Poll Shows Bush Is Very Unpopular

Recent polls put President George Bush’s approval rating less than 46 percent. This is the lowest of any two-term president at this point in their term of any President in nearly 80 years. It places Bush in with Herbert Hoover after the Depression; Truman after Korea; Richard Nixon after Watergate; Jimmy Carter after Iran.

The Gallup/CNN/USA Today poll at the end of last week found that 50 percent of American adults now believe that the Bush administration "deliberately misled" them about why we had to go to war in Iraq.

A definition of a lie is to deliberately mislead. So it is fair to say that the average American in this pole understands that the president lied, but prefers to say it more politely.

What an astonishing fact! Half of all Americans believe the president lied on a matter of such importance that it has resulted in more than 1,500 young American deaths and over 10,000 casualties, many of them life altering. Now 53 percent of Americans believe the cost we are paying in Iraq is not worth it.

Some defenders of the current president may point to Harry Truman. While it's true that Truman was very unpopular at the end of his second term over the Korean War, the American people at least didn't blame him for lying to us to get into the war.

Error on the side of life equals State control

The current mantra that "if there is any doubt, error on the side of life" is a sound-bite that sounds good on TV in the service of expanding the control that the state has over your medical care, because to do that would remove from your surrogate the ability to make health care decisions, and is equivalent to the state ordering that medical care be provided regardless of your wishes. Endless appeals and endless state oversight has a similar effect to transfer power to the state to make medical decisions.

The over-riding principle that is cited in favor of this transfer of power to the state is the protection of life. The protection of life is not an absolute over-riding value. When it comes to medical care, personal autonomy overrides protection of life; otherwise, the law would require that life-saving health care be provided to you over your objections.

Nobody is willing to take that step and strip the individual of all their personal medical decisions, so advocates for the transfer of power to the state are left in the position of arguing that some decisions that you can make for yourself should never be made by your surrogate, but should be made by the state instead.

This is not an area where we should allow more State control of our lives.

We Should Close the Guantomomo Bay Base in Cuba

The Guantomomo Military Base in Cuba exhists for one reason only - to annoy Castro. Now I have nothing against annoying a tyrant like Castro, but for the policies and actions of a great nation like the United States to be dictated by such pettiness is inexcusable.

Schiavo

The Government has no business playing God and deciding when a person has endured enough and has the right to die. That is a purely personal decision to make. Why are we allowing the government to step in to make the choice for us? No one should be forced to stay alive for the benefit for the rest of us. That's intolerably cruel.