An alternative theory on Bush’s poor standing

May 9, 2006

I have to admit, I’m fascinated by rationalizations from the president’s supporters on why [tag]Bush[/tag] is so [tag]unpopular[/tag]. The common argument I see is that he will be appreciated, one day, after historians can consider Bush’s greatness with the benefits of hindsight. I guess we’ll have to wait on that one.

But in terms of contemporary explanations, conservatives have struggled a bit. A few weeks ago, I noted one Bush supporter who argued that there’s a conspiracy of sorts among the nation’s major news outlets — including Fox News — which all conduct unreliable research that fails to accurately reflect public opinion. Bush really is popular, the theory goes, but the [tag]poll[/tag]s won’t admit it.

Today, the New York Post’s John [tag]Podhoretz[/tag] offers another explanation. I wish I could make this stuff up.

So here’s a theory: Republicans and conservatives have grown weary of defending Bush. They’ve been fighting and fighting and fighting for years, and they see no letup in the hostility toward him or in the energy and determination of his critics. Faced with that implacable opposition, they’ve grown not disaffected but disheartened.

Podhoretz acknowledges that the president is “losing support from conservatives and [tag]Republicans[/tag],” but believes this is driven by fatigue. Those mean ol’ Bush critics won’t give the president a break, Podhoretz theorizes, so Bush supporters have simply run out of steam.

As a result, when pollsters gauge public opinion, they’re not really finding Republican dissatisfaction; they’re finding Republican fatigue. It’s not a reflection of the president; it’s a reflection of the tenacious criticism the president is forced to endure. Or something.

Is it really that difficult for the president’s backers to accept the fact that Bush has lost the nation’s support? Apparently so.

“Republicans and conservatives have grown weary of defending Bush.” – John Podhoretz

“Republicanites and conservatives have grown weary of HAVING TO defend Bush.” – Me

Stupid is what Stupid does, and that is Boy George II in a nutshell. Fatigue is not the issue, the issue is that Boy George II gives America so much to complain about:

Wars fought under false pretenses,
Failure to capture our enemies,
Deficits as far as the eye can see,
Incompetence in agencies that used to shine (FEMA, FDA),
Divisive nominations for judges and justices,
An arrogant foreign policy where he promised humility,
and An embrace of systemic corruption for the prupose of retaining personal and party power.

  • So Bush’s backers are so tired that when the pollsters come ringing they can’t manage to say “Strongly Approve” but can only manage to whisper “Disapprove”?

    Or is it that they are all lying on the couch when the phone rings and they just can’t pick up the phone for all their apathy? I imagine that a long day of defending the president is so draining that it’s all you can do to watch American Idol in your underwear and eat Cheezy Poofs…

  • So Bush’s backers are so tired that when the pollsters come ringing they can’t manage to say “Strongly Approve” but can only manage to whisper “Disapprove”?

    Well said, Tenebras, that’s exactly what Podhoretz seems to be arguing. The pollster calls, the conservative wants to express approval, but he or she is just too darned tired.

  • It’s all in the psychology.

    The defenders have to because they have so much invested into their great leader that any flaw will expose their own (and they can’t have that as they’re so emotionally brittle.) They’re no different than gamblers on a bad streak or Giants fans with Barry Bonds or Homer Simpson and a flying roast pig.

    On one hand, it is down right funny to see and yet I can’t help but feel a touch bit of pity for the Kool Aid Krowd as they put their money an absolute loser. All this goes to prove (yet again) that incompetent people are usually the ones who think they’re compenent (without a doubt.)

    Maybe it’s time to rethink how the franchise should be given. No more automatic passes to those who have the good fortune to turn 18, but rather to those who aren’t totally cognatively dissonent. Just a thought.

    Me thinks ole Robert Heinlein was closer to the truth than we all realize (and I’m not referring to the vile piece of shit movie, but rather his book.)

  • “Me thinks ole Robert Heinlein was closer to the truth than we all realize (and I’m not referring to the vile piece of shit movie, but rather his book.)” – Dan

    Both made the same point, citizenship and voting rights accrue only to veterans of federal service because they have demonstrated their willingness to put the good of the community before their own self interest or self presevation.

    The movie was bad, but it wasn’t that bad.

