Today’s fun with polls.

Sometimes I like poking around with surveys. You can learn a good bit from them, despite being, at best, semi-scientific. Today’s flavor is a Harris Interactive poll in which we’ve got a whole slew of hilarious records set by our nation’s leaders.

• President Bush’s latest ratings are 24 percent positive and fully 75 percent negative. Previously, his worst numbers were 26 percent positive and 72 percent negative in April of this year. His ratings are substantially worse than those of any president, except for Jimmy Carter (22%-77% in July 1980), since Harris first started measuring them in 1963.
• Vice President Cheney’s ratings are even worse, 18 percent positive and 74 percent negative, compared to his previous low of 21 percent positive, 74 percent negative last July.
• Secretary of State Rice’s ratings are much better than those of the President and Vice President, but also have fallen to their lowest point ever, 39 percent positive and 54 percent negative, compared to 42 percent positive and 51 percent negative last October.
• Only 14 percent of the public think the things in the country are going in the right direction and fully 80 percent think they are on the wrong track. These compare to the previous worst numbers in President George W. Bush’s term, 75 percent thought things were on the wrong track in April. The highest number of people who said the country was on the wrong track was 81 percent in June of 1992 during the term of the first President Bush.

However, this dismal news for the administration has done nothing to help the Democrats. Most people seem to wish “a plague on all your houses”. Congress, which of course is controlled by the Democrats, gets its worst ratings ever, only 13 percent positive and fully 83 percent negative.

The last bit is fairly simple to explain.

In 2006, the Democrats ran on basically one platform: the Republicans are running roughshod over the nation and we have to stop them. Pick your policy, Iraq, the war on terror, the economy, science, anything. The Democrats had to have the majority in order to finally remind the government that the “checks and balances” aren’t just something cute to teach elementary school kids about.

Two years later and… what do we have? In the first 100 hours, I myself was wrapped up in what little progress they did show and was wholly prepared to be high-fiving every Democrat from here to San Jose all the way to November of ‘08. It didn’t happen. Through the cunning use of filibusters and the exploitation of the Democratic Congress’s lack of both a spine and testicles, the Republicans managed to make little to no palpable difference.

Congress rarely has a high rating. There’s an attitude that Congress is full of inept and corrupt politicians, but everyone also seems to like their own. That’s why the seats change so rarely even as the public bitches and moans about how awful Congress is. They’re the perfect “fall guy” for dissatisfaction with the government because it’s seen not as 535 people, but this monolithic and faceless organization.

That explains why the middle dislikes Congress. But that’s sort of like why presidents rarely have high ratings except in times of particularly patriotic zeal (huge economic boom, post-9/11). But to lose the base is different entirely. I don’t approve of the job Congress is doing at all, and I’m as lefty-loony as it gets.

It’s that old axiom I’ve explained before. Conservative politicians are disliked for enacting bad policies, liberal politicians are disliked for failing to enact good policies.

Oh. My. God.

Okay, I hate to keep picking on FOX, but this just blew my mind. A friend sent me this “motivational poster”

Yes. Indeed.

Guantanamo detainees have Constitutional rights

I had a really, really hard time deciding if I wanted to use the Gitmo icon or the “head exploding” one, because damned if this one didn’t have me reading it a few times before I fully accepted it.

As per the title, the United States Supreme Court has decided that detainees at Guantanamo Bay have the protection of the United States Constitution. Read that again, feel the relief wash over you.

The justices, voting 5-4, said a 2006 law unconstitutionally stripped Guantanamo prisoners of the right to file so-called habeas corpus petitions. The majority rejected arguments that a system of limited judicial review set up by Congress was adequate to protect inmate rights.

The ruling bolsters the legal rights of the 270 inmates at Guantanamo’s Camp Delta, set up in 2002 to detain accused al- Qaeda fighters captured after the Sept. 11 attacks. More broadly, the decision may mean a more powerful wartime role for the judiciary.

Many of us lefties lost our birds when the detainees were placed into legal limbo, so rest assured this is one hell of a step in the right direction. You can read the SCOTUS’s decision at their website, under the heading Boumediene v Bush. I’ll be perusing it, specifically Scalia’s entirely unsurprising dissenting opinion, later today.

More on Elitism

Will’s post gave me a little inspiration. This talk about elitism has always driven me crazy, but the way the phrase has become horrendously twisted is just getting out of hand these days.

The best way I can explain it is to perform a little exercise. Say to yourself the word “elitist”. Think about what this word conjures, to the best you possibly can. Imagine this person, this elitist, in detail. Really, get a clear picture in your head of the stereotypical liberal elitist.

Chances are, your image is something like the following: buys coffee at Starbucks, drives a hybrid, has a degree in liberal arts (or maybe is a professor of some kind), enjoys skiing, drinks wine, enjoys independent movies, writes on a blog, and listens to classical music and NPR. That sound about right?

What’s sorely lacking from that image is anything relating to station in life. A cup of coffee at Starbucks costs about $3, hybrids are pretty cheap, a bottle of wine runs about $12, blogs are free, and music means nothing. There isn’t anything particularly “elite” about what is involved in the “elitist” image.

You know what a true elitist is? Someone who earns seven figures a year and believes anyone who asks for government help is a freeloader. Someone born privileged who thinks an immigrant struggling to make a living is inferior because he hasn’t learned the language yet but took a semester of Spanish in high school and then gave up. Someone with four houses that believes that lower-class people skipping a vacation or picking up a second job just to pay the mortgage is something that just has to be done. That’s elitist.

Somehow the right as taken the “elitist” image not as anything actually elitist, but just as “liberal” in some manner. You can earn $20,000 a year and be an “elitist” according to these guys, so long as you drink fancy coffee and are concerned about the environment. Meanwhile, you can earn $20,000,000 a year and not be elitist just because you drive a pickup truck and listen to country music.

Traditionally, an elitist is someone who is of a higher class or value than others. The elite class would be CEO’s and surgeons, people whose stations in life are, admittedly, more important than office workers, bartenders, and taxi drivers simply because they have a far larger effect on peoples’ lives than others.

Colloquially, elitists are those who believe themselves to be inherently better than anyone else. They may not be, but the point is that they believe that, as human beings, they are of better stock. More realistically, they are people who are completely out of touch with the trials and woes of middle-class Americans.

Now you have to ask yourself, what makes someone out of touch with the concerns of “everyday Americans”? Is it the caffeinated beverages they drink, the sports they play, the car they drive? Or is it when they are in another strata of class, were lucky enough to be in the top 1% of income, and think that anyone earning less is doing so due to laziness? Does drinking a latte make you elitist, or does thinking no one deserves government financial help? Does someone buying a $20,000 hybrid to save on gas prices make them elitist, or does spending $200,000 on a top-level SUV that needs $100 per tank in gas every other week?

Ask yourself that. Your answers may surprise you.