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John McCain’s Achilles Heel

Posted by SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist in At TMV.
Feb 29th, 2008 | Comments

No, it’s not all his lobbyist buddies or that woman who looks strikingly like his wife. It’s President Bush, who in a new national poll has surpassed Richard Nixon as the modern president with the highest negative rating.

Some 52 percent of those surveyed place Bush at the bottom end of the scale as either “below average” or a “failure”, compared to 50 percent who said the same about Nixon. Bush also beats out Nixon on the failure scale – one in three Americans (33 percent) say Bush is a failure as a president, up from 30 percent who said the same last year. Most Democrats (60 percent) view Bush as a failure, but half as many independents (29 percent) feel the same, compared to just 7 percent of Republicans.

McCain has been chary to criticize Bush, and its hard to see how he’ll get much traction beyond the shrunken Republican base if he doesn’t.

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ChrisWWW

This won't stop the Bushists from screaming BDS at the top of their lungs...

PaulSilver

What's BDS?

Slamfu

Bush Derangment Syndrome. Its from the Clinton Derangement Syndrome cries of the 90's. Except that where CDS stemmed from blowjobs in the Oval Office and covering it up, BDS stems from coverups about secret meetings with energy execs before a war gets started on false premises, torture of prisoners and suspension of habeus corpus, a justice dept turned into lapdogs for the executive branch, CIA agents getting outed, corporate welfare on an unprecidented scale, incompetent appointments, and missing emails and records regarding all the above when Congress actually excercised its rights to demand an accounting. Oh yea, and turning the Dept of the Interior over to the very people it was designed to protect us from.

Also the constant stream of BS coming from the administration on just about any topic you care to name.

Slamfu

Guess you could say I have a pretty strong case of BDS. Personally I just call it paying attention.

cosmoetica

Actually the real BDS is those who still defend the Prez.

DLS

This thread and nearly all remarks posted with it demonstrate BDS. Even my rad-lib friend who cannot bear to say the name of "that man in the White House," because she considers him to be a human form of toxic waste, doesn't engage in deranged Bush-bashing to the point of being gratuitous or bizarre (using Bhutto's assassination as an excuse or "reason" to bash Bush, for example).

Slamfu

No need to get Bhutto involved, I'll stick to my examples from above.

Jim_Satterfield

And as you might notice, Paul, in the minds of some people any criticism of Bush makes it Bush Derangement Syndrome. Because of course if you disapprove of this Administration you must be irrational and mentally ill.

Jim_Satterfield

I see pictures. Lots and lots of pictures. McCain smiling with Bush. McCain hugging Bush. McCain being hugged by Bush. Captions along the line of "Do we really need 4 more years?".

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