I guess the 9/11 halo has worn off

October 10, 2006

No matter how many polls have reflected the public’s belief that the president has deliberately misled us about Iraq, most other polls have shown public support for Bush’s handling of 9/11 remained quite strong.

At least they used to. News coverage hasn’t mentioned it, but way down in the latest New York Times/CBS [tag]poll[/tag] (.pdf), there are some fascinating questions about the [tag]White House[/tag] and the 2001 attacks.

* “Do you think that George W. [tag]Bush[/tag] personally knew before [tag]September 11[/tag]th, 2001 about intelligence reports that warned of possible terrorist attacks against the United States using airplanes, or not?”

A surprisingly high 57% of Americans said Bush personally knew about a possible threat.

* “Was the Bush Administration paying enough or not enough attention to terrorism prior to September 11, 2001?”

Over three-in-four, 77%, said the administration wasn’t paying enough attention.

* “When it comes to what they knew prior to September 11th, 2001, about possible terrorist attacks against the United States, do you think members of the Bush Administration are telling the truth, are mostly telling the truth but hiding something, or are they mostly lying?”

28% of Americans said administration officials are “mostly lying” about 9/11, while an additional 53% believe the administration is hiding something. Only 16% believe the Bush gang is telling the truth about what they knew prior to the attacks.

Is it me, or are these results a little surprising? After five years of mostly reverential, practically hagiographic, coverage of the president’s handling of the attacks, most Americans seem to believe Bush and his team knew a terrorist attack was coming, didn’t take it seriously, and has misled the nation ever since.

Is it fair to say the [tag]9/11[/tag] halo is gone now?

Now that we’re headed to another elction, are more Americans actually reading poitical news in the papers and not just the sports page and the funnies?

  • Is it me, or are these results a little surprising?

    Not surprising – and Bush has only himself and his Administration to blame. There were lots and lots of unanswered questions about 9/11 – and the Bushies have done their best to prevent the truth from coming out. And so when that happens, it’s natural for people to speculate and even wonder why they are so anxious for the full story not to come out. A true leader, after such a calamatous situation, would have done his best to publicly get to the bottom of what happened and keep the public informed. There will always be conspiracy nuts, regardless, but the Bushies have always played it from Day One as if they had something to hide. It’s the chickens finally coming home to roost.

  • Yes, it’s very fair to say that the halo is gone—but I question whether it was a halo, or one of the training wheels from Herr Bush’s “air-assault” bicycle. I’ve serious doubts as to his ever being elegible for a halo; certainly not since he became our illustrious “president-in-name-only….”

    Here’s my mathematical calculation of the dimwit:

    If I take the 43% who don’t think that Bush personally knew about a potential threat, the 23% who don’t think that the administration wasn’t paying enough attention, and the 16% who think the Bush gang is telling the truth, and add those numbers together (82), then divide by 3—I come up with 27.3%—which is pretty close to Herr Bush’s current approval rating.

    Fast-forward to January ’07, and a plethora of investigations. The first and third numbers are most at risk if anything comes out to show that these “people” (*cough*sputter*) knew, and then lied. If that “43” gets cut down by half, and the “16” goes into single digits, then our “Little Lord Fauntelroy” is looking at an approval ratings-potential of 18% by spring. And 18% doesn’t get him a halo. It gets him a great big “L” on his forehead—for “loser….”

  • Yes, haven’t really seen any recent pictures of Bush with some false halo around his head recently.

  • I never got the glow from Bush and 9/11. I thought then and now that Americans turned to their President because there was no alternative. The thought that he might not be up to the task meant acknowledging our vulnerability and some other inconvenient truths, so people chose to believe that Bush was “the strong horse”.

    TPMCafe Book Club has a discussion on the final report of the Princeton Project on National Security, and while I have a number of issues with the report, I found this paragraph in Part I of the discussion pertinent…

    Five years after 9/11, we argue, it is time to stop being “post 9/11” and seeing the world through only through the lens of the war on terror. How exactly do North Korean nuclear weapons fit into the long war against Islamo-fascism? They don’t, and yet they MUST be a central part of our national security planning. We need a strategy that can counter multiple threats at once. That, in turn, means that no one threat-based concept can guide our strategy, as containment did in the Cold War and as the Administration would have the war on terror do today. Instead, we must offer a positive vision of a world that will make America safer, stronger, and legitimate; a vision that will translate into the building of an infrastructure of capacity and cooperation that will enable us to multiple threats over time and as they erupt. That vision is of a world of liberty under law.