  • Oh, Tenebras, what funny, pretty head pictures you paint!

    Actually, I would think it’d be the Bush apologists like Podhoretz who must be suffering from fatigue. I wonder how long it took him to come up with such a lame-ass conclusion. Denial can be exhausting!

  • “…incompetent people are usually the ones who think they’re competent.”

    Yup, they’re so stupid they think they’re smart!

  • I was wondering if anyone out there would have any idea where, or the best place to start would be, that I could find out information I could use to compile a list of the specific military jobs that the private companies are filling in Iraq. Like- sniper, bombadier, grenadist, castle stormingeneer, etc.? We need to compile it for our national release movie on private contractors on Iraq being evil. The movie will put it more eloquently and two-housier than that. barely.

  • “Is it really that difficult for the president’s backers to accept the fact that Bush has lost the nation’s support?”

    No, but it is supremely difficult for those arrogant yet ignorant folk to admit they were wrong and are complicit in the damage this president has inflicted on our reputation and the world. Admission = Responsibility. therefore, they will never admit/accept such facts.

  • I can feel the Bush lovers pain. I am getting tired of bitching about him, I cannot imagine how tiring it has to be to defend him. Lying must have a detremental effect on the mental and the physical being. All I can say is that I hope all the couch ridden (cheeze pouff eating) Republikans don’t go crying for any money or support from the government due to their condition. The social safety net was never intended to support lazy freeloaders.

  • Hmmmm…who was more visciously and relentlessly attacked and reviled (by the right) than Bill Clinton–for eight long years? And still his supporters weren’t too depleted to answer the pollsters’ call. Too bad all these people too fatigued to stand by Bush don’t understand Darwinism. Then they would know why they are not the fit to survive governing. Not sufficiently evolved, I guess. Lost and depleted when their creationist myth is called into question–for surely Bush is their creation. 🙂

  • I like Podhoretz’s analogy between Bush supporters and [rabid] sports fans. He focuses on the disillusionment aspect, but there are so many other similarities: the blind loyalty, the “We’re #1!” attitude, the treatment of world politics as a win-or-lose proposition, the view that cheer leading and applause really do affect the outcome of an event, . . .

  • Like Frak said, who was more viciously attacked constantly than Clinton? If Podhoretz’s theory was valid, than Clinton would have been at about 10% when he left office.

  • What’s going on is this: a pretty hefty number of Americans are really common-sense, really decent people w/ a pretty good amount of sense. Some of them identify more with what they see as “liberalism” and some of them identify more with what they see as “conservativism.” But they are all more or less well-intentioned and even if they are really ugly from time to time or on one thing or another, for the most part, on average, they have a sense of what’s what. And it’s really hard to keep selling people like that bullshit forever. If it was something arguable, if it was something that had a shade of merit to it, maybe you could do it. But if it’s not, over the long-run, you can’t, and they’ll never go along with the most extreme of what the reactionaries on either side want them to do, because in their hearts and their heads, they’ll know it’s wrong and they’ll sniff it out. It won’t smell right to them.

    Conservative activists don’t want to hear that, because it directly contradicts their fantasy of a wide-spread, doctrinally conservative populism, but that’s the truth. This isn’t some “Turner Diaries” novel, it’s real life.

  • All of that spinning must be making them tired.

    Over at NRO you can find the ridiculous assertion that the real problem with Bush is that he is a liberal – just like Nixon!
    http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZWU2NTMzOWUzMzNhMmZjYzU2YmUzY2JmYmYzOTU5Zjg=

    Nevermind the fact that the vast majority of Bush’s supporters are conservatives or that the vast majority of liberals are critical.

    Keeping all of this spin straight while running from the facts of the ground, no wonder they are getting tired.

  • I think our society will be remembered as one which raised bullshit to the level of a high art.

    It’s amazing how much reflexive, habitiual spin, lies, deception, misdirection, misrepresentation, “salemanship”, “marketing”, and general horseshit permeates our corporate society– especially the official Corporate Party: the Repugs.

    Like the people of Bali who have created those intricate, interlocked dances, of the French who have brought cooking to such a level of baroque refinement, the equisitely-complicated rules of upperclass social society in Edwardian New York and London, the magnificent level of art and artisanship in Rennaisance Italy, the incredible works of public engineering of the Romans and Egyptians, the extreme and sublime refinement of technology in the western world… the legacy of 21st century America is Bullshit, Bullshit, and more Bullshit. We are The Sales Society. We’ve easily got as many words for the subtly different shades of “bullshit” as the Eskimos have for “ice”.

