Remembering "President 79.5 Percent"

(And I also posted here.)

I know I should probably just ignore the right-wing bloviators out there, but for as long as I’ve been posting here (coming up on five years, and no, I can’t believe it either), I’ve gone back and forth as to when I should ignore them and when I should respond. And former Laura Bush employee Andrew Malcolm is pretty high on that list.

And in his quest today to obfuscate, spin and accentuate the utterly trivial in his incessant preoccupation with trying to impugn President Obama any way possible, he came up with this a few days ago…

A new Gallup Poll just out finds Obama's fifth quarterly poll score (Jan. 20-April 19) to be 48.8% job approval, down from his fourth quarter approval of 50.8%. Carter was 48% and Reagan 46.3%.

The average fifth quarterly score since Gallup began tracking it in 1945 is 54%.

One very slim sign of hope for Obama comes from a new ABC News poll that finds a few people believe the economy is getting even worse, now 30% versus a recent 36%. Alas, 92% still think the economy under Obama is in bad shape.

Here's something that would really annoy the current White House crowd if it paid attention to public opinion polls, which of course it doesn't, being so focused on doing what's right for the American people. But by far the best fifth-quarter presidential job approval in modern history was George W. Bush's 79.5%.

(Oh, and Malcolm also goes out of his way to take a dig at former President Carter at the end of this screed – I’ll see him his “one-term Carter” and raise him a “one-term Poppy Bush,” to say nothing of the fact that, if I tried to catalogue all of Carter’s post-presidential achievements, this post would turn into a book, such as this one, maybe).

But what really got me is Malcolm’s totally disingenuous comparison between Obama and the fifth quarter of Former President Highest Disapproval Rating In Gallup Poll History.

And as I recall, there was an event that made a few headlines that, inadvertently or no, helped to drive up 43’s approval numbers in a big way towards the very end of the third quarter and the fourth as well. Can you guess what that was?

Hmmm, I’m having a bit of a problem with that recollection…

It’s on the tip of my tongue, as it were…


(In fact, soon after this series of related events, Dubya’s approval numbers actually hovered near 90 percent, driven more by grief than anything else…it was nice to see everyone flying their flags for a time afterwards, though obviously we would have been better if we’d had no reason to do that.)

So the fifth quarter, then, would have been January-March 2002 I believe. Why don’t we take a look back to find out how much of an improvement Commander Codpiece supposedly was over our “Kenyan, Marxist, won’t-show-his-Hawaiian-birth-certificate” incumbent?

In January, Obama’s predecessor gave his 2002 State of the Union Address, and this tells us the following (and before you dismiss out of hand the World Socialist Web Site as supposedly being nothing but a bunch of “loony lefties,” as the Bucks County Courier Times might put it, consider how prescient this column is, as well as other accounts from this period)…

The State of the Union speech given by George W. Bush Tuesday night was among the most menacing and belligerent in American history. The US president outlined a program of limitless and perpetual warfare, on every continent, and against any regime that stands in the way of the rapacious American ruling class.

…

From a military standpoint, the network of bases and access rights which the US has established since September 11 resembles more and more a noose tightening around China: Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, India, the Philippines, and now the saber-rattling on the Korean peninsula.

As the British daily the Guardian noted Wednesday, “Every twist in the war on terrorism seems to leave a new Pentagon outpost in the Asia-Pacific region, from the former USSR to the Philippines. One of the lasting consequences of the war could be what amounts to a military encirclement of China.” The newspaper cited the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review which, without naming China, warned of the danger that “a military competitor with a formidable resource base will emerge in the region,” and called for a policy that “places a premium on securing additional access and infrastructure agreements.”

And for anyone out there who thinks that this is merely recent history, read this and consider that it could be a case of the proverbial chickens coming home to roost.

Continuing with the WSWS…

The scale of US military ambitions is demonstrated by the gargantuan increase in the Pentagon budget that Bush proposed, a staggering $48 billion, an increase larger than the total military budget of any other country. And his call for every American to sacrifice two years in public service clearly suggests the logic of this program of unbridled militarism—the restoration of compulsory military service for the new generation of American youth.

…

Bush's domestic policy centers on internal repression, building up the police and military at home. While the “war on terrorism” is the pretext, the real purpose is to prepare to deal with massive social upheavals through the use of force. A government installed, not by a vote of the people, but by a 5-4 majority on the US Supreme Court, the Bush administration more and more rests on the army and the police and dispenses with the trappings of democracy.

