Are you sitting down?
Bush wasn't when he gave his $87 billion speech a couple of Sundays ago that bombed in front of TV audiences. His ratings have been falling ever since. And the president's approval ratings continued to tank after the following Sunday, when Cheney briefly came out of his cave to lie on national TV about why and how we went to war.
Silly me. . .I thought the Bush speech bombed because the war is going badly, job losses at home continue to mount, our army is overstretched, the administration's credibility has taken quite a hit lately, major economists have excoriated tax cuts for the rich and ballooning deficit-spending, money for Iraq is money from the coffers of schools, libraries, health care and even homeland security. But nope! It seems that Bush's difficulties lie (or I should say,stand) somewhere else:
"There was widespread agreement among these Republicans that the speech did little if anything to help steady his standing, which had been hurt by a stream of bad news from Iraq and disclosures about the administration's handling of prewar intelligence.
Several of these Republicans complained about the decision to have Bush stand and read from a TelePrompTer instead of showing him seated and speaking more conversationally.
"Can you find anybody on Capitol Hill who thinks, 'Boy, that really gave us momentum?' " one presidential adviser asked. "The setting was a failure. The linguistics were bad. The language was off. It wasn't typical Bush language, and he should have been in front of a group. He isn't at his best discussing the appropriations process."
In other words, get that man a chair--and Baghdad really will be more like Chicago--with even worse weather than the windy city in July and August!
10:28:51 PM 
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