Bush @ 28%

It's still mysterious to me: who are these people who still support Bush? If he is at 28% approval, as the latest Newsweek poll reports, then maybe Bush is now down to his ineradicable base, the evangelical wingnuts who have flicked it in where life on Earth is concerned. Commander Guy still pulls about 70% approval ratings from Republicans, which strongly suggests that political and religious affiliations have entered into some sort of unholy matrimony in the reptilian brains of a large swath of the American population. I leave out the 1% or so of America's plutocratic class who like Bush simply because he doesn't get in the way of their unbridled acquisition of money. Team Bush, for example, is still researching global warming, while the rest of the civilized world has moved on to one of two positions: (1) frantically trying to deal with it, or (2) admitting that it's too late.

When I look at the photos above, I get the strong sense that Bush simply plays at being President. Long ago he figured out that the presidency was simply another in a long line of jobs for which he had no aptitude. It's always seemed ludicrous to me that politicians debate Bush's "policies," as if they were dealing with a coherent set of principles based on thorough analysis. They're nothing of the kind. Take the current tactic du jour of his Democratic opposition. They're talking of "de-authorizing" the Iraq War. Someone in the Democratic Caucus should read the original damned Authorization for Use of Military Force, October, 2002. It is, as almost all Congressional enactments are, an incomprehensible pile of bullshit. Nevertheless, the "authorization" for invading Iraq, for each and every point, depends on Saddam Hussein being in power. Nothing in the Authorization in the least grants Bush permission to engage in the endless "nation-building" exercise we've been enmeshed in since the Mission Accomplished speech. It's not a matter of "de-authorizing" the war; it's a question of pointing out there is no authority for what we're doing. None whatsoever. It is a full-blown Constitutional crisis (though no one ever talks about it) that the "President" continues prosecuting a war for which there is no legal basis, and if Congress were serious about stopping him, they could initiate litigation in the Supreme Court, hoping to slip it by the pervert/psycho wing of the Court.

So the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we've got about 8 years to deal decisively with global warming, or the most extreme consequences will become unavoidable. The United States, of course, sits at the very center of the action plan, and the simian pretender pictured above sits at the very center of the U.S. We can't figure out how to stop a war which the vast majority of the American populace wants over right now. Which we don't need to fight. For which there is no legal authority. Which is bleeding us dry. And the same Congress is supposed to come up with an integrated, highly technical, comprehensive plan for averting disaster for the world?