    The routine “American Bullshit” off of the 1999 “You Are All Diseased” CD by the great contemporary philosopher George Carlin comes immediately to mind. Our most copious export, by far, is bullshit.

  • Shorter Pod:

    Waaaaaaaaah. I’m tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiired. Fighting reality is hard work.

  • Over at NRO you can find the ridiculous assertion that the real problem with Bush is that he is a liberal – just like Nixon!

    I heard an even more ridiculous one today from a co-worker. Bush is really a democrat with a super-secret agenda to make the republicans look bad.

    Really. He said this.

  • I am constantly amazed that the party of personal responsibility cannot take responsibility for anything. Seems they’re always blaming someone or something else when their ideologically driven agenda is overwhelmed by reality. When they get caught with their hands in the cookie jar their answer is to change the law.

    The FM tuner in my car died yesterday, so I switched to AM and Sean Hannity was on. It’s been a long time since I’ve listened to him, but talk about a persecution complex! Nothing but whining justified by selfishness, fear, hate and vindictiveness. In the segment I heard, he was actually blaming Bush’s “dip in the polls” on the liberal media — and the fact that Bush can’t push the more radical aspects of the right’s agenda.

    Note to Repubs: It’s your policies, stupid. It’s your ideology and your self-righteous insistence that you’re always right, even as your ship is sinking by your own hand.

  • Keep in mind, these people aren’t part of the reality-based community that you or I are a part of – they make their own realities (or perhaps more accurately put, tenaciously cling to their own more and more contrived fantasy-world.)

  • Bush is giving them what they wanted. If they are sick of defending that, they do not hold their political beliefs that strongly. I mean, a pollster is not arguing with you. A pollster is asking a question. If you are “fatigued” to the point that you cannot even anonymously admit your support for Bush even though you believe in him, that is just pathetic.

    I really liked this one: “I would wager that even the most rabid Democratic partisans are, in the privacy of their own offices, scratching their heads a bit over the continuing decline in the president’s popularity. This kind of political meltdown should be tracking with a general meltdown either in the economy or on matters of national security, when in fact things appear to be improving all over the place.”

    Yeah, things are so good. I didn’t read a story in the paper every day last week about high gas prices. There are fewer people in poverty than ever before if you discount the past entirely. The national debt is very tiny. Iraq is not a quagmire, if by “not a quagmire” you mean “hasn’t devolved into civil war…yet”. There wasn’t just a firestorm over immigration policies. We aren’t setting up to invade Iran. The nation’s ability to respond to natural disasters and terrorism on the homeland is just Katrinariffic!

    I’m scratching my head wondering how this fuck has the support of anyone.

  • Conservatives hate the fact that with Bush they are losing the Conservative-Liberal political war.

    True “small-government conservatives” believe in limiting government power and–here’s the catch–isolationism. A robust foreign policy requires a robust government and robust military, funded by robust taxation. It’s oxymoronic to think that a nation can have an imperial foreign policy on the cheap.

  • It’s oxymoronic to think that a nation can have an imperial foreign policy on the cheap.

    Excellent point. Imperialism isn’t cheap but neither is it economically sustainable in the long term. All the imperialists eventually collapse. Hopefully, we will be rid of the imperialists before we experience the same thing Great Brittain did around 100 years ago.

  • If, as Podhoretz suggests, the Republican machine is running out of wind, then it’s everyone’s duty now to keep the pressure on. Maybe even redouble the effort, and not give them the opportunity to get back on track. 26 weeks to the mid-terms, and counting….

  • beep52 — I just recently traded for a car that had a radio. In the interest of hearing what the other side was saying I spent a few minutes listening to Hannity the other day. My jaw about dropped when I heard him go on a tirade that Duke Cunningham, Tom DeLay, and Karl Rove were all the victims of out of control liberal prosecutors. I know that DeLay and Rove are far from sitting in a jail cell, but Cunningham has been convicted of a crime. I can’t see how these guys sleep at night.

    • Comments are closed.