Looks Like It's Over for Poor George Bush

(CBS) After his election victory, President Bush said he had earned political capital and he planned to spend it. But six months into his second term, that capital appears to be all but gone.

In a CBS News/New York Times poll out Thursday, more than half the public disapproves of the job he's doing. And it gets worse from there:

# Only 39 percent approve of his handling of the economy.
# Only 39 percent approve of his handling of foreign policy.
# Only 37 percent approve of his handling of the war in Iraq.
# Only 25 percent approve of his handling of Social Security.
# Only the campaign against terrorism gets the approval of more than half those questioned.

The biggest drop off is among Americans aged 30 to 44. In just the past month, his approval rating in that group has fallen 14 points.

In the most serious split over the president's Iraq policy, two Republican House members joined with Democrats Thursday urging President Bush to start bringing U.S. troops home from Iraq in October of 2006.

"After 1,700 deaths, over 12,000 wounded and $200 billion spent, we believe it is time to have this debate and this discussion on this resolution," said Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C.
The President's Problems

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Impeachment is DEFINITELY in the air!

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Democrat Urges Inquiry on Bush, Iraq

Jun 16, 8:01 PM (ET)

By PETE YOST

WASHINGTON (AP) - Amid new questions about President Bush's drive to topple Saddam Hussein, several House Democrats urged lawmakers on Thursday to conduct an official inquiry to determine whether the president intentionally misled Congress.

At a public forum where the word "impeachment" loomed large, Exhibit A was the so-called Downing Street memo, a prewar document leaked from inside the British government to The Sunday Times of London a month and a half ago. Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, organized the event.

Recounting a meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair's national security team, the memo says the Bush administration believed that war was inevitable and was determined to use intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to justify the ouster of Saddam.

"The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," one of the participants was quoted as saying at the meeting, which took place just after British officials returned from Washington.

The president "may have deliberately deceived the United States to get us into a war," Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said. "Was the president of the United States a fool or a knave?"

The Democratic congressmen were relegated to a tiny room in the bottom of the Capitol and the Republicans who run the House scheduled 11 major votes to coincide with the afternoon event.

"We have not been told the truth," Cindy Sheehan, whose soldier son was killed in Baghdad a year ago, told the Democrats. "If this administration doesn't have anything to hide, they should be down here testifying."

The White House refuses to respond to a May 5 letter from 122 congressional Democrats about whether there was a coordinated effort to "fix" the intelligence and facts around the policy, as the Downing Street memo says.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan says Conyers "is simply trying to rehash old debates."

Conyers and a half-dozen other members of Congress were stopped at the White House gate later Thursday when they hand-delivered petitions signed by 560,000 Americans who want Bush to provide a detailed response to the Downing Street memo. When Conyers couldn't get in, an anti-war demonstrator shouted, "Send Bush out!" Eventually, White House aides retrieved the petitions at the gate and took them into the West Wing.

"Quite frankly, evidence that appears to be building up points to whether or not the president has deliberately misled Congress to make the most important decision a president has to make, going to war," Rep. Charles Rangel of New York, senior Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, said earlier at the event on Capitol Hill.

Misleading Congress is an impeachable offense, a point that Rangel underscored by saying he's already been through two impeachments, of President Nixon in Watergate and President Clinton for an affair with a White House intern.

Conyers pointed to statements by Bush in the run-up to invasion that war would be a last resort. "The veracity of those statements has - to put it mildly - come into question," he said.

Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson said, "We are having this discussion today because we failed to have it three years ago when we went to war."

"It used to be said that democracies were difficult to mobilize for war precisely because of the debate required," Wilson said, going on to say the lack of debate in this case allowed the war to happen.

Wilson wrote a 2003 newspaper opinion piece criticizing the Bush administration's claim that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger. After the piece appeared someone in the Bush administration leaked the identity of Wilson's wife as a CIA operative, exposing her cover.

Wilson has said he believes the leak was retaliation for his critical comments. The Justice Department is investigating.

