Can Bush bounce back?

[RichardNixon]

This thread is not meant to be a new thread about Iraq, although that topic will no doubt, overlap into this. Anyway, Bush's approval ratings are somewhere in the 30s. Is it possible for him to bounce back? Historically, many presidents have had dips. Reagan was in the 30 during the Iran Contra scandal, and he bounced back. But can Bush? I tend to think he can't. His legacy is no doubt tied to Iraq, and I don't see that being resolved any time soon, much less in the next three years. Also, who knows where this Plame scandal will lead, possibly to Darth Cheney himself. I basically see Bush as a placeholder until Clinton, McCain, or whoever comes next.

[Surfrider]

No he can't.  There are too many forces against him, and he does not have the ability to battle back by selling his policies, conducting press conferences, and  fighting against the extreme fringes of this country.

[RichardNixon]

No he can't.? There are too many forces against him, and he does not have the ability to battle back by selling his policies, conducting press conferences, and? fighting against the extreme fringes of this country.

Yeah, he's such a victim.

[Sterlingdog]

I hope not, but sometimes it amazes me what people "forget" when it comes to politics.  I do think it depends a certain amount on the economy though.  People will forgive alot of things if they are doing well and living well. 

[D]

Yes he can come back, if he just wins back all the support from the conservatives he will be back up to over 50 percent.

Clinton back in 94 I think it was had his approval rating drop into the mid 30's and they responded and he got back into the 60's in no time.

Gas Prices are dropping, that will help, but he has to come with something more to get them up, he cant sit on his ass and do nothing and expect anything to change, but It is possible for him to get them back up.

[SLCPUNK]

Yeah, he's such a victim.

haha, yea everybody is just picking on poor ole W. 

People will forgive alot of things if they are doing well and living well.

Sadly this is true. If the money is good and life is good for them, all the bad that is happening falls to the side.

Reagan's approval dipped down to around 40 percent for During Iran Contra (which many people quickly forgot as well). But his term ended with about the same approval rating as Clinton.

Bush is lower than Carter, and approaching Nixon's approval before he resigned. Chenney's approval is right at 30 percent the last I read. Don't even ask what the poll numbers show for black people's approval of Bush. One poll showed single digits, rightfully so.


The bottom line is this: You can not unspend the Billions and billions (like a drunken sailor Bush has spent). You can't bring 2000 troops back to life. You can't find WMD now. You can't take away the CIA leak (this hurt him more than anything I think, polls how people don't trust Bush any longer, don't feel he is honest) case. You can't take away his lack luster response to Katrina. You can't take away the fact that his own base is publicly disagreeing with him now, and voicing their frustration.  You can't take away the fact that W himself has no exit plan for a botched war in the middle east. You can't take the higher gas prices away. You can't take the higher heating costs this winter away. People are getting slammed financially, and they are starting to pay attention now. They are asking more questions, and trusting Bush less and less. You can't take hyper inflation away.

Can he bounce back? I highly doubt it. With 2006 around the corner I would not be surprised if Democrats grab a majority of seats and begin the impeachment process, sending his poll numbers even lower.

[RichardNixon]

Yeah, he's such a victim.

haha, yea everybody is just picking on poor ole W.?

People will forgive alot of things if they are doing well and living well.

Sadly this is true. If the money is good and life is good for them, all the bad that is happening falls to the side.

Reagan's approval dipped down to around 40 percent for During Iran Contra (which many people quickly forgot as well). But his term ended with about the same approval rating as Clinton.

Bush is lower than Carter, and approaching Nixon's approval before he resigned. Chenney's approval is right at 30 percent the last I read. Don't even ask what the poll numbers show for black people's approval of Bush. One poll showed single digits, rightfully so.


