Let's talk about replacing GWBush in 2004.

www.sfgate.com

Poll: President's approval on the rise after Thanksgiving
©2003 Associated Press

(12-02) 14:30 PST WASHINGTON (AP) --

President Bush's standing with the public has improved since his surprise Thanksgiving trip to Iraq amid signs of a stronger economy and following congressional passage of a prescription drug benefit under Medicare.

Bush's job approval was at 61 percent in the National Annenberg Election Survey conducted the four days after the holiday, up from 56 percent during the four days before Thanksgiving. Disapproval of the president dropped from 41 percent to 36 percent, according to the poll released Tuesday.

Bush visited the troops in Baghdad on Thanksgiving -- a move that even won praise from political opponents.

Public opinion about Bush personally also improved during the four-day, post-holiday span, with an increase in the number who view him favorably from 65 percent to 72 percent. Republicans shifted from 83 percent with a favorable view of Bush personally to 94 percent. Democrats moved from 46 percent to 55 percent.

Public opinion on the war in Iraq did not shift significantly, however. People were about evenly split on whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile before the holiday and afterward.

Approval of Bush's handling of Iraq increased slightly, with 44 percent approving and 53 percent disapproving before Thanksgiving, and people evenly split on that question now. The public view of his handling of the economy also shifted from a 45-51 percent split before Thanksgiving to a public divided almost evenly on his handling of the economy, 50-48, afterward.

The margin of sampling error for the 789 people interviewed before Thanksgiving and the 847 interviewed after was plus or minus 3 percentage points.

©2003 Associated Press

Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2003 12:44 a.m. EST
With Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff
For the story behind the story...


Bagram GI: Troops Waited While Hillary Chowed Down
U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton forced U.S. troops stationed at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan to wait for their Thanksgiving dinner last Thursday while she and her entourage arrived late, then cut in line and were served first.

A soldier who witnessed the scene tells NewsMax:

"Thanksgiving Dinner started at 3 p.m. that day, so the line was forming around 2:30 p.m. She didn't show up until around 3:30 p.m.

"Once she got there," our source maintains, "Clinton and her entourage bumped everyone in line, forcing them to wait almost an extra hour."

The brass at Bagram apparently had a hard time rounding up New Yorkers who wanted to have dinner with Clinton, D-N.Y. Only six GIs responded to an e-mail sent out last week that stated, "Looking for military members from New York and Rhode Island interested in meeting their Senator/Congressman."

People magazine was on hand to cover the event and wanted to interview the troops for reaction to Clinton's visit.

"But they were getting declined left and right," our source said. "People were actually telling the reporters, 'You don't want to print what I think about her and her visit.'"

After Clinton and her entourage departed, the only topics GIs wanted to talk about were "how great the food was and how fantastic they thought George Bush's visit to Iraq was."
All Rights Reserved © NewsMax.com

W'S FOES FLIP OUT[/url]

John Podhoretz

December 2, 2003 -- IT might be best for President Bush's opponents to drop the subject of his Thanksgiving trip to Baghdad. The more they talk about it, the longer it will remain in the public eye - which will only benefit Bush. But some on the increasingly loony Left just can't help themselves, because their compulsion to rant and rave and spew conspiracy theories overwhelms any practical political common sense they may once have possessed.
On the Web site Counterpunch, edited by the veteran leftist journalist Alexander Cockburn, a man named Wayne Madsen announced on Saturday in a piece called "Wag the Turkey" that the whole trip was a fraud because he had figured out the president actually landed in Baghdad at 5:30 a.m. on Thursday. "Our military men and women," Madsen complained, "were downing turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie and non-alcoholic beer at a time when most people would be eating eggs, bacon, grits, home fries and toast."

A blogger named Brian O'Connell responded, "Er, no. Change all those a.m.s to p.m.s and then you'd have something like a factual story." Madsen simply misread the report on the time. Baghdad is 8 hours ahead of New York. The plane took off at 7:50 p.m., which is why America found out about the trip as the last big balloon was arriving in front of Macy's just before noon.

How could Madsen have spun so demented a tale? Apparently, because of a typo in a Washington Post story on Friday. But having been caught out, he chose to continue spinning his web. In a piece yesterday called "Wagging the Media," he accused CNN of being in on the conspiracy - even though not a single CNN journalist was among the 13 brought along on Air Force One.

