Thirty-four

The latest CBS News poll shows that Bush's approval rating among American voters has sunk to a new all-time low of 34 percent. His numbers rebounded a little after the first of the year, but have dropped eight points since February first.

The Dubai Ports deal is the immediate cause of this sudden plunge in Bush's numbers, but the continuing Katrina clusterfuck and the Iraq War news have hurt him as well. The CBS poll shows that now only 30 percent of us approve of the way Bush is handling the war.

Ana Nicole Smith is now more popular than Bush.

The dictator's response to his sinking fortunes, as Joe Klein comments in Time Magazine, is to remain stuck on stupid, repeating the exact same talking points and mindless assertions that got him where he is, like a parrot with a small vocabulary.

The president, Klein reports "has spent most of the past few weeks traveling the country, selling the vaporous 'policies' he proposed in his State of the Union address...three days after the terrorist attack on Iraq's Golden Mosque, Bush gave another of his 'freedom's on the march in the Middle East' speeches to a subdued American Legion audience in Washington."

In the meantime, Cheney's approval rating, according to the same poll, is now 18 percent, or slightly less popular than Herpes Simplex Virus II.

The leaky vessel of the second neocon administration simply sails on, however, seemingly unaware of its own misfortune -- and ours. As the inimitable James Wolcott observes, "Bush is on Fox News delivering a speech in Indiana, looking jaunty and relaxed, repeating soundbites such as 'As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down' and working that Determined Jaw as if he were personally going to grind terrorists between his back molars. He has to repeat himself ad nauseum because if he paused to reflect on the harm he's done and the horror he's unleashed he'd collapse like a paper cup crushed beneath a boot."