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Tomgram: John Brown's Wake-up Call for the President

[Note to Tomdispatch readers: I'll be traveling much of the week -- with no access to email until perhaps Tuesday, limited access until Thursday, and minimal ability to respond to letters and requests.]

Just a week back, I suggested that there was no reason to believe the President's approval ratings had bottomed out. In fact, I wrote, "There is no reason to believe that a polling bottom exists for this President, not even perhaps the Nixonian Age of Watergate nadir in the lower 20% range." Now, the latest Fox News poll puts the President at an all-time low -- a 33% approval rating. Democrats are long gone; independents peeling away in droves; and, it seems, even Republicans not so desperately far behind.

Fox News, whose trusty team not a month ago could be found banging away at CBS News (when its poll hit 34%) for "wildly oversampl[ing] Democrats," now tells us that "for the first time under 70% of Republicans approve of the Bush presidency." As we all know, the President has already lost the informal poll of generals and now, according to historian Sean Wilentz in Rolling Stone magazine, he's lost the historians, too. Across the political spectrum, Wilentz writes, historians are coming to agree that George Bush is the worst president in U.S. history. ("No previous president appears to have squandered the public's trust more than Bush has.") President James Buchanan's shade can now rest easy.

Increasingly, the price of unleaded regular at the local gas pump (on average, $2.86; in California, $3) and the price of a barrel of crude oil ($75), not to speak of the ever more disastrous situation in Iraq, the unreconstructed New Orleans and Mississippi coasts, the ever-deepening Plame case investigation, all those conservatives undergoing conversion experiences, the range of government bureaucrats and intelligence officials leaking up an angry storm as well as the former officials (as on 60 Minutes tonight) spilling the beans about administration misdeeds,! and too many other disparate phenomena to name indicate that George and his pals stand in the rubble of their project to dominate the American public and the world.

On March 10, 2003, diplomat John Brown wrote an open letter to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell submitting his resignation in protest against the onrushing invasion of Iraq. He wrote in part: "The president has failed: To explain clearly why our brave men and women in uniform should be ready to sacrifice their lives in a war on Iraq at this time; to lay out the full ramifications of this war, including the extent of innocent civilian casualties; to specify the economic costs of the war for ordinary Americans; to clarify how the war would help rid the world of terror; to take international public opinion against the war into serious consideration." And he added that this administration in its "unjustified use of force" was "giving birth to an anti-American century."

Despite the millions then demonstrating worldwide, Brown was part of a rather lonely crowd in American officialdom. (Only three State Department officials resigned in protest.) But how on target he proved to be. Now, viewing that rubble, all those wasted lives, and the trillion-dollar or more Afghan-Iraq wars, he writes directly to the President, calling on him to take some responsibility for what he has wrought. Tom

posted by Annamarie at 6:49 PM