The World Agrees: Stop Him

By Robert Scheer

"Stop him before he kills again. That is the judgment of the American people, and indeed of the entire world, as to the performance of our president, and no State of the Union address can erase that dismal verdict.

President Bush has accomplished what Osama bin Laden only dreamed of by disgracing the model of American democracy in the eyes of the world. According to an exhaustive BBC poll, nearly three-quarters of those polled in 25 countries oppose the Bush policy on Iraq, and more than two-thirds believe the U.S. presence in the Middle East destabilizes the region......

But it is not just our failure in that all-important region that disgraces us. Those around the world who still believe we play a positive global role has dropped to a miserable 29 percent, strikingly similar to Bush’s overall performance numbers at home, according to the most recent CBS poll. So it’s true: Bush is “a uniter, not a divider”—uniting people across the world in their opposition to his policies.

With a whopping 71 percent saying in an ABC-Washington Post poll that the country is seriously off track, the Post called it “the highest such expression of national pessimism in more than a decade.” And that’s at a time when the economy, presumed to be the all-important bellwether, is in halfway decent shape.

It’s the war, stupid, and ending it is the major concern of most Americans, while all other issues are in single digits of importance to them.....

In fact, it seems as if everyone gets it except the president and those still hunkered down with him in the White House. “They’ve backed themselves into a tough corner,” GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio told the Post, “and the problem is his continued insistence for the troop increase, which flies in the face of what 70 percent of Americans want.” He added that it makes Bush seem to say, “I’ll listen to you, but I’ll do what I want anyway.” Hardly the message that the leader of the world’s greatest experiment in representative democracy should be sending to the world....."