Then there are those who argue that Bush took the trip not because he wanted to spend time with the troops, but because he wanted - get this - to overshadow Hillary Clinton's visit to Iraq.

"Bush probably planned on visiting the troops sometime around Thanksgiving, but hastily decided to give the 'go' command when Karl Rove realized that Bush's 'daring' midnight run into Iraq would be laughed at by the entire country if Hillary Clinton already beat him to it," according to the blogger Hesiod. "It turns out that Hillary's people informed the White House of her trip to Iraq way back in September . . . Anyone still believe this was a 'spur of the moment' decision?"

Yeah, that's why Air Force One flew in the dark over the Atlantic - to rob Hillary Clinton of a one-day news story.



Why, others want to know, didn't Bush stay longer in Iraq? See more troops? See more Iraqis? Why didn't he go to Germany to visit the wounded in hospitals? Why was he wearing an army jacket?

If Bush visited a hospital in Germany, they would ask why he wasn't visiting Iraq. If he stayed longer in Iraq, they would want to know why he was using the troops as a campaign prop. If he visited lots of Iraqis in Baghdad, they'd want to know why he wasn't going to Mosul or Kirkuk.

These responses range from the peevish to the dyspeptic, from the merely cynical to the near-psychotic. Bush is increasingly fortunate to have such people as his enemies, because their demented anger continues to seep into mainstream Democratic Party discourse and threatens to make all anti-Bush rhetoric seem like the ravings of a bunch of lunatics. That happened during the Clinton years, and it's happening now.

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Nader Raising Money for Possible Campaign

Tuesday December 2, 2003 10:16 PM


By SAM HANANEL

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - Ralph Nader has not yet decided whether to make another run for the White House, but he's authorized a new exploratory committee to raise money for a potential bid.

The Nader 2004 Presidential Exploratory Committee was formed in late October as part of the consumer activist's effort to gauge support for a run, said Theresa Amato, a committee director.

``He is using it to test the waters,'' said Amato, who served as Nader's national campaign manager when he ran for president on the Green Party ticket in 2000. She said the organization is part of Nader's overall strategy of ``talking to people, calling people, seeing what level of support there is.'' ...

"Today President Bush pardoned the White House turkey. Of course the turkey had to donate $100,000 to his re-election campaign first." ?-David Letterman

"Yesterday the Senate passed President Bush's Medicare bill 54-44. And history was made ?- this is the first time Bush has ever gotten more than 50% of the vote." ?-Jay Leno

"This morning the Senate passed the president's big prescription drug benefit bill. The bill will help 40 million Americans. The president said that everyone should have the same right to prescription drugs as Rush Limbaugh." ?-Conan O'Brien

"A couple of hours ago, President Bush arrived back in the United States after a controversial trip to England. The president said he was looking forward to seeing his loved ones. Of course he was talking about the reporters at Fox News." ?-Conan O'Brien

The Promised Land

By DAVID BROOKS
November 29, 2003

The history of American conservatism is an exodus tale. It begins in the wilderness, in the early 1950's, with Russell Kirk, Milton Friedman and William F. Buckley Jr. writing tracts for small bands of true believers.

Conservatives crashed into the walls of power during the Goldwater debacle of 1964, and then breached those walls with Reagan's triumph 16 years later. But even with Reagan in the Oval Office, Republicans were not the majority party. Democrats controlled the House, and few Reaganites actually knew how to run a government.

In 1994, with the Gingrich revolution, the conservatives strode closer to the center of power. But even then, they were not quite there. For the rule of exodus tales is that the chiefs who lead in the wilderness and storm the citadels do not get to govern once their troops have occupied the city. Renegades are too combative to govern well.

It was only this week that we can truly say the exodus story is over, with the success of the Medicare reform bill. This week the G.O.P. behaved as a majority party in full. The Republicans used the powers of government to entrench their own dominance. They used their control of the federal budget to create a new entitlement, to woo new allies and service a key constituency group, the elderly.

From now on, as Tony Blankley observed in The Washington Times, if you work at an interest group and you want to know what's going on with your legislation, you have to go to the Republicans. The Democrats don't even know the state of play.

If you are the AARP, seeking a benefit, you have to go to the Republicans. If you are a centrist Democrat like John Breaux or Max Baucus seeking to pass legislation, you have to work with the Republicans.