The bottom line is this: You can not unspend the Billions and billions (like a drunken sailor Bush has spent). You can't bring 2000 troops back to life. You can't find WMD now. You can't take away the CIA leak (this hurt him more than anything I think, polls how people don't trust Bush any longer, don't feel he is honest) case. You can't take away his lack luster response to Katrina. You can't take away the fact that his own base is publicly disagreeing with him now, and voicing their frustration.? You can't take away the fact that W himself has no exit plan for a botched war in the middle east. You can't take the higher gas prices away. You can't take the higher heating costs this winter away. People are getting slammed financially, and they are starting to pay attention now. They are asking more questions, and trusting Bush less and less. You can't take hyper inflation away.

Can he bounce back? I highly doubt it. With 2006 around the corner I would not be surprised if Democrats grab a majority of seats and begin the impeachment process, sending his poll numbers even lower.

You think 'ole W. could be impeached? 2006, the downfall of W. and "Chinese Democracy." Could be a good year.

[SLCPUNK]

You think 'ole W. could be impeached? 2006, the downfall of W. and "Chinese Democracy." Could be a good year.

I don't think he will, but there is certainly plenty of rumbling about it. I would not be shocked if they tried to impeach him. Started the process, and through that more truth is on the table for America to see. Thus bringing his poll numbers even lower. The gig is up for him, he has been exposed too many times for lying and flip flopping on issues.

Impeached and CD? I have a better chance of hitting the lotto......

[Genesis]

Can Bush bounce back?
The world hopes not. 

[Prometheus]

most likely he wont beable to bounce back clinton had some good spinners on his side that could spin a blow job into a great thing.... which it is.... as we have seen it either W's spinners are crap... or teh IQ of the nation is actualy starting to climb...... i go with the fomer... lol.... as SLC has said, '06 is coming up strong, and i would ot be surprised to see a large number of seats shift dramaticly across the floor.... impeachment..... thats a hard line to go for on bush...... he has managed to keep clean.... as close as it has gotten is to dick... but that was a stretch.... if you can impeach for being dumb then hes a gonner... but unless you can actualy find direct ties to him knowing that the intel was totlay worng on iraq hes safe...... nothing else you can get him for... if yo give it time... well ya never know

[Gunner80]

Suck it up, we only have three more years of this man and his administration.

[Axl_owns_dexter]

If he changes his positions on immigration, health care, the war, and government spending, then ya I think he is due for a comeback.   

[D]

I think the country works as long as one part is republican and the other is democrat.

I dont like the president and congress being controlled by the same party, I think that is where u get the most problems cause the true checks and balances gets corrupted when one party controls it all.

[Charity Case]

He can bounce back if he captures bin Laden and oil prices continue to drop and if 2 years from now we are withdrawing troops and we can declare a victory in Iraq.? If two of those three happens, he will bounce back over 50%.? Reagan and Clinton were in the 37-40% range at one time (same as Bush) and they bounced back.? Of course Bush senior was at 38% and couldn't bounce back.?

The bad news for liberals is he is in the last term and whether he bounces back or not is pretty much irrelevant...you are stuck with him for 3 more yeasr.

And if they tried to impeach him liberals would lose seats in the next election...it won't happen.

[SLCPUNK]

Dishonest, Reprehensible, Corrupt ...
By Frank Rich
The New York Times
Sunday 27 November 2005


George W. Bush is so desperate for allies that his hapless Asian tour took him to Ulan Bator, a first for an American president, so he could mingle with the yaks and give personal thanks for Mongolia's contribution of some 160 soldiers to "the coalition of the willing." Dick Cheney, whose honest-and-ethical poll number hit 29 percent in Newsweek's latest survey, is so radioactive that he vanished into his bunker for weeks at a time during the storms Katrina and Scootergate.

