Dec 25 2008
Mission Accomplished, Mr. President
What’s going down in the world today, Animal?
Well my fellow politicats, our esteemed president, George Dubya Bush, gave an interview with “Fair & Balanced” Fox News last week.
According to Breitbart.com, the commander-in-chief “praised the national security team assembled by President-elect Barack Obama, offered hope to U.S. automakers seeking government assistance and said the people of Illinois will have to sort out allegations that Gov. Rod Blagojevich sought kickbacks in choosing a successor for Obama’s Senate seat.
With regard to the tragic disaster that he often refers to as his presidency, Bush had this to say: “I didn’t compromise my soul to be a popular guy.”
No, Mr. President, you didn’t compromise your soul – you merely compromised the soul of your country.
During the interview, Bush also said that “Presidents fail when they make decisions based on opinion polls.”
“Look, everybody likes to be popular,” said one of the worst chief executives in American history. “What do you expect? We’ve got a major economic problem and I’m the president during the major economic problem. I mean, do people approve of the economy? No. I don’t approve of the economy. … I’ve been a wartime president. I’ve dealt with two economic recessions now. I’ve had, hell, a lot of serious challenges. What matters to me is I didn’t compromise my soul to be a popular guy.”
I guess this is Bush’s way of saying that he never follows the polls, as opposed to his poll-driven predecessor. That’s odd, because I seem to recall the Bush White House hiring an academic pollster for the National Security Council a few years back. This guy conducted some research and concluded that “The key to public support for the war is not the number of casualties in Iraq, nor whether the war was right or wrong — but whether people feel like we’re going to win.”
There are more examples like this, but it would take up too much space to document them here. In any case, Bush is totally right – presidents who follow polls tend to be failures. And he’s one of the worst.
Sources: Breitbar.com and BuzzFlash.com
But your allegation fails. He is right, he DIDN’T follow the polls, and his dismal approval ratings prove it.
We are still left with the fact that you and he disagree on his main point, which is how his actions may or may have not protectd the country.
And whatever you may feel about how his principles mesh with the democratic principles of the country as a whole, he did NOT compromise HIS principles.
His hiring of a pollster doesn’t violate that, as the reason he did was to be able to find out ways to elicit public support for the war, and not to alter his actions to garner public support.
Proof of that is that he failed to gain that support.