Bush completely ignored the warnings about Katrina, and earlier, had refused to fund the reinforcement of the levees even though he was warned they were vulnerable long before the hurricane. He completely botched the preparation and the aftermath. And he GOT US INTO Iraq!! How are either of these events "external" to him? Even that premise is unbelievably forgiving.

Increasingly, every time I walk past the NYT front door on West 43rd Street, I find it hard to resist the desire to go thru the revolving doors and hurl a shoe box filled with cow manure into the lobby. It's a great if impotent fantasy. It's really appalling to me to contrast the NYT of today with the paper I remember from back in June 1971 when I was finishing service in Vietnam and the paper courageously defied the U.S. government and published the Pentagon Papers. Jeez!

Isn't that the Bart Simpson (TM) defense? Matt Groening should be calling his lawyers.

Dick Cheney says he didn't chose to be veep, it was thrust upon him. Karl Rove says Bush didn't chose to invade Iraq, it just happened on his watch. Katrina? Who could possibly expect a hurrican would hit New Orleans and breach it's levees? When these yahoos harp and rant againts the Baby Boomers and their '60's mentality of do what feels good whithout accepting any responsibility, well, we know now they know of what they speak.

Until they acknowledge that 40% of Bush's approval rating earlier in his presidency came from his good fortune in being President during the worst terrorist attack in the nation's history (not to mention the extreme stupidity of people who approve of someone just because something really bad happened while he was in charge--I can see a sympathy effect if he'd been injured or lost family members on 9/11, by approving of him based on something that AT BEST he had nothing to do with, and at worst should have prevented is just idiocy), you'll forgive me for not feeling sorry for him when other external events cause his popularity to drop.

The 6-8% of the us (depending on whose polling you believe) that have consistently disapproved of him even during his "best" days have known he was an incompetant idiot all along, thank you very much. To the rest of you flip-floppers: TOLD YA SO.

The Iraq War was an external event? Just something that happened that the Bush administration had nothing to do with starting, and no choice about how to handle? To paraphrase Keith Olbermann from a recent "Countdown": Who do they think they're effing kidding?

The whole article seems to smack with this issue.

"The WH isn't managing the image well enough. Never mind that what it's doing plain sucks, if sugar coat the bitter pill well enough, no one would be complaining."

Sure, the core is terrible poison, but make the coating taste nice.

What is this country coming to when the coating is more important than the core?

Sheesh,

Greg

When things don't go your way, no much you cheat, lie, or steal, blame God!

It's funny how the Republican response is "we can't help it when bad things happen."

Naturally, nobody can help it when bad things happen (unless, as in the case of the Iraq war, it's a bad thing you yourself started) but the real measure of a leader's character is how he or she shepherds the rest of us through the bad times that are as unforseeable as they are inevitable.