Not quite five months after a re-election victory that he claimed earned him political capital to spend, Bush's approval ratings are languishing in the mid-40 percent range and his Social Security plan for individual investment accounts seems to be winning few friends, either in Congress or among the general public.
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Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who is chairman of the Senate panel responsible for Social Security, said in an interview with The Washington Post: "I don't think [Bush] has made much progress on solving the solvency issue or what to do about personal accounts. It concerns me because as time goes on, I was hoping the President would be able to make my job easier. We are not hearing from the grass roots that, by golly, you guys in Congress have to work on this."
Well, golly, Chuck. Perhaps that's an indication that you need to get off your dimpled white ass and get busy doing something productive, like ... oh, golly, I dunno ... saving the motherfucking World from certain motherfucking doom:
Planet Earth stands on the cusp of disaster and people should no longer take it for granted that their children and grandchildren will survive in the environmentally degraded world of the 21st century. This is not the doom-laden talk of green activists but the considered opinion of 1,300 leading scientists from 95 countries who will today publish a detailed assessment of the state of the world at the start of the new millennium.
Doing something about it might not be as "easy" as reading the lines handed to you by the White House. But if you're looking for an easy job, maybe you should go stand guard over the Pope's feeding tube, or some shit.
Said Thomas Mann, an analyst at the Brookings Institution, "It matters what you're trying to sell. ... when you talk about Social Security, that's real, that's close, that's dear, that's something people care about."
Good point -- it helps explain the Administration's easy "sell" of Saddam's non-existent WMD programmes. After all, what the fuck do we care how many tens of thousands of A-rabs get buried under our bombs?
Interesting post. While I wouldn't underestimate the racism element of bombing the shit out of Iraq, the war was sold as a way to protect us from a "grave and gathering" threat from Saddam's unmanned arial vehicles.
The Social Security pitch is a little different ... Iraqi chemicals and nuclear bombs aren't going to fall from the sky next week; someday SS *might* be insolvent and many who give a rip figure they'll be dead by that time anyhow.
Posted by: dack on April 5, 2005 08:01 AM