Leaky McFlightsuit ain't Popular

A new Gallup Poll has 63% of Americans believing that President Bush acted either illegally or unethically when it comes to the Plame Leak Scandal. (How many just think he's a lying bastard that's never done anything ethical in his life wasn't covered in the survey.)

The latest USA Today/Gallup poll finds more than 6 in 10 Americans critical of President George W. Bush on the leak controversy. The more closely people are following the issue, the more likely they are to say he did something illegal rather than unethical. The poll also shows that 37% of Americans continue to approve of Bush's job performance, unchanged from last month. While that is a low rating -- and among the lowest of the Bush administration -- it represents no change in four Gallup polls conducted since the end of February.

OK, so the base has invested so much of their own self-identification in being a Bush Supporter^tm that if they gave up on him, they'd have to, you know, think about things. We can now assume that barring anything beyond the sort of scandals we've already seen, Bush's numbers won't go much lower than 35%. (Nixon still had about 25% approval rating and he was impeached.) The fact that Gallup bothered to notice that the more you pay attention, the more you think that something illegal happened is nice. When this gets quoted in newspapers I bet that little fact will be buried at the bottom if mentioned at all.

The thing that caught the Bush Administration wasn't that he leaked the information. If he had said, right at the beginning that the President had personally approved the 'dissemination' of 'newly declassified' information to 'explain to the American people the reasons for war' he would have been much better off. But this is an Administration with a culture of secrecy that will undoubtedly spawn books on par with The Davinci Code. Their first instinct is to lie and deny. It finally caught up with them.

George W. Bush Plame Leak