Under the leadership of Bush, Frist, Hastert and DeLay, the Republicans have built a fully mature establishment of activist groups, think tanks and lobbyists, which is amazingly aloof from the older Washington establishment (not to mention the media establishment). Republicans now speak in that calm, and to their opponents infuriating, manner of those who believe they were born to rule.

The Democrats, meanwhile, behave just as the Republicans did when they were stuck in the minority. They complain about their outrageous mistreatment by the majority. They are right to complain. The treatment is outrageous. But the complaints only communicate weakness.

Democrats indulge in the joys of opposition. They get to sputter about fiscal irresponsibility, just as the green-eyeshade Republicans used to, as the majority party uses the power of the purse to buy votes. They get to make wild charges. They get to propose solutions that ignore inconvenient realities. They never have to betray their principles to get something done, and so they savor their own righteousness.

Minority parties are pure but defeated; governing parties are impure but victorious. The Republicans are now in the habit of winning, and are on permanent offense on all fronts. They offer tax cuts to stimulate the economy and please business. They nominate conservative judges to advance conservative social reform and satisfy religious conservatives. They fight a war on terror. They have even come to occupy the Democratic holy of the holies, the welfare state. In exchange for massive new spending, they demand competitive reforms.

The only drawback is that now, as the governing party, they have to betray some of the principles that first animated them. This week we saw dozens of conservatives, who once believed in limited government, vote for a new spending program that will cost over $2 trillion over the next 20 years.

In the past three years, federal education spending has increased by 65 percent. Unemployment benefit payments are up by 85 percent.

Many conservatives are dismayed over what has happened to their movement as it has grown fat and happy in the Promised Land. A significant rift has opened up between the conservative think tankers and journalists, who are loyal to ideas, and the K Street establishmentarians, who are loyal to groups.

The good news for Democrats is that the K Street establishment will slowly win this struggle. The majority will ossify. It will lose touch with its principles and eventually crumble under the weight of its own spoils. The bad news for Democrats is that, as Republicans can tell you, the ossification process is maddeningly slow. After the New Deal, it took 60 years.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Conservative Republican frustration over the failure of the Bush administration and the House Republican leadership to restrain federal spending has boiled over in recent days, producing a rare confrontation between GOP lawmakers and party leaders.

The internal conflict, fueled largely by recent passage of the $78 billion Iraq reconstruction effort and the $400 billion prescription-drug benefit for senior citizens that squeaked through the House on Nov. 22, came to a head last week when President Bush abruptly terminated a phone conversation with a Florida Republican who refused his plea to vote for the landmark bill.

Well-placed sources said Bush hung up on freshman Rep. Tom Feeney after Feeney said he couldn't support the Medicare bill. The House passed it by only two votes after Hastert kept the roll-call vote open for an unprecedented stretch of nearly three hours in the middle of the night.

Feeney, a former Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives whom many see as a rising star in the party, reportedly told Bush: "I came here to cut entitlements, not grow them."

Sources said Bush shot back, "Me too, pal," and hung up the phone.

Lost Jobs and Military Funerals Haunt Bush in the Heartland
Attention, Wal-Mart Voters
by Rick Perlstein
December 3 - 9, 2003

Rock River Valley, Illinois?-Piety is easy to find on the highways of Red America. Stop at a cemetery and you may find that the marker towering over all the rest reads, "In Memory of the Unborn Children." Down at the lower frequencies, the ones occupied in more urbane locales by the edgy college stations and NPR affiliates, your radio lectures at you: The music you'll hear during your visit is safe for the whole family. . . . Family friendly 91.5, WCIC, celebrating 20 years of music and ministry. Neighborliness is unavoidable, a saving grace: Pull into a motel and the lady asks for your cell phone number because there was a rash of folks forgetting their cameras this summer and she wants to be able to call you if you leave something behind yourself.

But just like in a novel by Sinclair Lewis, if piety is easy to find, then so is hypocrisy. Enter the sultry stink of a dingy roadhouse not far from where Abraham Lincoln once debated Stephen Douglas, and a terse young man winding himself up with coffee for a hard-partying Saturday night volunteers his version of the scene: a couple of towns down, the best gentleman's club; the next town over (you won't see a sign), a gambling den. A couple of hours later, when you tell the woman behind the counter at the convenience store where you've been, you elicit a grimace: "Oh, did you see two girls getting it on?" (They do so nightly, apparently, around 11 o'clock, on the pool table, for tips.)

