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The
Washington
Post
Opinion
Rage of Reason
By Eugene Robinson,
washingtonpost.com from the Web, November 9, 2007
It's official: Bush Derangement
Syndrome is now a full-blown epidemic. George W. Bush apparently has
reduced more of his fellow citizens to frustrated, sputtering rage than any
president since opinion polling began, with the possible exception of Richard
Nixon.
That should be a pretty good indicator of where Bush will rank when historians
get their hands on his shameful record -- in the cellar, alongside the only
president who ever had to resign in disgrace.
A Gallup Poll released this week showed that 64 percent of Americans disapprove
of how the Decider is doing his job. That sounds bad enough -- nearly
two-thirds of the country thinks its leader is incompetent. But when you
look more closely at the numbers, you see that Bush's abysmal report card --
only 31 percent of respondents approve of the job he's doing -- actually
overstates our regard for his performance.
According to Gallup, if you lump together the Americans who "strongly" approve
of Bush as president with those who only "moderately" feel one way or the other
about him, you end up with about half the population. That leaves a full
50 percent who "strongly disapprove" of Bush -- as high a level of intense
repudiation as Gallup has ever recorded in its decades of polling.
Gallup has been asking the "strongly disapprove" question since the Lyndon
Johnson administration. The only time the polling firm has measured such
strong give-this-guy-the-hook sentiment was in February 1974, at the height of
the Watergate scandal, when Nixon's "strongly disapprove" number was measured at
48 percent. Bush beats him by a nose, but the margin of error makes the
contest for "Most Reviled President, Modern Era" a statistical tie.
The Gallup Poll found that among Bush's shrinking Republican base, he has
unusually strong support. Independents, though, have joined Democrats in
the Bush Derangement Syndrome clinic: They, too, "strongly disapprove" of
the job the president is doing.
Bush didn't come by this distinction with help from family connections or the
Supreme Court. No, he earned it.
Look at the situation Bush's successor will inherit. Throughout much of
the world, the United States is seen as an arrogant bully whose rhetoric about
freedom and the rule of law is disgracefully empty. The lawyers and
students who are being tear-gassed in the streets of Pakistan's cities will long
remember that, when push came to shove, Bush chose to stick with a cooperative
dictator, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, rather than live up to his words about the
universal value of democracy.
The next president will be left with more than 100,000 U.S. troops bogged down
in Iraq, with an unfinished war in Afghanistan -- and, between those two crises,
a strengthened and emboldened Iran that hopes to dominate the world's most
dangerous region. Nice work.
Bush's successor will, incredibly, assume control of a United States government
that interrogates suspected terrorists with "enhanced" techniques known
throughout the world by a much simpler term: torture. The new commander in
chief will almost surely take custody of hundreds of people detained without
formal charges and on questionable evidence, and held for years in secret CIA
prisons or at Guantanamo. The next president will take over a government
that claims the right to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens without meaningful judicial
oversight.
Whoever takes office in January 2009 will be left with a more polarized economy
-- an America where the rich have been made richer during the past six years
with generous tax cuts, while more than 40 million people struggle without
health insurance. The new president will be left with a government that
not only failed miserably in its response to the most extensive natural disaster
the nation has ever faced but that also reneged on Bush's pledge to rebuild a
better New Orleans -- and to make it possible for all those who lived in the
city to return.
The next occupant of the White House will find the nation's coffers depleted by
Bush's wars -- the price tag doubtless will have reached $1 trillion by
Inauguration Day -- and by whatever it eventually costs to keep the housing
market afloat.
He or she will inherit, in short, a dismal mess. It will take most of the
new president's first term to begin to set things right.
It's easy to understand why Americans have come to think of George W. Bush as
the worst president in memory, perhaps one of the worst ever. What's hard
to fathom is how we'll make it through the next 14 1/2 months. But who's
counting?
eugenerobinson@washpost.com
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