Bush II administration at 22% approval rating, meets Truman's 1952 record

Washington D.C.--Not since records began to be kept--in 1938--has a president been so despised, with the old record, Harry S. Truman.

You know him: the guy the Republicans keep bringing-up as a "great president" who showed certainty and ignored the public, and how they wish he was one of theirs. That must be because he was a corrupt mental midget who authorized dropping the atomic bomb on the Japanese to keep the Russians out of that nation, and...oh yeah, because he wouldn't listen to the public will.

They can have him, but it's not going to do the GOP any good.

By 1952, Americans had only been involved in the Korean War (euphemistically called a "police action," circumventing Congress in a similar fashion as occurred in 2002), had faced a seemingly endless postwar economic downturn, and were frankly sick of looking at the moron who replaced FDR when he died in 1945. As we all know, they didn't make a good choice after Truman, so why should Americans stop screwing-up now? Because the stakes are significantly higher.

Certainly, the Cold War was on the minds of most of the wrongheaded public of that time, but they should have known clearly that the Soviet Union was more of a threat to itself than the rest of the world. In fact, the only real threat posed was to the "captive nations" that Russia surrounded itself with after losing over 20 million of its citizens during WWII. We can assume had this happened to the United States, the reaction would have been much stronger.

The polls are only stating the obvious about George W. Bush: we never asked for him, we never wanted him, and only a small percentage of the electorate elected and supported him. The problem is, a smidgen of them were the economic elites, the rest being small business people and rednecks who don't understand their own interests very well.

None of this matters. What matters is the bailout and the fact that it isn't going to work. What it will do is to worsen an already bad situation, and fortunately, the Republican Party is going to be one of the greater recipients of the fallout when the public is finally affected directly by their policies at virtually every level of society. What no one appears to understand is that Wall Street, Congress, and the White House have all pushed things too far and that it's time to pay the piper, the bill has come due.

A 22% approval rating is going to look good in a few weeks.