"The Embarrassment President" - BuzzFlash Must-Read!

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"The Embarrassment President" by P.M. Carpenter
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Tony Blankley appeared on MSNBC's Hardball the other night, looking a bit ashen. As a panel member discussing the president's grave and gathering problems, the former Newt Gingrich evangelist and current Reverend Moon spokesman volunteered that even Republican support for George W is beginning to slip. This is bad, in his view. I'd like to relate Mr. Blankley's complete personal take on W's falling numbers, but, it being Hardball, Chris Mouthews was there to interrupt and talk over the guest. So I can't relate much with certainty.

Yet I have little doubt that Blankley and fellow conservatives would be in private agreement in identifying specific causes of W's decline and the relative harm each is doing. There's Iraq, of course, probably this nation's greatest foreign policy blunder ever. When you factor in the blunder's increasingly apparent intentionality, mere blundering then transmogrifies into the criminal. That sort of behavior doesn't make for gangbuster approval ratings, even among one's base.

But even that is just the tip of the political iceberg this White House first created, then rammed. There's also the colossal deficit Mr. Bush labored so hard to produce, something which the Democratic Party's finest wastrels could not have done a better job at. Principled conservatives are seething. There's the colossally clumsy way in which the White House mismanaged the National Guard story. There was the president's colossally bungled introduction of revamped immigration policy, a package with a little something to alienate nearly everyone. There were the colossal bombs of the State of the Union speech and "Meet the Press" appearance. And most recently there was the White House's backtracking on its colossally imbecilic promise of 2.6 million new jobs by year's end, preceded by numerous other colossally stupid promises of miraculous job growth.


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