Now is the winter of our discontent
I was reading this article over at ABC News and came across this little item:
Bush’s Disapproval Rating Highest in History
Just two presidents have had lower approval (Richard Nixon and Harry Truman) than President Bush, and none has had higher disapproval in polls since 1938.
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This is, of course, not news, and certainly not around my house, where Bush’s disapproval ratings have maintained their 100% level for eight years, even among the cats, who are staunch supply-siders. I only mention it because I was reading the article a little too fast and for a moment I thought it said "Just two presidents have had lower approval (Richard III and Harry Truman)."
The resemblance is uncanny!
Dick 3
He’s such a fascinating, polarizing figure–Did you read ‘Royal Blood’ by Bertram Fields?
The politics within the situation were amazingly complicated, I think I’d need to reread it and create a flow chart, but it was still a good read.
Re: Dick 3
What? Jeffrey Katzenberg’s lawyer wrote a book on Richard III? Small world, small world.
Re: Dick 3
And didn’t you write Royal Blood? This world shrinks all the time.
–Ed.
Re: Dick 3
But in my version, he isn’t a hunchback and I moved the action to 1970s suburbia.
Re: Dick 3
I love when people are multifaceted and have different passions like that. Example: Jim Beaver, one of the character actors on Deadwood, was interested in the death of Superman actor George Reeves so much he was a consultant on the recent film Hollywoodland. Or how Peter Weller is a lecturer at Syracuse on Roman and Renaissance Art. Robocop!
There are many people, and I tend to agree with them, who think Richard III’s horrible reputation was, in large part, exaggerated or fabricated. A case of the victors rewriting history to justify their own tenuous claims to the throne.
In a time when most people were uneducated, ignorant and illiterate and kept few records it wasn’t too difficult to rewrite history and have it passed down for hundreds of years. George W. doesn’t have that advantage. The stink of his failures and misdeeds will reek for decades if not centuries.
So, President Merkin Muffley has a higher approval rating?
Cheney is a lot more like Richard III (at least as portrayed by Shakespeare – I won’t open the can of worms about whether that portrayal is historically accurate). Bush is more like Richard II – unfit for the job, self-pitying, willful, resolutely unlovable, woefully incompetent at best, actively malignant at worst.
The only difference is that Shakespeare makes Richard II sympathetic by the end, as he’s destroyed, imprisoned, and finally killed by his enemies. I can’t imagine feeling any sympathy for Bush in similar circumstances.
America has to be careful not to step in anymore Richard the Thirds…