Long, but good: President Bush Enters Credibility Gap

[CatWoman]

by Tom Engelhardt
Published by Tom Dispatch

Two lines which not so long ago seemed firm as battlements -- places where a sign reading "Go no further" might well have been posted -- now seem drawn in the sand of an Iraqi desert. The first was, of course, that Florida 50% mark of an evenly divided nation of voters (quite different of course from a nation of Americans, who have, until the recent Democratic primaries, been deserting the voting booths in droves). Last year, the President's "approval" rating dropped close to the 50% mark and then held firm until the "Saddam bounce" in December drove it impressively upwards for a month.

At the end of January, however, in the space of a week his approval ratings plunged about 10 points, which in the strange world of serial polling, is a bit like an elevator dropping from an upper floor to the basement. In most polls, they plummeted, in fact, straight through the fast and firm Florida dividing line as if it had never been there and now have come to rest at perhaps 47% approval (even less in an electoral match-up with Sen. Kerry) in what is for this White House team terra incognita -- though it's territory that would be quite familiar to W's Dad. Given that Florida's about as far south as you can go in the U.S., it may not be accurate to say that Dick Cheney's vice-presidential numbers had already "gone south," but at perhaps a 20% approval level, he was already in Never-Never Land.

Why did this happen? The simplest and most compelling explanation I've found was in Associated Press piece that made the following link:

"President Bush's January decline in public opinion started soon after a top adviser on the search for weapons of mass destruction said he did not believe Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons, a tracking poll suggests."

http://progressivetrail.org/articles/040211Engelhardt.shtml

[delbert_]

1. Very long but not too long..

Well worth the read...thanks

[PATRICK]

2. another polite newsspeak

I forgot how that early word showed how the media danced around the issue of fraud and lies even when they had sympathetic courts, a united national audience, no hate hit men, a Democratic Congress, and somewhat less corporate control. "Truth challenged" "misspeaking" etc.

I think we grew up with the evidence that our myths were absurd illusions in practice, but that presumption gives us the energy now to want to make them real.

To make American ideals more real as the conservatives flounder in intellectual bankruptcy trying to revive the unchallenged Gilded Age.
Their heroes are bankers, CEO's and accountants with erasable pencils.
Americans are excited about prodigies like that? The manipulators of abstract numbers we call capital and a mega-Ponzi scheme pyramided over institutionalized human misery and subjugation is the apex of the human race, the heirs to the warrior cult brigands who became kings and nobles? No wonder they chose Bush.

Chaff in the winds of change.