Presidents and Polls

While I was listening to George and Laura on the Larry King Show last night it seemed to me that they were disconnected from reality. Larry kept asking them if the low poll ranking bothered them or caused them to loose sleep. Both of them said that they didn’t worry about the polls and that George was going to continue to govern according his convictions. In other words they seemed to say that once you are elected you don’t need to be responsive to the wishes of the majority of the people. They think that a President who listens to the polls would be a failure. It is good that we have the opportunity to change presidents every four years.

George keeps tying the Iraq conflict to the “War on Terror” and contend that we must fight them there or we will need to fight them here. I believe that there was no tie between September 11, 2001 and the Government of Iraq. George created the conflict and linked it to terror. If we had used the resources that are tied up in that misbegotten venture to pursue those who planed a carried out the September attack we would be in a much safer world today.

No question that Saddam was and is a bad cat and he was harmful to the Iraqi people. But we can not justify the invasion of that county based on that. Nor can we justify staying there based on the idea that we are creating a democracy. It seems that George did not learn anything from Viet Nam or from the Russian failure in Afghanistan. The majority in Iraq may want a theocracy. Who are we to tell them that they shouldn’t?