Though even in this, Oglesby, Illinois's local den of iniquity, Republicans aren't hard to find, either. "I thought Bush would be a good man for the job at the time, and thought he'd be a good president," says the terse young man, whose nickname is Stony. "So I voted for him."

Stony is the kind of guy liberals love to worry about, the kind they fret they can't win over by next year's election. He works the midnight shift as a "picker" at a nearby grocery warehouse?-the very job Tom Wolfe depicts as the soul of thankless blue-collar humiliation in his latest novel. Stony talks proudly about his union and, quietly, mentions his fears that his workplace "could have a shutdown any day. You never know."

Liberals: Worry less. Stony no longer supports George Bush: "Because of the war. Too many people dyin'." Neither does his drunken friend, who pipes up: "I hate him. Because there are kids getting killed every single day."

Worry less. But worry still. In the middle of November, I spent five days in four Illinois counties where Bush was successful in 2000 to see whether support for him was peeling off in areas especially hard hit by the jobless recovery. The answer offers some surprising political lessons.

A few moments' Web research is all it takes to learn that the next town I visit, Byron, "the gateway to the Rock River Valley," supports 13 churches for a population of 2,284 and is named for the Romantic poet; that George Bush beat Al Gore in this county by 23 points; and that its two "major industries" are Quality Metal and Bergstrom truck heaters. It takes considerably longer to learn that this is all a convenient fiction: Byron's actual major industry is a $3.7 billion nuclear plant that once earned the distinction of becoming the first in history to have its application for an operating license flatly rejected by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

No such reticence in the shadow of the cooling towers, where Byron Motosports Park, a 1.3-mile dirt track, proudly advertises an annual "Nuclear Mountain Bike Meltdown" on its website. The track is where you'll find, on a typical Sunday?-race day?-two semi drivers from Rockford named John and Scott. John is the talkative one. Scott is the one with the heavy goatee. Ask them about George Bush, and this is what you hear.

"Best president we ever had. Because he's the only one, one of the few, who's got the balls to do what needs to be done. . . . I'm so glad Gore didn't get elected, 'cause he's another Clinton. And Clinton should have done it when he was in office."

They blame 9-11 and the unending wars that have followed on the previous White House occupants.

John: "All this **** is Clinton's fault. . . . This'll probably be the first year ever that I vote a straight Republican ticket. 'Cause all them Democrats, bad-mouthin' Bush, sayin' he didn't have it planned out right, all that crap?-they didn't even have a clue what was going on!"

John and Scott are dead wrong, of course: Clinton knew there was danger to Americans from a terrorist group called Al Qaeda and did do something about it, if perhaps not all the right things, whatever those might have been; Bush knew of the danger before the World Trade Center attacks and probably did less. Playing catch-up, he used the war on terror as pretext for an invasion of Iraq, and well-informed Democrats knew exactly what was going on: that unilateralism and lack of planning for a post-war settlement would lead us into disaster. But there's not much you can do about macho fantasies like Scott and John's; you can't force voters to critically read several newspapers a day. This is, simply, the reality that those who would wish to see George Bush defeated have to work with.

Alongside the judgment that Bush is responsible for bringing home Americans in body bags persists the judgment that America's current foreign policy situation, all of it, just sort of happened to Bush, and that it's a damned fortunate thing this Iraq mess happened under his watch instead of under some hapless Democrat's. It is a testament to the Republicans' mastery at keeping people scared of all that is not Republican, then taking credit, as Republicans, for making them feel "secure." And it is a dynamic more evident the more Republican the milieu.

Drive 30 miles down the Rock River from Byron and you come to a very Republican place. Dixon advertises itself as the hometown of Ronald Reagan, another convenient fiction: Reagan didn't have a proper hometown because his father was a peripatetic drunk. But Reagan nostalgia is one of Dixon's major industries.

In Dixon, where two civil servants who admit not liking Bush beg for anonymity, you get an indelible lesson in the Republican politics of fear. Tasha Goral and Dion Day, 22 and 29, share a child (Raven Rose) and a home (candles, flowing scarves, no telephone, Coltrane on the stereo), and they are not married; all this in a town where the piety, in public at least, is especially fragrant. Tasha should know. Her father was the town bookie. He never got busted, though. "Hell, the cops all bet with him!" Dion laughs. "He paid everybody. Republicans, Democrats."

