[George W. Bush] is the man who misled the country into a disastrous war, ruined U.S. relations around the world, wrecked the economy, squandered a budget surplus to give tax cuts to fat-cat friends, played the guitar while New Orleans drowned, politicized the Justice Department, cozied up to oil companies and betrayed American values by promoting torture, warrantless eavesdropping and a modern-day gulag at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for people never even charged with a crime.This.
In the current poll, 71% of Republicans approve of Bush, compared with an average of 64% in April through June. Twenty-five percent of independents now give Bush a positive review (compared with 23% between April and June) as do just 7% of Democrats (compared with 6% in the April-June period).Republicans make up Bush's largest and most enthusiastic fan club.
Then the realists take command, the connoisseurs of deal making and deal breaking, masters of the most shameless ways of undoing an opponent, those for whom moral concerns must always come last, uttering all the well-known, unreal, sham-ridden cant about everything but the dead man’s real passions. Clinton exalting Nixon for his ‘remarkable journey’ and, under the spell
of his own sincerity, expressing hushed gratitude for all the ‘wise counsel’ Nixon had given him. Governor Pete Wilson assuring everyone that when most people think of Richard Nixon, they think of his ‘towering intellect.’ Dole and his flood of towering clichés. ‘Doctor’ Kissinger, high-minded, profound, speaking in his most puffed-up unegotistical mode–and with all the cold authority of that voice dipped in sludge–quotes no less prestigious a tribute than Hamlet’s for his murdered father to describe ‘our gallant friend.’ ‘He was a man, take him for all and all, I shall not look upon his like again.
Literature is not a primary reality but a kind of expensive upholstery to a sage himself so plumply upholstered, and so he has no idea of the equivocating context in which Hamlet speaks of the unequaled king. But then who, sitting there under the tremendous pressure of keeping a straight face while watching the enactment of the Final Cover–up, is going to catch the court Jew in a cultural gaffe when he invokes an inappropriate masterpiece?
Who? Gerald Ford? Gerald Ford. I don’t ever remember seeing Gerald Ford looking so focused before, so charged with intelligence as he clearly was on that hallowed ground. Ronald Reagan snapping the uniformed honor guard his famous salute, that salute of his that was always half meshugeh, Bob Hope seated next to James Baker. The Iran-Contra arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi seated next to Donald Nixon. The burglar G. Gordon Liddy there with arrogant shaved head. The most disgraced of vice-presidents, Spiro Agnew, there with his conscienceless Mob face. The most winning of vice-presidents, Dan Quayle, looking as lucid as a button. The heroic effort made by the poor fellow: always staging intelligence and always failing All of them mourning platitudinously together in the California sunshine and the lovely breeze: the indicted and unindicted, the convicted and the unconvicted, and, his towering intellect at last at rest in a star-spangled coffin, no longer grappling and questing for no-holds-barred power, the man who turned a whole country’s morale inside out, the generator of an enormous national disaster, the first and only president to have gained from a hand-picked successor a full and unconditional pardon for all the breaking and entering he committed while in office.”
Most Republicans are not in favour of what Bush has done. They recognize that this Administration has been a series of disasters for the country.You don't know what you're talking about. As the stats above, among other things, demonstrate.
"Some 68 percent of Republicans agreed with the statement that abortion "destroys a human life and is manslaughter" while 43 percent of Democrats in the U.S. also agreed.While I am pro-choice I respect the pro-life position since at its kernel is the defense of human life. Ie, given the belief that a human life begins at conception, preventing the host of this life from aborting its development is morally akin to preventing mothers from killing their unwanted infants.
The Zogby poll also showed that Americans are more inclined to support "restrictions on abortion" compared to five or ten years ago."
That was May. As of late this month, the president and the would-be successor from his own party have not spoken since.Wow. Good article; the writer (Peter Baker) obviously has good sources among Republicans.
The overall level of violence in Iraq is down, with the Iraqi government saying 382 Iraqi civilians were killed in August 2008 compared to 1,770 in the same month a year ago. Only 11 US soldiers were killed in combat in August compared to 56 a year earlier.That may be enough to keep it out of the evening newscasts in the US, but it doesn't mean Iraq is "stabilizing." See Juan Cole's analysis.
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posted by turgid dahlia at 9:58 PM on August 31, 2008 [2 favorites]