So you can fool 23% of the people all the time.

We members of the I Told You So Caucus may officially take pleasure in this.

The pleasure is bittersweet, however, knowing how this guy fouled up the country.

It seems as if 23 percent has become the Mendoza Line of Presidental approval ratings.

In his book "Homegrown Democrat," Garrison Keillor aptly characterizes George W. Bush as"a man who should not have sought public office. A man with almost nothing admirable in his résumé ... a small petulant man who keeps diminishing with time." Amen to that!

I hope he leads an extremely private life, seen only by his attorney and relatives on visitors' day.

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back to their money or their vast carelessness, or
whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made..." (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby)

New poll question.
Do you believe Bush and Cheney should be tried for various crimes and found guilty and put in prison?

Obviously a speaking tour, a book or a humanitarian ambassador appointment are all completely out of the question. Maybe Pickles and he can do something relatively unheard of in the states; contract cholera and die!

Okay, even for me that's a little harsh.. How about he and pickles become the new spokespeople for DSW or Shoe Pavilion?

Here, direct from the pages of today's NYT, is the quote I think best defines the Bush legacy: "In hindsight, many economists say, the United States should have recognized that borrowing from abroad for consumption and deficit spending at home was not a formula for economic success."

Who but the Bush administration could imagine that such a policy might lead to economic success? What kind of retard could believe that, and still carry the title of "economist"?

Bush's legacy is alive in all the executives who adopted the modus operandi, "IWBH", or "I Won't Be Here". Now they're rolling in ill-gotten gains - at least those who didn't invest them all - and will experience no punishment whatsoever.

I'm still amazed that 23% of USians will miss him. Unless those 23% include pardonees and such?

In circumstances like these, I find comfort in turning to the Good Book:

Hate (v): "Abhor, Abominate, Anathematize, Condemn, Curse, Deplore, Deprecate, Deride, Despise, Detest, Disdain, Disfavor, Disparage, Execrate, Loathe, Reject, Repel, Repudiate, Repulse, Revulse, Revile, Scorn, Shun, Spurn"

Thus spake Roget.

Oh, yeah: "Excoriate" and "Extirpate."
Can't imagine how I left those out.
Happy New Year, all.

I was/is one of the whack-jobs??? My only question is who are the 33%, they can't be living in this country? IMHO,THEY are the whack-jobs.

I been around long enough to remember LBJ and Nixon. I never thought we would have a president as abominable as Nixon, but Bush was able to surpass him by 2003.

I always knew Bush was arrogant and incompetent, but never imagined he would be as bad as he turned out to be.

He and Cheney should never step foot in a public space for the rest of their lives.

don't like him, don't trust him, don't think he cares about them, and don't admire him. The public doesn't think Bush united the country, doesn't think he brought about the change we needed, and believes he failed to manage the government effectively

Well, I'm glad they finally figured that out. A number of us thought that all along.

What, I wonder, is the overlap between that 23% and believers in a flat earth?

"In hindsight, many economists say, the United States should have recognized that borrowing from abroad for consumption and deficit spending at home was not a formula for economic success."

Cripes Alblighty. YA THINK??????

Gore Vidal predicted as much. I can't recall if it was before or after 9/11, but he remarked around that time that Bush would leave office as the most despised president in the country's history.

If you need a "Legacy Project" you probably don't really have a legacy.

Well, we'll have to thank the Keep The Bush Disaster In The Public's Eye Legacy Project for prolong the Republican party's Bush agony and providing additional late night TV jokes just when we most need them.

The Republicans are so bad that Americans actually went out and voted for Democrats. Bush is so gobsmackingly awful that America actually elected a (half-) black guy as president. (Hey, whatever it takes.) Churchill said that Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing, after trying everything else first. Bush falls into the "everything else" category.

Do you believe Bush and Cheney should be tried for various crimes and found guilty and put in prison?

Gandalf,

Hell yes ! !

If America really recognized merit and justice it would promote those Liberals (and others) who were right about Bush and his policies and they would reject anybody who so much as smiled when Bush spoke.

But already we're seeing them trashing Obama and he hasn't even taken office yet.

Something is terribly wrong in all this.

I'm still amazed that 23% of USians will miss him.

If your sole criterion for excellence in a president can be reduced to his avoiding oral sex and/or hastening the End of Days, I can see someone missing him.

If your sole criterion for excellence in a president is whether he pissed off the liberals, I can see someone missing him.

The more interesting question is, how the hell am I supposed to sleep at night knowing I share a country with, say, 30 million people whose desiderata in a President are limited to his avoiding oral sex, hastening the End of Days, and pissing off the liberals.

It's like living near a leaky dam....

"it must be pleasant to believe one's own lies"
That would be Mr. Bush!

While I answer to the general description of 'whack-job from the left,' and have never thought that President* Bush was even faintly likeable (which is to say, I could never get past my abhorrence of his administration's policies [such as they were]). That said, I was rather amused by the spate of accusations from supporters who branded we dissenters "Bush haters." It is my favorite label for those who revere rationality and evidence based governance, and I was sorry to see use of the phrase diminish in popularity.

I won't go so far as to say that we're all (or mostly) Bush haters now, but I wonder if those who used the term previously comprise the 23% of us who never looked for reality based decision making in the first place, and can hardly be expected to start now.

Bush was an enormously successful president -- at accomplishing what he actually set out to accomplish, which was to loot and plunder the wealth of the country for the enrichment of America's Ultra-Rich Ruling Class, Inc., a.k.a. "the top one percent", a.k.a. "Bush's base".

It is true that he failed to accomplish a couple of very big things.

He was not able to "privatize" Social Security into the hands of his cronies and financial backers on Wall Street -- though he and his gang of career white collar crooks did bilk the Congress and the taxpayers out of a trillion dollar "bailout" for the Wall Street racketeers, a trillion dollars that is unaccountably vanishing at this very moment, with no apparent positive effect on "the economy" except for the urgent matter of ensuring that the rich stay rich.

And Bush was not able to hand over the vast oil wealth of an Iraq ruled by an authoritarian US puppet dictatorship, headed by Ahmed Chalabi as the "new improved Saddam", to the US oil corporations -- though the war did enrich the military-industrial-mercenary complex, leaving the taxpayers another trillion-dollar tab for unaccountably vanished money.

But Bush had many other successes, from the massive tax cuts for the ultra-rich, to protecting ExxonMobil's hundreds of billions of dollars in annual profits from global warming legislation.

Bush turned the executive branch into an organized crime enterprise run entirely for corrupt purposes of private financial gain at the public expense, and triumphantly presided over the largest transfer of wealth and power to the wealthy and powerful from the working class and middle class in the history of this country.

That is Bush's victory and a legacy of success that will shape the future of this country for decades to come.

Well, at least some of the 23% are probably people who enjoyed hating him so much they don't know how they're going to live without him! Codependency is such a sad condition.

Bush can play a very important role after Jan. 20, although he will probably choose not to. He will probably have himself embalmed when the time comes, making it impossible to use him for fertilizer.