    Parts I and II of the discussion: http://bookclub.tpmcafe.com/

  • I think the halo was a reflection of trust. Trust that the President of the United States will act in the interest of the people and the country. The office of the POTUS holds great respect and trust from the American People.

    Unfortunately for the past 5 years nearly everything Bush has does has eroded that trust and respect. It has only been in th elast year that much of this erosion has damaged Bush. Now that Iraq, Torture, Gitmo, Secret Prisons, Wire Tapping, Signing Statements etc…have shown Bush may not deserve our trust even solid pieces like 9/11 have been brought into question.

    Of course some of us ahve questioned Bush since 1999 but we can talk about that later..

  • Bu$h never had a halo, just two horns protruding from his low brow. I bet the bible thumpers are all feeling pretty stupid right now.

  • “News coverage hasn’t mentioned it”

    FWIW, Bob Schieffer highlighted the 57% figure (people believing that Bush knew 9/11 was coming) on his presentation of the poll on Katie Couric’s evening news last night.

    Watching the Repubs coming unglued is delicious. It’s a spectacle I’m almost going to miss if we win the election.

  • petorado: Now that we’re headed to another elction, are more Americans actually reading poitical news in the papers and not just the sports page and the funnies?

    i’d hope more Americans are getting their news online but who knows? whatever works to wake them up.

  • Watching the Repubs coming unglued is delicious. It’s a spectacle I’m almost going to miss if we win the election.

    If Democrats win the election, the Republicans will be losing it for a long time to come. And when they start to settle down, we’ll just have to bring up impeachment again.

  • A very small part of these results might be people finally listening to all of the reports about who knew what when. A far larger part is that people are just sick of all terra, all the time. They had to get po’ed with the Pres before they could listen to all of the evidence that has stacked up against him.

    People get tired of being scared and it was inevitable they would get sick of the person doing the scaring. We’ve had ShrubCo screaming “LOOK OUT!” in our faces for five years and no evidence that there is any reason to scream. (ShrubCo wants us to think a bombing in Madrid is the same as a bombing in Tampa but people’s minds don’t work that way.) And ShrubCo can say they’ve been catching bad guys left and right but the best they could show us in the US was those nitwits from Florida. Oo, er. Did anyone think those guys could blow their nose, much less a building?

    In addition, what else has that sheet stain talked about in the past five years? If he had some good news to go with all the stuff about the bad guys waiting to bathe in our blood he might still be wearing his halo (or training wheel). But what can he say? Uh, the war in Iraq hasn’t claimed all of our soldiers yet, gas prices are much higher in England and at least Foley didn’t kill the pages?

    I hope someone is taking notes because ShrubCo has provided lots of material for the How Not to be a Leader manual. Now I gotta clean my monitor because Steve keeps getting me with the training wheels/Big Wheels comments.

  • “Wow, I guess “The Path to 9/11″ really did its job, huh?” – 2Manchu

    [snicker]

    This is all because Boy George II tried to bring his handling of security and terrorism to the for in September. Americans started to give his “achievements” a critical look and all of a sudden, the Republican’ts lose another issue.

    That’s called attacking their strengths 😉

  • Is it me, or are these results a little surprising? After five years of mostly reverential, practically hagiographic, coverage of the president’s handling of the attacks,

    Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned (William Congreve, “The Mourning Bride”, 1697). But close claim can be made by a public whose saints are at last exposed as sinners (Sinclair Lewis, “Elmer Gantry”, 1927).

  • Just what the hell did Bush do after 9/11 that suddenly made him a hybrid of Abraham Lincoln and Davy Crockett? He was scared shitless AFTER trying to wish himself into his mother’s womb while reading “The Pet Goat.” Later, somebody shoved a bullhorn in his hands and he made some lame cheerleading remarks. Much later, he invaded Afghanistan. And if he hadn’t, he would have been driven from office with pitchforks.

    There ain’t no halo, and never has been.

    Americans haven’t seen actual leadership in so long, we’ll accept anything.

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