is the failure to acknowledge this that is so troubling about Bush and others in his administration. Yes, the President is right: Foreign intelligence services also thought Iraq had weapons of mass destruction; Saddam Hussein simply ignored more than a dozen UN resolutions demanding that he reopen his country to arms inspectors. We can endlessly debate the facts. More important, though, is the mind-set of those in the administration, from the President on down, who had those facts - or, as we shall see, none at all - and mangled them in the cause of the war. For example, the insistence that Saddam was somehow linked to 9/11 tells you that to Bush and his people, the facts did not matter. It did not matter that Mohamed Atta never met with Iraqis in Prague. It did not matter that Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, was finding no evidence of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program. None of that mattered to Vice President Cheney, a fibber without peer in the realm, who warned of a "reconstituted" nuclear weapons program, promoted the nonexistent Prague meeting and went after legitimate critics. "We will not hesitate to discredit you," Cheney told ElBaradei and Hans Blix, the other important UN inspector. ElBaradei recently won the Nobel Peace Prize. The President's recent speech conflates all sorts of terrorist incidents - neglecting that they are specific to their regions and have nothing to do with Al Qaeda. Every bombing somehow becomes an attack on Western values. Oh stop it! It would be nice, fitting and pretty close to sexually exciting if Bush somehow acknowledged his mistakes and said he had learned from them. But far more important is what this would mean in foreign policy from here on out. Repeatedly in his speech, Bush mentioned Syria, Iran and North Korea - Syria above all. If push comes to shove there, it would be nice to have confidence in American intelligence and the case for possibly widening the war. If we are to go to the mat with North Korea or the increasingly alarming Iran, then, once again, it would be wonderful to have the confidence we once had in the intelligence community. Is there or is there not a threatening nuclear weapons program on the horizon? At the moment, no one can have confidence in the Bush administration. Almost three years into the war, the world is not safer, the Middle East is less stable and Americans and others die for a mission that is not what it once was called: a fight for democracy. It would be nice, as well as important, to know how we got into this mess - nice for us, important for the President. It wasn't that he had the wrong facts. It was that the right ones didn't matter. nydailynews.com

To: CYBERKEN who wrote (713645)	11/17/2005 8:35:25 AM
From: Mr. Palau	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

The American people now favor death and taxes over GW by a 3-1 margin. "Bush's Approval Rating Falls Again, Poll Shows THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE November 17, 2005 President Bush's positive job rating continues to fall, touching another new low for his presidency, the latest Harris Interactive poll finds. Bush's current job approval rating stands at 34%, compared with a positive rating of 88% soon after 9/11, 50% at this time last year, and 40% in August. And he's not alone. Cabinet members, Congressional leaders and both parties in Congress have also seen their ratings slip, with Democrats seeing one of the biggest dips in approval, the telephone poll of 1,011 U.S. adults shows. PRESIDENTIAL RATINGS • Chart: How They Fared in the Second Term Vice President Dick Cheney's approval ratings slipped to 30% this month from 35% in August, while Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's approval ratings dropped to 34% from 40% and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's approval ratings fell to 52% from 57%, according to the poll. At the same time, only a quarter of Americans polled give Democrats a positive rating in the latest poll, compared with 31% in August, while Republicans' approval ratings fell to 27% from 32%. Mr. Bush's current ratings don't compare favorably with those of three of the last four two-term presidents at a comparable time in their fifth year in office. In November or October of their fifth year, Presidents Johnson (67%), Reagan (66%) and Clinton (58%) all enjoyed the support of majorities, while President Nixon (29%) was less popular than Mr. Bush is now. (See related chart) In the most recent poll, Americans were also asked to name the two most important issues that the U.S. government needs to address. When considering the most important issues, 34% of those polled say the war is most important, 13% said the economy and 13% said Iraq. Other issues mentioned were health care (11%), education (10%) and taxes (9%).