Every day, as I read the New York Times online, I shake my head in wonder at its dishonesty. Read this. By what standard is George W. Bush "unpopular"? Seriously. The man was elected president twice. Yes, he got fewer popular votes than Al Gore in 2000, but the vote was close. He was as popular as he was unpopular. When he was reelected in 2004, he garnered more votes than his opponent. Doesn't this make him a "popular" president? Yes, there are groups within which George W. Bush is unpopular, but the term "unpopular" is not qualified in the story. It doesn't say, for example, that George W. Bush is unpopular among New York Times employees (which I'm sure is true) or residents of New York City or college professors or Democrats or homosexuals or blacks or readers of the Times. Bush Derangement Syndrome is alive and well in the newspaper of record.
Addendum: Here is a puzzling paragraph from the Times story:
“There really isn’t a conservative conversation right now,” Mr. [David] Frum said. “Conservatives are really unwilling to do any stringent analysis of why they lost in 2008. We won’t start to really have a serious conversation until we acknowledge that the typical American was less well off after eight years of Bush.”
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that what Frum says is true, namely, that "the typical American was less well off after eight years of Bush." What does that show? The proper comparison is not between how Americans fared in 2000 and how they fared in 2008, but between how they fared under George W. Bush and how they would have fared under Democrat presidents. Does anyone seriously believe that they would have fared better under Democrat presidents? A smart man like Frum should know better than to say such stupid things.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 