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George W Bush approval rating polled at 90% by Gallup, the highest presidential approval rating ever recorded in US history (September 24th, 2001)
Link information
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- Title
- Bush Job Approval Highest in Gallup History
- Authors
- Gallup, Inc.
- Published
- Sep 24 2001
- Word count
- 817 words
Fear and terror is a helluva approval ratings maker.
9/11 was a great case study of the power of fear and gut reaction in politics.
George W gets a lot of flak. I'd like to ask: which president would have the nerves to react to September 11 in a calm, rational, deliberate manner? Americans lost more people on a single strike than Pearl Harbor, in 1941. And that got them into World War 2! Before that Ted Roosevelt basically invented a war so that he could see combat for himself. 10 years later, when Obama killed Bin Laden in what can only be called a high profile assassination, there was carnival in the streets of the US. I'm not here to defend the sanctity of GWB, but really, let's put things in perspective.
This was in a speech he gave in 2001:
We should also remember how blatantly in bed with the corporate side of the military industrial complex the GWB administration was (Cheney and Halliburton, etc..) It was maybe the first time in history an administration didn't really try to hide it (or just did a terrible job).
They waged a war for oil and profits and had the American people waving flags and calling for more.
It wasn't the first time, but it established beyond doubt that the aforementioned financial interests and their politicians can run their game right out in the open and the public at large will go along.
Also, GWB managed to make the office look like a joke over and over, in a way that few before had managed. Before Trump wrecked the curve, he was the wikimedia commons image for Presidential dunce.
I don't have any issue with his immediate response following 9/11. It's pretty much everything else he did afterwards that I take issue with. Afghanistan should've been small targeted strikes rather than a full-blown occupation followed by nation-building. Iraq never should've happened at all.
Note that the question was not "Should America attack Iraq or Afghanistan in retaliation...". I don't recall what we knew about the attacks at that point, so I don't know what the response would have been to those question, but I do remember thinking, "Why are we talking about going into Iraq? What did they have to do with this?" when we eventually did start having those specific discussions.
Not that it matters. Tempers tend to run hot immediately after a big event, so I'm not sure how relevant the responses are to understanding the state of Americans at that point. People from another country killed thousands of our citizens on our own soil. I think that in the heat of the moment, most people would want to retaliate for an act like that. (I'm not saying it's the right response, just that it's the human response.)
In a similar vein, Vladimir Putin's approval rating after the Russian apartment bombings, which some believe to be an intentional attack to boost ratings (notice former President Yeltsin was in the single digits of approval) so that Putin could cement his power.
Being a war criminal pays off I see. Good to know.
I mean this was done in 2001, most of the war crime-y stuff happened in the following years (after which approval ratings declined). By 2001 I think the strongest claims you could make about Bush doing wrong was the Florida election debacle.
This was 8 months into his presidency, just two weeks after 9/11. Long before the War on Terror, Iraq, and the CIA torture scandal