All Rise for the Leader of Our Nation.

I read in "Newsweek" yesterday that, according to one poll, President Bush is has spent 23 consecutive months at less than a 40% approval rating. The author of this article makes this statement:

"No matter what he does, or what happens in the world, the public seems to have decided that Bush has been a failure."

I don't know how accurate this particular poll is, and whether or not it can actually speak for the "public". I've heard that poll statistics can be a tricky thing. However, the above quote still disturbs me.

I don't claim to know anything about politics, and I consider myself out of the loop when it comes to current events (an ailment which I am trying to remedy), and I knew very little about the Bush Administration's policies till I read this article. So maybe I'm a little naive about all this stuff.

I just don't see a reason to call Bush a failure.

Sure, maybe some things he has done were not the best. But who hasn't? President Bush has always seemed to me to be the kind of guy who genuinely cares about this nation, and what is best for it. And I respect him for doing what it takes to do what he feels is right for this nation and it's people.

If the polls are correct, and we as a people consider Bush as a failure, then we have essentially withdrawn our support of him. That bothers me. He's the leader of our nation. He's not oppressing us as a people. He's not sending in the troops to impose his unrighteous will on us. We did not elect him as president so that he could make us all happy. We elected him because we thought he would be the best man to run our country for four years, and then four more.

The thing that I really liked about the "Newsweek" article was how it almost defended President Bush. Though you could tell that the author didn't really care for our current President, he made it clear that there have been significant changes for the better in the Bush Administrations policies over the last few years. Even though they started out making some mistakes, they have done many things to correct them.

This to me is another reason to be proud of our current leader. No matter how gung-ho he was, and how convinced he was that he was doing the right thing, he can still say, "I was wrong. Let’s go another direction."

Not that the media would like you to know that. That's a whole different rant.

Again, I'm relatively uneducated about the topic, so maybe I shouldn't even be writing this. I just feel like we as a people enjoy complaining. That we enjoy placing blame where no blame is due, as long as it is not on ourselves. And that perhaps the fact that we don't approve of President Bush is our own problem. That maybe we will never approve of whoever we elect as President because we are more concerned with what we want than what is actually good for the nation as a whole.

I don't know.

Maybe.

I think the President of our country has a hard job. I don't envy him. I don't think I could do a better job.

Do you?