Twenty Six!

How Low Can He Go asks MSNBC.

Bush was very unpopular for a newly elected President back in 2001. After 9-11 Bush didn't do anything great but America did: It rallied around its President. However, ever since David Kay came back from Iraq and told us in 2004 that there weren't going to be any WMD, it's been all downhill for Bush. How low can he go?

Peggy Noonan

Andrew Sullivan nailed it:

In 2004 Noonan wrote:

So Much to Savor
A big win for America, and a loss for the mainstream media.

Thursday, November 4, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST

God bless our country.

Hello, old friends. Let us savor. ...

The Democrats have lost their leader in the Senate, Tom Daschle. I do not know what the Democratic Party spent, in toto, on the 2004 election, but what they seem to have gotten for it is Barack Obama. Let us savor.

George Soros cannot buy a presidential election. Savor. "Volunteers" who are bought and paid for cannot beat volunteers who come from the neighborhood, church, workplace and reading group. Savor.

Yet yesterday she wrote:

Too Bad
President Bush has torn the conservative coalition asunder.

Friday, June 1, 2007 12:00 a.m. EDT

... For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don't like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don't like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad.

...The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic--they "don't want to do what's right for America." His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, "We're gonna tell the bigots to shut up." On Fox last weekend he vowed to "push back." Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want "mass deportation." Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are "anti-immigrant" and suggested they suffer from "rage" and "national chauvinism."

Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of opponents who are concerned citizens? And often, though not exclusively, concerned conservatives?

Even now her shameless hypocrisy is unbearable. Where was this outrage when these tactics of personal attack were used against concerned citizens, some of whom happened to be concerned liberals? Not only was there no outrage, she was leading the charge, and then urging Bush supporters to savor the fruits of her loathsome labor.

Even now she has learned nothing, repented for nothing. She merely objects to the two-sided nature of her sword.

Why Are We In Iraq?

The Blogosphere is all abuzz with that question these days, especially now that Bush has admitted what we've all known and suspected for some time: We will be there for years and decades to come, on permanent bases.

I think you have to go back to what Paul Wolfowitz said in his famous Vanity Fair interview:

There are a lot of things that are different now, and one that has gone by almost unnoticed--but it's huge--is that by complete mutual agreement between the U.S. and the Saudi government we can now remove almost all of our forces from Saudi Arabia. Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government. It's been a huge recruiting device for al Qaeda. In fact if you look at bin Laden, one of his principle grievances was the presence of so-called crusader forces on the holy land, Mecca and Medina. I think just lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to open the door to other positive things.

This is about the Saudis in a big way. Our troops there were destabilizing the Saudi regime by inciting Al Qaeda. So what to do with our massive presence in the region? You can't put them in another friendly country it will cause them too much grief. And the less-friendly won't have us. So you either leave or knock somebody off. Saddam was the obvious choice. That move was supposed to be easy and popular.

And of course there's the money: Just consider how much of the the federal treasury has been directed to companies like Haliburton and you see what a success the Iraq war has been for its benefactors...