More Bad News for Dictators and Trolls everywhere

On Monday it was USAToday/Gallup, today it's NYTimes/CBS News. It's going from bad to worse for our glorious President.

Americans have a bleaker view of the country's direction than at any time in more than two decades, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. Sharp disapproval of President Bush's handling of gasoline prices has combined with intensified unhappiness about Iraq to create a grim political environment for the White House and Congressional Republicans.

Wanna see some numbers? Here's the big one:

Mr. Bush's overall job approval rating hit another new low, 31 percent, tying the low point of his father in July 1992, four months before the elder Mr. Bush lost his bid for a second term to Bill Clinton. That is the third lowest approval rating of any president in 50 years; only Richard M. Nixon and Jimmy Carter were viewed less favorably. [emphasis added]

I'm not sure on exactly when Nixon and Carter were lower, but remember that Nixon had Watergate and Carter had the Iranian Hostage Crisis (with the failed rescue attempt) to bring their respective numbers down. Bush has, well if you don't know by now, you haven't been paying attention to this blog.

Some more bad news for Dubya:

Mr. Bush is even losing support from what has been his base: 51 percent of conservatives and 69 percent of Republicans approve of the way Mr. Bush is handling his job. In both cases, those figures are a substantial drop in support from four months ago.

Only about half of the nation's conservatives approve of the way he's doing his job?

Fifty percent said Democrats came closer than Republicans to sharing their moral values, compared with 37 percent who said Republicans shared their values. A majority said Republican members of Congress were more likely to be financially corrupt than Democratic members of Congress, suggesting that Democrats may be making headway in their efforts to portray Republicans as having created a "culture of corruption" in Washington.[emphasis added]

I guess we could blame the MSM on this one. Why do they just report on all the bad news about God's Own Party? The fact that they can't bring themselves to say anything about the (few?) republicans who aren't tied up in the Abramhoff or Delay or Cunningham corruption scandals proves their obvious liberal bias. It's just like Iraq - if they insist on reporting the bad stuff while ignoring the good, they're liberals. The Bastards.

Haha - back to reality. And speaking of Iraq:

The poll showed a further decline in support for the Iraq war, the issue that has most eaten into Mr. Bush's public support. The percentage of respondents who said going to war in Iraq was the correct decision slipped to a new low of 39 percent, down from 47 percent in January. Two-thirds said they had little or no confidence that Mr. Bush could successfully end the war.[emphasis added]

And:

On Iraq, two-thirds of poll respondents said they disapproved of how the president had handled the war. Fifty-six percent said going to war in the first place was a mistake, up from 50 percent in January. And 60 percent said things were going "somewhat or very badly" in the drive to stabilize the country. Sixty-three percent disapproved of Mr. Bush's handling of foreign policy in general.[emphasis added]

Ouch.

No wonder he thinks the high point of his presidency was when he caught a big fish. Maybe he was actually telling the truth then. Imagine that!

For the skeptics in the audience here's how the poll was taken. And here are the complete results.