The whole world can see that both men are on the run. Just how much so became clear in the brace of nasty broadsides each delivered this month about Iraq. Neither man engaged the national debate ignited by John Murtha about how our troops might be best redeployed in a recalibrated battle against Islamic radicalism. Neither offered a plan for "victory." Instead, both impugned their critics' patriotism and retreated into the past to defend the origins of the war. In a seasonally appropriate impersonation of the misanthropic Mr. Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life," the vice president went so far as to label critics of the administration's prewar smoke screen both "dishonest and reprehensible" and "corrupt and shameless." He sounded but one epithet away from a defibrillator.

The Washington line has it that the motivation for the Bush-Cheney rage is the need to push back against opponents who have bloodied the White House in the polls. But, Mr. Murtha notwithstanding, the Democrats are too feeble to merit that strong a response. There is more going on here than politics.

Much more: each day brings slam-dunk evidence that the doomsday threats marshaled by the administration to sell the war weren't, in Cheney-speak, just dishonest and reprehensible but also corrupt and shameless. The more the president and vice president tell us that their mistakes were merely innocent byproducts of the same bad intelligence seen by everyone else in the world, the more we learn that this was not so. The web of half-truths and falsehoods used to sell the war did not happen by accident; it was woven by design and then foisted on the public by a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose in the White House. The real point of the Bush-Cheney verbal fisticuffs this month, like the earlier campaign to take down Joseph Wilson, is less to smite Democrats than to cover up wrongdoing in the executive branch between 9/11 and shock and awe.

The cover-up is failing, however. No matter how much the president and vice president raise their decibel levels, the truth keeps roaring out. A nearly 7,000-word investigation in last Sunday's Los Angeles Times found that Mr. Bush and his aides had "issued increasingly dire warnings" about Iraq's mobile biological weapons labs long after U.S. intelligence authorities were told by Germany's Federal Intelligence Service that the principal source for these warnings, an Iraqi defector in German custody code-named Curveball, "never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so." The five senior German intelligence officials who spoke to The Times said they were aghast that such long-discredited misinformation from a suspected fabricator turned up in Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations and in the president's 2003 State of the Union address (where it shared billing with the equally bogus 16 words about Saddam's fictitious African uranium).

Right after the L.A. Times scoop, Murray Waas filled in another piece of the prewar propaganda puzzle. He reported in the nonpartisan National Journal that 10 days after 9/11, "President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda."

The information was delivered in the President's Daily Brief, a C.I.A. assessment also given to the vice president and other top administration officials. Nonetheless Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney repeatedly pounded in an implicit (and at times specific) link between Saddam and Al Qaeda until Americans even started to believe that the 9/11 attacks had been carried out by Iraqis. More damning still, Mr. Waas finds that the "few credible reports" of Iraq-Al Qaeda contacts actually involved efforts by Saddam to monitor or infiltrate Islamic terrorist groups, which he regarded as adversaries of his secular regime. Thus Saddam's antipathy to Islamic radicals was the same in 2001 as it had been in 1983, when Donald Rumsfeld, then a Reagan administration emissary, embraced the dictator as a secular fascist ally in the American struggle against the theocratic fascist rulers in Iran.

What these revelations also tell us is that Mr. Bush was wrong when he said in his Veterans Day speech that more than 100 Congressional Democrats who voted for the Iraqi war resolution "had access to the same intelligence" he did. They didn't have access to the President's Daily Brief that Mr. Waas uncovered. They didn't have access to the information that German intelligence officials spoke about to The Los Angeles Times. Nor did they have access to material from a Defense Intelligence Agency report, released by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan this month, which as early as February 2002 demolished the reliability of another major source that the administration had persistently used for its false claims about Iraqi-Al Qaeda collaboration.

