The Inexorable Weight of Evidence Drags Bush's Ratings to New Lows
In today's Post. The really good news is that a clear majority of people now give him low ratings for personal integrity and for the way his administration has handled ethical matters.
You can fool all of the people some of the time and so forth.
The really amazing thing is that this is a president who started out with unbelievable advantages. Most people really liked him--hard for me to imagine, but apparently true. Then came 9/11 and everybody (me included (though reluctantly)) rallied behind him. Only a truly exceptional record of dishonesty and incompetence has been able to erode the loyalty he amassed early on. People don't like to change their minds. They hate what Peirce calls "the irritation of doubt," and it takes a truly impressive amount of evidence to alter the opinions of this many people.
Of course, many of these people are the same people who came to like him because we were bombed, so their opinions don't count for much, one might argue...
I predict that he ratings won't fall much lower than this. By this point it's almost exclusively hard-core Republicans who still believe--or at least say that they believe--that he's a good president. He'd have to eat a baby on live television to go down below 30%.
The question is: will the electorate learn from this? Will they learn that it matters who we elect? That intelligence, knowledge, and intellectual and moral character are more important than superficial likeability? That we're not talking about electing a class president here?
Let's face it: probably not.
In today's Post. The really good news is that a clear majority of people now give him low ratings for personal integrity and for the way his administration has handled ethical matters.
You can fool all of the people some of the time and so forth.
The really amazing thing is that this is a president who started out with unbelievable advantages. Most people really liked him--hard for me to imagine, but apparently true. Then came 9/11 and everybody (me included (though reluctantly)) rallied behind him. Only a truly exceptional record of dishonesty and incompetence has been able to erode the loyalty he amassed early on. People don't like to change their minds. They hate what Peirce calls "the irritation of doubt," and it takes a truly impressive amount of evidence to alter the opinions of this many people.
Of course, many of these people are the same people who came to like him because we were bombed, so their opinions don't count for much, one might argue...
I predict that he ratings won't fall much lower than this. By this point it's almost exclusively hard-core Republicans who still believe--or at least say that they believe--that he's a good president. He'd have to eat a baby on live television to go down below 30%.
The question is: will the electorate learn from this? Will they learn that it matters who we elect? That intelligence, knowledge, and intellectual and moral character are more important than superficial likeability? That we're not talking about electing a class president here?
Let's face it: probably not.
posted by Winston Smith at
8:36 AM
5 Comments:
You can fool all of the people some of the time
I've always wondered which order the quantifiers go in here.
No wait, it's "You can fool some of the people all of the time" that I wonder that about.
Best to do this with tense logic, but maybe we could muddle by with:
There is a person S such that for every time t you can fool S at t?
Oh, is the other reading:
For every time t there is an S such that you can fool S at t?
Damn! Never saw that one before.
Good catch, Matt.
As Ruben well knows, you can spin baby-eating too ;-)
http://www.salon.com/comics/boll/2002/11/14/boll/print.html
Gore Vidal once remarked that there were some people who, if they saw Nixon strangling Pat on the WH lawn, would accept the explaination that he was trying to get a bone out of here throat.
On the bright side, when Chimpy's rating goes through the floorboards, the Repubs will be dragged down with him, and thus have no inclination to support any of his pro-corporate c***, like his version of "Social Security reform".
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