And in February 2002, "Old Europe," as Rummy once called it, decided to “push back” (here)…

PARIS, France -- A senior French government minister has attacked the U.S. approach to fighting terrorism as "simplistic."

Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine told France Inter radio on Wednesday: "We are friends of the United States, we are friends of that people and we will remain so.

"But we are threatened today by a new simplism which consists in reducing everything to the war on terrorism.

"That is their approach, but we cannot accept that idea. You have got to tackle the root causes, the situations, poverty, injustice."

Vedrine said the U.S. was showing signs of acting "unilaterally, without consulting others, taking decisions based on its own view of the world and its own interests ... refusing any multilateral negotiation that could limit their decision-making, sovereignty and freedom of action."

And in response the following year (to this and the fact that the French chose not to go along with Dubya’s Not-So-Excellent Iraq Adventure), two of our august members of Congress concocted this nonsense (including Bob Ney, who was eventually convicted in the Jack Abramoff scandal).

Oh, and just to let you know that “the drinking of the Kool-Aid” in this country, symptomatic of Dubya’s ridiculous approval rating, was truly bipartisan, I give you this, from someone who most definitely should have known better.

Also in February 2002 (can’t track down the link at the moment – I think it’s nested here – though I seriously don’t think the facts here are in dispute)…

In a White House press briefing, Bush's counterterrorism chief, Frances Fragos Townsend, told reporters that (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) was arrested in February 2002, and "at that point, the other members of the cell" (later arrested) "believed that the West Coast plot (to fly a plane into the Library Tower) has been canceled, was not going forward" [italics mine]. A subsequent fact sheet released by the Bush White House states, "In 2002, we broke up [italics mine] a plot by KSM to hijack an airplane and fly it into the tallest building on the West Coast." These two statements make clear that however far the plot to attack the Library Tower ever got—an unnamed senior FBI official would later tell the Los Angeles Times that Bush's characterization of it as a "disrupted plot" was "ludicrous"—that plot was foiled in 2002. But Sheikh Mohammed wasn't captured until March 2003.

However, that of course didn’t stop Dubya, as part of the drip-drip-drip of Terra! Terra! Terra! news to hopefully win allies as well as elections, from releasing these supposedly “new details” in February 2006, noted here, suspiciously during a congressional midterm election year (the “Bank Tower” is the proper name, even though former President Nutball incorrectly referred to the structure as the “Liberty Tower”).

And what of March 2002? Well, we learn the following from here…

"September 11 really underscores the need to look at a full range of flexible options," noted David Smith, an author of a recent report by the National Institute for Public Policy supporting such a view (namely, that we’ve supposedly “marginalized” nukes in the name of deterrence). "We don't believe that the current arsenal of the United States is persuasively deterrent to all comers." Advocates favor recalibrating nuclear weapons as part of an effort to strengthen deterrence and assure more effective results if such weapons are unleashed against a new range of post-Soviet targets. These new nukes, for example, would be smaller than the silo-busters in favor during the Cold War, and they would be fashioned to hit non-conventional targets located in depots underground or in caves. The Pentagon's Nuclear Posture Review leaked in early March 2002 confirmed the interest of the Bush administration in such new capabilities.

Of course, this type of weapon had nothing to do with 9/11 (thank God), and Dubya’s request to fund new nukes was defeated in 2005 by a Republican congress, as noted here (and this tells us what Dubya’s sane successor has done by contrast).

So, to sum up, much of this country was in a state of lizard-brained, jingoistic panic due to the worst terrorist attack on our soil during the “fifth quarter” of Dubya’s presidency, a time in which I’m sure anyone who was taking up space in An Oval Office would have enjoyed high approval numbers (and I suppose it’s “picking nits” on my part to say that Malcolm would likely cast GWB in a favorable light anyway since he worked for his wife at the time). And to date, Obama has kept us safe from a similar fate (which rankles the Bushies to no end, I’m sure).

But all of this is par for the course when it comes to Malcolm and Obama (and as noted here, Malcolm is just as much of an embarrassment, at least, when it comes to the veep as well).

And perhaps this little history lesson is a little tedious at this point, redundant, repetitive...whatever. But we forget it at our peril, lest Malcolm and the other corporate media gutter snipes concoct something else that may be more sympathetic to our prior ruling cabal, though it be ever more damnable to what our country has stood for for approximately 234 years.

Update 4/30/10: Too funny (h/t Atrios - and I gave McClatchy more credit than to publish this garbage)...