The more we learn about the road to Iraq, the more we realize that it's a losing game to ask what lies the White House told along the way. A simpler question might be: What was not a lie? The situation recalls Mary McCarthy's explanation to Dick Cavett about why she thought Lillian Hellman was a dishonest writer: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' "

If Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney believe they were truthful in the run-up to the war, it's easy for them to make their case. Instead of falsely claiming that they've been exonerated by two commissions that looked into prewar intelligence - neither of which addressed possible White House misuse and mischaracterization of that intelligence - they should just release the rest of the President's Daily Briefs and other prewar documents that are now trickling out. Instead, incriminatingly enough, they are fighting the release of any such information, including unclassified documents found in post-invasion Iraq requested from the Pentagon by the pro-war, neocon Weekly Standard. As Scott Shane reported in The New York Times last month, Vietnam documents are now off limits, too: the National Security Agency won't make public a 2001 historical report on how American officials distorted intelligence in 1964 about the Gulf of Tonkin incident for fear it might "prompt uncomfortable comparisons" between the games White Houses played then and now to gin up wars.

Sooner or later - probably sooner, given the accelerating pace of recent revelations - this embarrassing information will leak out anyway. But the administration's deliberate efforts to suppress or ignore intelligence that contradicted its Iraq crusade are only part of the prewar story. There were other shadowy stations on the disinformation assembly line. Among them were the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, a two-man Pentagon operation specifically created to cherry-pick intelligence for Mr. Cheney's apocalyptic Iraqi scenarios, and the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), in which Karl Rove, Karen Hughes and the Cheney hands Lewis Libby and Mary Matalin, among others, plotted to mainline this propaganda into the veins of the press and public. These murky aspects of the narrative - like the role played by a private P.R. contractor, the Rendon Group, examined by James Bamford in the current Rolling Stone - have yet to be recounted in full.

No debate about the past, of course, can undo the mess that the administration made in Iraq. But the past remains important because it is a road map to both the present and the future. Leaders who dissembled then are still doing so. Indeed, they do so even in the same speeches in which they vehemently deny having misled us then - witness Mr. Bush's false claims about what prewar intelligence was seen by Congress and Mr. Cheney's effort last Monday to again conflate the terrorists of 9/11 with those "making a stand in Iraq." (Maj. Gen. Douglas Lute, director of operations for Centcom, says the Iraqi insurgency is 90 percent homegrown.) These days Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney routinely exaggerate the readiness of Iraqi troops, much as they once inflated Saddam's W.M.D.'s.

"We're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history," the vice president said of his critics. "We're going to continue throwing their own words back at them." But according to a Harris poll released by The Wall Street Journal last Wednesday, 64 percent of Americans now believe that the Bush administration "generally misleads the American public on current issues to achieve its own ends." That's why it's Mr. Cheney's and the president's own words that are being thrown back now - not to rewrite history but to reveal it for the first time to an angry country that has learned the hard way that it can no longer afford to be without the truth.

[SLCPUNK]

Think this will help Bush and Co?

Yet another one of his party caught up in FRAUD.  Imagine that?  This is also why his poll numbers are falling. How many of his "team" are under investigation right now? Or charged with something? The country does not trust Bush after his lies about Iraq and the corrupt nature of his party in general.

Congressman resigns after bribery plea
California Republican admits selling influence for $2.4 million



(CNN) -- Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham said Monday he is resigning from Congress after pleading guilty to taking more than $2 million in bribes in a criminal conspiracy involving at least three defense contractors.

After entering his plea in San Diego, California, the eight-term California Republican said he was "deeply sorry."

"The truth is I broke the law, concealed my conduct and disgraced my office," he told reporters, his voice strained with emotion. "I know I will forfeit my reputation, my worldly possessions -- most importantly the trust of my friends and family."

Asked by U.S. District Judge Larry Burns if he had accepted cash and gifts and then tried to influence the Defense Department on behalf of the donors, Cunningham said, "Yes, your honor."

Cunningham's plea agreement with federal prosecutors stemmed from an investigation of the 2003 sale of his California home to a defense contractor for an inflated price.

Under the agreement, Cunningham acknowledged a conspiracy to commit bribery, mail and wire fraud and tax evasion. He also pleaded guilty to a separate tax evasion violation for failing to disclose income in 2004.