Recently, a black friend of theirs, much more of a genuine hometown boy than Reagan ever was, graduated from Northwestern and came back to Dixon because that was where his heart was, where he wanted to make his contribution. He got a job at the local medium-security prison (one of the biggest industries in Ronald Reagan's hometown), kept his dreadlocks, drove a Cadillac. So two weeks ago, out of nowhere, he was pulled over by a convoy of law enforcement vehicles and spirited at gunpoint to his house, where 15 DEA agents, four IRS agents, two county sheriffs, and two state police officers searched his every belonging. "And you know what they found?" says Dion. "Nothing. Not a damned thing. They had a warrant. He doesn't know why anything happened. But he's supposedly some big drug kingpin." Now he's thinking about moving away, Dion says. He trails off. "It just makes us scared to be us. . . . "

Worry less. Intriguing cracks are opening in the Republican firmament. Take the factory owners I meet in the Rock River Valley's population center, the city of Rockford, who are ready to burn George Bush in effigy.

"I'm very conservative," Eric Anderberg of Dial Machine says, in the boardroom of the machine-parts factory his family built in 1966. "Always voted Republican. But I'm extremely concerned with what I hear from this current administration." Eric is 32, fiercely political, and articulate. He's called over two of his older industrial-park neighbors, Don Metz of Metz Tool and Judy Pike of Acme Grinding. Family manufacturers like these were the foundation of the modern conservative movement, reacting against the moderate Republicanism of Dwight Eisenhower in the '50s. Now they are a wedge in the Republican coalition. I ask if they could imagine supporting, for president, a Democrat. Don Metz, who in his golf shirt looks like he just came back from a midday round, doesn't hesitate: "No problem. Somebody steps forward and says we're going to make manufacturing a priority in this country." They would even donate the legal maximum of $2,000.

The reason is economic near-devastation. Unemployment around here has increased by half in the last three years. In Rockford, it approaches 12 percent. Factories are closing as production is shipped off overseas. (The mantra of "high tech" is unlikely to impress Rockford; one of the most wrenching recent production shutdowns was at the plant that produced a motor for the Segway scooter.) "Service jobs" have replaced some of the work. But where they materialize, with rotten hours, pay, and benefits, they end up destroying families instead of saving them. And it makes these people livid, because it all seems so stupid and unavoidable.

It would sound like socialism if it weren't coming out of the mouths of Republicans. "The generation of people that are running corporations today," Eric explains, "all they give a damn about is what happens in the next 90 days to their stock price and when that window is going to be when they're going to jump out and pull that parachute?-who cares what happens five years from now?" He's not talking about protectionism. He's talking about creating an economy that can survive the next generation. "Running a company based on shareholder wealth is a collapsible scheme! It's a short-term scheme! It's not a sustainable scheme."

Don offers an example: "What happened to the tax rebates? Everyone went to Wal-Mart and got a DVD that was made in China, which created no jobs. Thus: a jobless recovery."

He has mentioned a bogeyman. And now the conversation turns headlong.

Eric: "Wal-Mart and the rest, they love the way the trade situation is right now. They're forcing their suppliers to basically shut down and move overseas to produce."

Judy?-whose company will probably have to shut down next year?-moves the critique to the terrain of family values: "The moms that used to have a factory job with me and who go home at the end of eight hours and 10 hours and take care of their children and have decent day care, now they're working two jobs at Wal-Mart with no health benefits."

Eric takes this all home to politics: "At some point the Republican Party has to realize that, yeah, they need the money today to get elected"?-the big, multinational, corporate money?-"but it's not the General Electrics or all these large corporations that are putting them in office. It's the people who work for these corporations."

Perhaps one of the reasons these successful people are entertaining the thought of supporting Democrats is that they feel like they're abandoning a sinking ship?-a party that stakes its future on unsustainability, on the "efficiency" of shutting down every factory in sight because it makes for a better-looking quarterly balance sheet.

Don notes that an employee at his plant, non-union, starts at $16 an hour and makes as much as $100,000 a year: "sends his kids to private school, he drives a nice car?-does that sound like a Democrat to you? . . . Our people, in the past, didn't want government interfering with their life. . . . What happens to these people is that they find out they can't become a Wal-Mart associate . . . at $7.50 an hour without completely undermining their lives."

Here's a riddle: What do shuttered factories manufacture? Democrats. Or at least they might, if the national Democratic Party had the balls to do what needs to be done.

