Mutiny On The Bushie

Over the past few days, Bush has been looking rather tired. I saw him on Good Morning America the other day and I almost felt sorry for him. He looked absolutely drained and defeated. The polls are generally close though I think Kerry's numbers are probably higher because I don't think they are polling the minorities and young people who are strong supporters. Many conservatives have criticized Bush but had vowed to stick by him. Lately, more and more newspapers have been endorsing Kerry - many of which supported Bush in 2000. The news has been bad for weeks both domestically and abroad. Iraq just seems to get worse and worse. Even Allawi is blaming the US for negligence. Now, it seems that American Conservative Magazine is having problems throwing the nod Bush's way. This article is just one of several that lead me to believe that even if George W. Bush does manage to eek out a victory, he will have a tough row to hoe once he gets re-installed:

Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is supposed to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations. The launching of an invasion against a country that posed no threat to the U.S., the doling out of war profits and concessions to politically favored corporations, the financing of the war by ballooning the deficit to be passed on to the nation’s children, the ceaseless drive to cut taxes for those outside the middle class and working poor: it is as if Bush sought to resurrect every false 1960s-era left-wing cliché about predatory imperialism and turn it into administration policy. Add to this his nation-breaking immigration proposal—Bush has laid out a mad scheme to import immigrants to fill any job where the wage is so low that an American can’t be found to do it—and you have a presidency that combines imperialist Right and open-borders Left in a uniquely noxious cocktail.

During the campaign, few have paid attention to how much the Bush presidency has degraded the image of the United States in the world. Of course there has always been “anti-Americanism.” After the Second World War many European intellectuals argued for a “Third Way” between American-style capitalism and Soviet communism, and a generation later Europe’s radicals embraced every ragged “anti-imperialist” cause that came along. In South America, defiance of “the Yanqui” always draws a crowd. But Bush has somehow managed to take all these sentiments and turbo-charge them. In Europe and indeed all over the world, he has made the United States despised by people who used to be its friends, by businessmen and the middle classes, by moderate and sensible liberals. Never before have democratic foreign governments needed to demonstrate disdain for Washington to their own electorates in order to survive in office. The poll numbers are shocking. In countries like Norway, Germany, France, and Spain, Bush is liked by about seven percent of the populace. In Egypt, recipient of huge piles of American aid in the past two decades, some 98 percent have an unfavorable view of the United States. It’s the same throughout the Middle East.

The other articles in this issue aren't any more positive. Pat Buchanan lends his support solely to display party loyalty - but only after giving Bush a serious analytic beat down. I must say, if Bush thought that being President was "hard work" during his first term, he'd better step down now if he has a problem with it getting anymore harder. His party will, most certainly, do an intervention before they let him continue in the manner that he has been.