corrente

This sort of thing makes my gorge rise:

"The number of Americans who believe the war in Iraq has made the United States less safe from terrorism spiked sharply after last week's terror attacks in London, according to the latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.

President Bush's approval rating, meanwhile, edged up slightly, according to the poll of 1,006 Americans conducted Thursday through Sunday." Emphasis mine.

That's right. Bush's approval rating amongst the clueless went up from 43% to 45% since he climbed on top of that pile of unfortunates who were caught in the blasts in London last week and brayed his usual empty bragadoccio. Yet fewer of these same Einsteins felt, in the same breath, that going to war in Iraq was worth it (down 2%), and more felt that the Iraq war has made us less safe (up 15%).

It's practically an axiom that when a war breaks out, leaders can get away with almost anything and still retain the faith and support of their people; it's just human nature. But it's human nature of a very primitive sort, and somehow I'd hoped we had gotten to the point where figuring out that something is bad for us is a reason to avoid it. Instead, we find ourselves trapped inside this nightmare by a vast army of our countrymen and women who would just as likely go along with a new, improved Final Solution as they would a new brand of toothpaste, so long as it comes with a cloud full of rhetorical vapor from a daddy-figure spouting the Old Testament, and the concomitant approval of the lapdog press.