Nolan Burkholder
When the President of the United States is less popular now than Spiro Agnew was in 1973, we know we have a problem. Bush’s approval rating is at 33 percent as of Oct. 4, 2007, according to the Gallup Poll.
Then-Vice President Agnew’s approval rating just before his conviction for criminal tax evasion was 45 percent, which is the same as former New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey in August 2004, after he admitted to having an extramarital affair with a man and resigned from the job.
The one public figure Bush is more popular than? Paris Hilton, brainless bobblehead and hotel heir, who has an approval rating of 15%, according to a Gallup poll.
And Bush didn’t even do anything criminally foul, did he? Well, actually, he did. He misled Congress and the American public regarding the threat posed by Iraq in order to justify a war against Iraq and intentionally conspired with others to defraud the United States in connection with the war in Iraq, which is a violation of Title 18 of the United States Code, Section 371.
Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney also conspired to torture prisoners in violation of the Federal Torture Act, Title 18 of the US Code, Section 113C, the UN Torture Convention and the Geneva Convention.
It gets worse. Bush and Cheney admitted to ordering the National Security Agency to conduct electronic surveillance of American civilians without seeking warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which is a violation of Title 50, Section 1805 of the US Code.
In addition to criminal violations, Bush is spending about $200 million a day on the war in Iraq, or $6 billion a month, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. $6 billion is also Nigeria’s gross domestic product.
It doesn’t even make sense that, with these obvious violations and apparent disregard for the law, Bush has been in office for almost seven years. The blame is starting to shift from Bush, who is only doing what he thinks is right, to the American people, who are apparently not doing quite enough to impeach the man.
Of course impeachment efforts can be found around every corner, but they mean very little if they can’t join efforts and become one huge, angry mob. People can bombard Congress with e-mails, but then again, e-mail is the easiest form of communication to ignore.
People can start Web sites, but those are even easier to ignore than e-mail. People can post signs by the side of the freeway, like the one in Culver City right next to the 405 by the Jefferson Blvd. off-ramp, reading simply “Impeach”.
But all of these will go unnoticed by Congress or the White House if people don’t start putting senators’ and representatives’ jobs and votes on the line.
Of course, we can’t just impeach Bush, because then Cheney would become president, and that would be even worse. His approval rating is 18 percent, according to the Gallup Poll–less popular with Americans than Joseph Stalin is with Russians (20 percent in 2003-Gallup) — and Stalin was purportedly responsible for the deaths of millions of people. Cheney is also less popular than Michael Jackson, whose approval rating was 23 percent (Gallup) just after being found not guilty of child molestation and O.J. Simpson just after his murder trial in 1995 (29%, Gallup).
After all, on that certain hunting trip, Cheney shot a very rare species – someone who liked him!
The bottom line is that the longer Bush and Cheney stay in office, the angrier the Middle East is going to get at us, the smaller the ice caps will get, the more will be poured down the drain into the war in Iraq and generally, the welfare of America is going to go down, and down, and down – all because we have a man who basically got to lead the country as a favor from his dad.
As college students, we have a great opportunity to show the general public that we’re not the apathetic people they think we are. Go to impeachbush.org and cast your vote–it’s already at 963,821 and everyone is hoping that it will reach a million. We have the power to make sure Bush and Cheney are gone before Jan. 20, 2009.