The 22% Solution

It seems there is a consensus among the living: George W. Bush is the worst President in the history of polling, leaving office with a miserable 22% approval rating. His trusted sidekick, Richard Bruce Cheney, Vice President for Torture, leaves office with an even more astounding 13%.
As a natural contrarian, I tend to think that most people have things wrong most of the time; indeed, ’twere it not otherwise, everyone would have invested in the right stocks, bet on the right horse, made the right career decisions, and so forth… or voted for the right candidate. As you know, these things rarely ever happen. But in this case, the question has to be, just who are these 22% incapable of assessing reality? Even accepting that they might just like Dubya personally… who are the 13% who like Cheney? I mean, just how large is Halliburton’s management corps?
Admittedly, nearly 40% of the country voted for Herbert Hoover in 1932, of course, just four years after he garnered 58% of the vote and relegated Al Smith and the Democrats to only 40%… A Depression will do that, after all.
We’ll have the rest of history to discuss just how bad George W. Bush’s Presidency has been… we still need to remember that it’s not even over: there’s still plenty of time, for example, for him to pardon his upper echelon members responsible for his Administration’s crimes against humanity and crimes agaist the Constitution (Lynndie England… sorry, we don’t mean you), and who knows… maybe get us in another war somewhere…
But at this point, I just want to comment on all the wonderful emotions that the Bush Presidency has brought to bear: paranoia, xenophobia, fear, anger, denial, helplessness, intolerance… in short, all of the underpinnings of the Great Southern Strategy that has kept the Republican Party going since Reagan: racism masquerading as “family and moral values,” now finally brought out into the open, thanks to traumatic events. It seems, however, that this envelope got pushed so far… it finally got torn apart.
And now it seems, only a 22% share of the nation is still willing to be so moved… Progress? Or just national exhaustion…
Who knows? The 78% of us who are at least capable of recognizing that there is not a single aspect of George W. Bush’s Presidency, other than its ending, of which we approve… we’ve got an awful lot of clean-up to do. Best, quite frankly, we not waste too much energy on our well-justified anger at those who are, thankfully, leaving.
Because they have surely earned that anger.