Don again: "If Eric and his family decided to shut this place down, he's not going to end up on a food line. Neither am I." It makes them mad all the same. Mad enough to do something about it. Downsized factory workers and their well-off former bosses: What a wonderful coalition it would be.

Meanwhile, the rock-headed jingoes at the motorcycle track can afford to focus their fears on weapons of mass destruction because they don't have to worry about job destruction. They're truck drivers. They're the ones shipping product to the Wal-Marts.

It all comes together, as a Marxist might say, at the point of production. The last stop of my visit is the shop floor, where a young man Eric's age tells me about the place where he used to work, and his father before him, and his grandfather before him: a paper plant that shut down a few years back. But he's no protectionist either: "I have no problem with a company that uses overseas goods?-if they're going to return some of that investment to the American worker, which can in turn spend that here."

He has a particular company in mind. The one that may end up, if Dial Machine has to close, as the next stop down the line.

"I won't go to Wal-Mart. My problem is that the company made $7 billion in profits. And yet they pay their workers substandard wages." Health co-payments are so expensive, he notes, that less than half sign up for the "benefit." This worker fears Wal-Mart more than he fears weapons of mass destruction. Because he knows which one is more likely to end up in his future. Americans who fear Wal-Mart more than apparitional WMDs (and apparitional dreadlocked drug dealers) are proliferating every day?-and must be made to proliferate more, for the sake of our nation. This is the Democratic Party's hope: convincing Red America they can provide an economy that's safe for the whole family.

CI -- I think what will be interesting is the polls over the next two months -- they'll contain any variation due to the Iraq trip and Christmas spending. It wouldn't surprise me if they remained relatively flat. Let's keep an eye on his personal ratings which have always been fairly high. They'll likely weigh pretty heavily in a vote...

University of Pennsylvania National Annenberg Election Survey. Nov. 28-Dec. 1, 2003. N=847 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3. (5 Page PDF File)

"Now I'd like to ask you how you feel about George W. Bush as a person, as opposed to how you feel about the job he is doing.
Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of him as a person?"

11/28 - 12/1/03

Favorable 72%

Unfavorable 19%

Not Sure 9%



11/23-26/03

Favorable 65%

Unfavorable 24%

Not Sure 11%

"This morning the Senate passed the president's big prescription drug benefit bill. The bill will help 40 million Americans. The president said that everyone should have the same right to prescription drugs as Rush Limbaugh." ?-Conan O'Brien

I like these numbers better. http://www.pollingreport.com/BushJob.htm
It shows that his approval rating is dropping since 9/11.

A team of military lawyers recruited to defend alleged terrorists held by the US at Guantanamo Bay was dismissed by the Pentagon after some of its members rebelled against the unfair way the trials have been designed, the Guardian has learned.
And some members of the new legal defence team remain deeply unhappy with the trials - known as "military commissions" - believing them to be slanted towards the prosecution and an affront to modern US military justice.

People the law forgot

It is almost two years since the Guantanamo prison camp opened. Its purpose is to hold people seized in the 'war on terror' and defined by the Bush administration as enemy combatants - though many appear to have been bystanders to the conflict. Images of Camp Delta's orange-jumpsuited, manacled detainees have provoked international outrage. But the real horror they face isn't physical hardship, it is the threat of infinite confinement, without trial or access to legal representation. James Meek has spent the past month talking to former inmates and some of those involved in operating the Pentagon's Kafkaesque justice system. He has built an unprecedented picture of life on the base, which we present in this special issue

His face only lights up when you ask about fishing. He has been doing a lot of it - mostly for trout - since his return. The other day he caught a five-pounder with his Japanese rod. "The biggest damage is to my brain. My physical and mental state isn't right. I'm a changed person," he says. "I don't laugh or enjoy myself much." ...

In India Block, as the block of punishment cells is known, "there were no windows. There were four walls and a roof made of tin, a light bulb and an air conditioner. They put the air conditioning on and it was extremely cold. They would take away the blanket in the morning and bring it back in the evening. I was kept in this room for one month. We'd ask them: 'Is this a sort of a punishment?' And the translator would say, 'No, this is being done on orders from the general.'"