Prosecutors said Cunningham had taken bribes from contractors, which enabled him to buy a mansion, a suburban Washington condominium, a yacht and a Rolls Royce.

A government statement said Cunningham received at least $2.4 million in bribes and will forfeit his $2.5 million mansion and about $1.8 million in cash, antiques, furnishings and other valuables.

The charges carry a potential penalty of 10 years in prison and up to $350,000 in fines. Sentencing is scheduled for February 27.

"The citizens who elected Cunningham assumed that he would do his best for them," said U.S. Attorney Carol Lam. "Instead, he did the worst thing an elected official can do -- he enriched himself through his position and violated the trust of those who put him there."

Cunningham, 63, sold his San Diego-area house in 2003 for $1.6 million to defense contractor Mitchell Wade, who then sold it for $700,000 less.

The transactions sparked allegations that the contractor had bought the house at the higher price as payback for Cunningham's pressing the Pentagon to award contracts to the defense contractor.

Cunningham, whose annual salary is about $160,000, then bought the $2.5 million mansion.

Over the summer, federal agents raided Cunningham's California home, a boat he lives on while in Washington and the Washington offices of Wade's former employer, defense contractor MZM Inc.

A decorated former Navy fighter pilot who shot down five MIGs in Vietnam, Cunningham served as an instructor in the Navy's famed "Top Gun" program.

"I learned in Vietnam that the true measure of a man is how he responds to adversity," he said. "I can't undo what I have done, but I can atone."

"I'm almost 65 years old and I enter the twilight of my life. I intend to use the remaining time that God grants me to make amends, and I will."

Cunningham would not respond to questions.

"This is now a personal matter for the congressman and his family," said Harmony Allen, his chief of staff, in a written statement. "The office will not comment any further on today's proceedings other than to say that we are praying for Duke in these exceedingly difficult times."

Cunningham was first elected in 1990. He represented the 50th District, which includes parts of San Diego and its northern suburbs. The district is solidly Republican.

He served on a powerful defense appropriations subcommittee that approves spending for defense programs.

Cunningham said in July that he wouldn't seek a ninth term next year; denying any wrongdoing at the time, he said that he intended to finish the remainder of his current term.

The congressman said then that he decided not to run for re-election in part because of the toll the investigation had taken on his family and standing in the community. (Full story)

"I publicly declared my innocence because I was not strong enough to face the truth," he said Monday. "So I misled my family, friends, staff, colleagues, the public, and even myself."

In a written statement, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, said the case "is just the latest example of the culture of corruption that pervades the Republican-controlled Congress, which ignores the needs of the American people to serve wealthy special interests and their cronies."

[Dr. Blutarsky]

Politicians on both sides can be corrupt. It doesnt matter if he was a republican or not, a scumbag is a scumbag no matter how you look at it.

[Axl_owns_dexter]

Politicians on both sides can be corrupt. It doesnt matter if he was a republican or not, a scumbag is a scumbag no matter how you look at it.

Shhhh.  In his world only the republicans can be corrupt.  Don't ruin his fantasy.

[SLCPUNK]

Politicians on both sides can be corrupt. It doesnt matter if he was a republican or not, a scumbag is a scumbag no matter how you look at it.

And you sure have a bunch of them in the white house right now...........

How quick you are to say this when it's your guys getting their hands caught in the cookie jar.

Anyway, my point is that the right wing is getting hit with one scandal after another right now. This is only going to hurt bush more, since people already don't trust him.

[Charity Case]

This guy's actions are not tied to Bush.  He is obvious corrupt and guilty of accepting bribes, but there is no tie in to Bush that I can see other than he is a republican. 

I will say that the republicans in politics are taking a good size hit at this point.  I would be shocked if the liberals don't secure more seats in congress next year.  This is their opportunity.  The question is will they know what to do with the ball now that they have it or will they fumble it away like they did in the presidential election by nominating poor candidates.