John Bonifaz, a lawyer and co-founder of a new group called AfterDowningStreet.org, said the lack of interest by congressional Republicans in the Downing Street memo is like Congress during Nixon's presidency saying "we don't want" the Watergate tapes.
Democrat Urges Inquiry on Bush, Iraq

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We should be so lucky as to have him kicked out. 3 and a half more years of this guy will destroy this country and then we'll be stuck rebuilding it while he goes back to his ranch and fires up the barbeque.

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One could only hope republicans would have the balls to do what is necessary. I have found that usually they surround, protect, and do not acknowledge their mistakes, and then deflect to totally non-related issues to change the focus......

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looks like the truth he is really dim. god job DRS writers!

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Updated On: 6/17/05 at 10:53 AM

What we NEED to do is VOTE in 2006 and elect a democratic congress. A republican majority will NEVER impeach one of their own- or even allow discussion of it. This was not an "Official" house activity and no inquiry will be authorized unless the Democrats can muster a majority.

Till then, Bush has complete and total reign-- they will not object to his behaviour, even if, to quote an old Texas political warning "He were caught in bed with a dead woman or a live boy."

Some of you people are so frickin' bandwagon it makes me sick.

I would like some of you, (especially the kiddies who aren't old enough to vote, much less understand the intricacies of the "solution" that you are proposing) to actually back up your pitchfork and torch routine with something other than "let's git 'em!" I'll get to you non-citizens some other time.

Speaking realistically, I am not happy with everything that has been done to this point, but I'm not sure that what this nation needs is an impeachment right now. I'm more apt to listen to those who are advocation a swing in Congress. I have always maintained that this representative democracy operates most effectively when there is some division in the party make-up of the branches.

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The sheer amount of corruption among Bush administration appointees ought to be enough to turn any Republican's stomach. Here's Richard Bradley from today's Huffington Post:

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Richard Bradley

The Decline and Fall of a Second Term

Here's an anti-Bush plank for Democrats to run on in 2006 and 2008: corruption. As in, the Bush administration is full of it.

There's more evidence of that today, as the Times reports that political appointees at the Justice Department "overrode the objections of career lawyers running the government's tobacco racketeering trial and ordered them to reduce the penalties sought at the close of the nine-month trial by $120 billion."

The man who made this bizarre decision, Associate Attorney General Robert McCallum, happpens to be a Skull and Bones—mate of Bush's who—it's so predictable—was previously a partner at an Atlanta law firm that represented the tobacco industry.

But let's return to that $120 billion figure. Career Justice Department lawyers had spent years building their case against Big Tobacco, and at the very last minute, the penalties they were seeking were reduced from $130 billion to ten billion by one of the president's cronies.

Imagine what that money could go to. A hell of a lot of medical care. Funding for public education. Or, if you prefer, a year of war in Iraq.

McCallum is the second Bush official in recent days who's been shown to have greater loyalty to his prior employer than to his present one. Phillip Cooney, former chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality -- the man who used to work for the American Petroleum Institute —- doctored already approved White House documents to soften warnings about global warming.

This trickle of corruption will become a torrent as Bush's second term winds down. That's the way second terms work -- especially when you have a president who polices the morals of everyone except the people who happen to work for him.
The Decline and Fall of a Second Term

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I love the mob mentality of PJ, Joe, etc!!!!

Are you saying PJ and Joe look like Rodney King?

An FBI agent's description of the treatment at Guantanamo authorized by the Bush administration:

On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. . . . On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.

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Is this American?

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If the Republicans can have Clinton impeached for lying about a blow job,

WHY HAVEN'T THE DEMOCRATS ASKED THAT BUSH BE IMPEACHED FOR LYING ABOUT THE REASON BEHIND THIS WAR?!

I'm so pissed I'm ready to move to Canada.


And don't even get me started on Jeb Bush and the crap he's pulling in FL with the Terri Shiavo case. She's GONE, LET HER LAY IN PEACE!


I'm going to go throw something

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I agree about Dean - let him go after these weenies.