As treatment for Mohammed's suicidal state of mind, US medics injected him with an unknown drug, against his will. "I refused and they brought seven or eight people and held me and injected me," he says. "I couldn't see down, I couldn't see up. I felt paralysed for one month - this injection, the effect, I couldn't think or do anything. They gave me tranquillising tablets. They just told me: 'Your brain is not working properly.' They were forcing me to take these injections and tablets and I didn't want to do that. Some people were being injected every month."

Over the course of my life, I have often benefited from the friendship of others. It is through my friends and the friends of my father that I came to acquire the Texas Rangers, it is through my friends and the friends of my father that I was able to acquire my first oil company, it is through my friends and the friends of my father that I was able to run for Congress, and it is through my friends and the friends of my father that I became Governor of Texas.

Finally, it is through my brother, my friends and the friends of my father that I became President of the United States.

But besides high-profile friendship, my career has been marked by another, less cheerful pattern: a lack of second chances.

When my oil company couldn't find any oil in Texas, through no fault of my own, it went bankrupt just after I sold all my stock. I was never given another chance to own an oil company.

When I lost my race for Congress, I was never offered another chance to run such a race--even though I had lost through no fault of my own, elections being so often the "wild cards" of our politics.

When I went AWOL from the Texas National Guard, no one ever offered me another chance to earn an honorable discharge.

When, as Governor of Texas, I was asked to change pollution laws for power and oil companies and did just that, I accidentally made Texas the most polluted state in the Union, and Houston the most polluted city in America. And when I was asked to cut taxes too much and did so, I accidentally bankrupted the Texas government. Yet no one ever offered me a second chance to achieve an honorable record in Texas.

Today, as President of the United States, I of course have done some marvelous things. I have already set the all-time record for most campaign fund-raising trips of any President in US history. I kept the US out of the international spotlight by withdrawing from the World Court. I avoided media insanity quite well, with fewer televised press conferences than any other President since the advent of television.

But I know, too, that my record hasn't been perfect. Leaving aside my accomplishments for the moment, I'd like to eat some humble pie:

**Three million of you have lost your jobs over the past three years. That is bad - worse than at any other time since the Great Depression, when Herbert Hoover was President. I know this.

**1.7 million of you dropped below the poverty line this past year. That is bad, because 1.7 million is the population of Philadelphia, the "city of brotherly love." Imagine all of Philadelphia falling off the shelf of prosperity, all at once. Believe me, I know.

**For those of you in the middle classes, incomes have gone down, after rising throughout the 1990s. I know.



**My tax cuts have turned your budget surplus into a $480 billion deficit. I know there are many things you could have used the surplus for, and I know it will cause your children some stress later on. I know this.

**It was during my tenure that more private bankruptcies were filed in twelve months than ever before. I know.

**It was during my tenure that the stock market dropped more than ever before in history. I know.

**I accidentally appointed more convicted criminals to administration positions than any other President in US history. I'm living with that legacy, like all of us are.

**I also accidentally appointed more multi-millionaires to my cabinet than any other President in US history. My cabinet is by far the richest of any in US history. This was a tactless move, I know - I know.

**Your country's security is a mess. Even my generals in the field, even my Homeland Security apparatus, even Rumsfeld is telling me that now, the American people face a great deal more of a threat than before my War on Terror began. I know that too.

**After taking the entire month of August off for vacation, I presided over the worst security failure in US history. I remember that well, even today.

**Your country's diplomacy is in tatters. After September 11, we received an outpouring of heartfelt sympathy from our allies and enemies alike. We had an opportunity to build on that sympathy. Today, none of our allies trusts us one bit, and not only because we found no weapons of mass destruction. I know how this hurts some of you. Believe me, I know.

**I dissolved more international treaties than any other President in US history. I know that this hasn't helped our diplomacy either.

**More people have taken to the streets to protest me and my actions (around 15 million worldwide on February 15 alone) than ever before in the history of humanity. I know these figures quite well.

**Because of my actions, the United Nations removed the US from its human rights commission and its elections monitoring board. I know that!

Now all this is not good, I know. But I'm asking you for a second chance. If you grant it to me, it will be a first for my lifetime, and I will forever be grateful.

As an American, I think you can understand the importance of second chances. If you've lost your job during my tenure, surely you'll want some corporation, somewhere on earth, to give you another job someday, and not say "Oh, no, you messed up for good. You can't ever work again."

Since there's a good chance you can relate to this scenario, I feel I can ask you, as a friend: please, give me a second four-year term. Give me that second chance--for once in my life.

Thank you.

- George W. Bush