While President Bush continues his taxpayer funded tour to try to soften stubborn and growing opposition to his Social Security privatization plan, his handlers decided that bringing House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who is under pressure to resign his position due to charges of influence peddling, would help boost his public image.
It isn't clear yet what effect Bush's high profile association with DeLay will have. Will it cultivate the appearance that Bush is willing to overlook corruption for political gain? Or will it add to DeLay's misery by associating with a president that more than half of Americans simply don't view as credible?
So Bush can canoodle Saudi princes and mollycoddle DeLay and ignore public opinion all he wants. It isn't too early to pronounce his administration a failure based on its "accomplishments" so far.
Do Bush's handlers believe that DeLay's slumping 38 percent approval rating combined with Bush's 43 percent approval adds up to 81?
A majority of Americans, according to recent polls, don't support Bush's Social Security privatization plan. This opposition has grown so much, in fact, since Bush began his tour that some Democratic leaders jokingly have urged the president to expand the tour.
According to a poll cited by Bloomberg.com, 64 percent of Americans disapprove of his handling of the Social Security issue – up from 56 percent last month. Fake town hall meetings and misleading information just don't fly with the people.
On the major issue of his presidency, worse news for Bush is the growing view that he deliberately misled us about the reasons for going to war in Iraq.
According to Gallup, exactly half of Americans say the Bush administration deliberately misled Americans about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Even more, 54 percent, disapprove of the way Bush is handling the situation in Iraq. Gallup also reported that 53 percent now believe that the US invasion of Iraq was "not worth it."
And why shouldn't majorities of Americans doubt Bush's credibility on the war? No WMD were found in Iraq despite the administration's insistence that it knew exactly where WMD would be located. Revelations about pressure put on intelligence officials to find "evidence" or manage information in a manner to support the president's views, don't lend credibility to the administration's claims.
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Whitewashing the truth with less than believable claims that the whole mess was an "intelligence failure" simply hasn't convinced most people that the administration is above responsibility for taking us into the wrong war at the wrong time.
A wave of revelations about the administration's failure to uphold international conventions and treaties against the use of torture, increasing numbers of terrorists attacks globally, and the US's tarnished international image add fuel to anti-war sentiment.
Further, after two years and over $166 billion dollars spent with tens of billions more on the way, according to the National Priorities Project (NPP), taxpayers are wondering what happened.
Public school closings, public hospital closings, public transportation cuts, and elimination and cuts in public services across the board are making Americans angrier everyday.
They see the diminishment of their standards of living as directly related to the financial mess created by a war that the Bush administration lied to get us into.
According to NPP, over 2.8 million public school teachers could have been hired with the money spent on the war so far. Health insurance for more than 99 million children could have been fully funded for one year. Environmental cleanup, anti-poverty programs, job training programs, health research investment, job creation investments and more are on the chopping block because of a war that was supposed to have paid for itself and have ended within weeks.
Even further, military families are expressing their anger at the outcome of Bush's war. Military Families Speak Out is an organization that holds community meetings and town halls demanding their family members be returned to them. Gold Star Families for Peace, an organization of families of fallen soldiers, is also speaking out to limit any further human cost of Bush’s war.
Increased periods of military service in a country where the war was supposed to have ended almost two years ago are tearing families apart. Deaths, battle-related and accidental, totaling close to 1,600, too, are destroying families. Wounds, injuries, and disease incurred in Iraq have affected over 25,000 service members, according to GlobalSecurity.org and recently released figures from the Veterans' Administration.
Mounting Iraqi civilian deaths resulting from a war initiated by lies is also a serious concern for Americans who prioritize human rights as a motivation for their support for any foreign policy goal. According to the British journal The Lancet as many as 100,000 Iraqi civilians may have been killed in the war so far.
While the Pentagon has denied that it keeps a body count of civilians killed (a denial viewed with great skepticism by many observers and former Pentagon insiders), IraqiBodyCount.net, a website that, using media, eyewitness, and government reports, estimates that as many as 24,106 Iraqi civilians are known to have been killed as a result of the war.
So Bush can canoodle Saudi princes and mollycoddle DeLay and ignore public opinion all he wants. It isn't too early to pronounce his administration a failure based on its "accomplishments" so far.
The main question is what can the majority of Americans do to stop him from further destructive acts. Public pressure on Republican and Democratic elected officials to block Social Security privatization and to end the war in Iraq, along with firing at least 15 Republican members of the House of Representatives and 4 Republican Senators in the 2006 mid-term elections are good places to start.
--Joel Wendland can be reached at jwendland@politicalaffairs.net.
