I'm in Washington DC again, and it is amazing how the tone has changed in this city. The Bush presidency has imploded, and even the neocons are despairing. Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard is particularly incensed by Bush's choice for the opening on US Supreme Court:
George W. Bush's nomination of White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court was at best an error, at worst a disaster.
And yesterday the president stated that he picked Miers "for her religion", making a complete farce of the US Constitution.
But the president's problems go far beyond the Miers' nomination, as John Kenneth White writes in PollingReport:
Not only are Bush’s overall approval ratings low and doubts about his leadership growing, but on a variety of issues he has been judged seriously deficient. A Zogby International survey gives Bush poor marks on a host of domestic and foreign concerns (see Table 1, below). Overall, the ratio of poor-to-excellent scores ranges from a low of 1:1 (managing the war on terror and Hurricane Rita) to a high of 8:1 (handling gasoline prices). If this were a parliamentary system, there would be a vote of no confidence and a new election held.
The neocon dream of a US-style democracy in Iraq has turned into a nightmare - a quagmire that has Americans increasingly angry:
In many respects, public opinion toward Iraq resembles attitudes about the Vietnam War circa 1968, with one difference: it took Americans more than a decade to conclude that Vietnam was unwinnable and their troops should leave; it has taken just two years for them to reach the same conclusion about Iraq.
But perhaps the biggest insult to Bush came from Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga while visiting Austria. This president - who wears his faith on his sleeve and consulted with God before launching a preemptive war - "is not a Christian", said the Cardinal while visiting Vienna:
Wien - "Jeder, der sich für Krieg ausspricht, darf nicht mehr als Christ bezeichnet werden": Der Erzbischof von Tegucigalpa in Honduras, Kardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga, übte während seines Österreich-Besuchs scharfe Kritik an US-Präsident George W. Bush.
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