People continue to woner why a certain number of Americans refuse to abandon George W. Bush. Here's some suggestions.

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USA TODAY reported:

A "Feb. 9-11 poll puts Bush's job approval at 37%, but among people who identify themselves as Republican or leaning Republican, his approval rating is 76%.

"Thus, despite bad news from Baghdad and carefully crafted hand-wringing by high-profile GOP war critics in Congress such as Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, three of four Republicans in the country are hanging in there with the president.

"The poll also shows that rank-and-file Republicans have higher regard for the president than they do Republicans in Congress. They gave GOP lawmakers a 63% job-approval rating, 13 points below Bush's. And 72% of Republicans do not think Bush made a mistake sending U.S. troops to Iraq."

A March 2 New York Times story said:

"Over all, Mr. Bush's job approval remains at one of its lowest points, with 29 percent of all Americans saying they approve of the way he is doing his job, compared with 34 percent at the end of October. Sixty-one percent disapproved, compared with 58 percent in October, within the margin of sampling error."

In April, President Bush's approval rating in a new Harris survey had sunk to 28 percent. Newsweek magazine confirmed that 28% approval rating in its poll released in May and in June, Newsweek showed Bush's approval at 26%.

Columnist Helen Thomas reported in a mid-May column that, "The latest CBS-New York Times poll said the president has dropped to 24 percent in his approval ratings on his handling of the war." In June, Newsweek showed him with a 23% rating on the war. Those figures apply to handling of the war and not to his over-all job-approval rating.

Bush's approval within the Republican party remains relative high at well above 50% and accounts for nearly all his support, which still boggles the mind why anyone would continue to support the "worst" president in history.

After 9/11 Bush had some of the highest approval ratings in history. That also boggles the mind. He knew not what to do when told of the attacks, spending seven minutes continuing to read a children's story to kiddies. He was absent from the White House for three days while his handlers and puppet masters coached him on how to act and what to say when he emerged from hiding. At Ground Zero he made a speech prepared by much-brighter men which was well received and cast him as a strong and resolute leader when he, in fact, is neither.

Bush has managed to prove two things in his presidency. 1) White supremacy is a fallacy and 2) Ivy League degrees aren't worth a bucket of dirt (in the wrong hands). So why do not more people get off his bandwagon when his actions prove him to be an incompetent buffoon?

Some of Bush's supporters are captains of industry who are used to the gifts government throws their way while cutting their taxes, so they want to keep that gravy train running even if it runs off a cliff to destroy the US. They know that at the destruction of the USSR, nothing was gone except governing principles; party leaders who ran commerce entities were freed to confiscate business properties for themselves and became billionaires while ordinary Russians suffered. The people remained, the land remained, the military remained, the police remained, the prisons and jails remained as did the wardens and jailers, the schools and universities remained.

Our American "comrades" know that at the destruction of the United States, all will remain except public constraints on their lust, greed and voracious appetite for more. They may have it all now; but that isn't enough. That they don't care if our democratic republic follows the Soviet Union into oblivion is borne out by the fact that they have made millionaires of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly and many others whose only reason to exist is to trash the principles of this nation and smear anyone who clings to those principles. Our "comrades" will always support a regime that gives them more, but they are a tiny sliver of Bush's support.

To understand why others, including ordinary working-class people, refuse to abandon a sinking ship we need to know history.

It has long defied logic why peasants continued to serve in king's armies which suppressed the peasantry from which they came. Why go to battle for the king and aristocracy and die for them? But the peasants, in their uneducated way, had been indoctrinated about the divine right of kings to rule, and that meant supporting the king and to die for the king no matter how cruel he is was also supporting God and dying for God.

Where did people get that stupid idea and hold it for hundreds or thousands of years? From the Bible of course, which says that God chose David to be the king of the Jews. That false reading of the David story was all that was needed to brainwash subjects into thinking that God chose their kings, no matter how despicable. God determined who would always rule by choosing who would be born into the ruling royal family and He'she-it put the preferred choice for inheriting the crown as the first born. Sound familiar? The Bible has stories of fearful kings ordering the murder of all first-born sons in order that none of them may claim for themselves the title of king. That is the story of Passover. Pharaoh did it. Herod did it.

We have primitive minds spouting the same nonsense today. Lt.Gen. William G. Boykin justified the "stolen" 2000 election with the statement that, "George Bush was not elected by a majority of the voters in the United States, he was appointed by God."

Islam once enjoyed world leadership in society, culture, arts, science, education, commerce, all things civilized. Allah created it all, they were told by the religious leaders who claimed that only they could communicate with Allah and understand his wishes and plans. When Islam was tops in the world, that premise was easy to accept. Now that Islamic nations are near the bottom of the barrel, fanatics must find others to blame and the others are us. Blaming the West saves them from thinking that maybe Allah didn't create what they have been told to believe, and to reject the belief they were taught is to reject Allah.

Bush claims to be a good Christian man and espouses a love of Christ in a nation that is considered the most religious in the western world. Therefore, Bush backers think to abandon Bush is to abandon Christianity, to deny Christ, to hate God and to abhor an America they falsely think was created as a "Christian nation." In this manner, Bush backers are no different from Islamic fanatics. The fact that Bush's actions prove he has nothing in common with Christianity or the real Christ, and neither do his supporters, seems not to deter them.

We have spent the past six decades maligning "Good Germans"; the millions who looked the other way while the Third Reich conducted some of the most-grotesque evils in the history of the world. Now we have millions of "Good Americans" not only looking the other way but actively defending the actions of our Fourth Reich as it commits some of the worst crimes since WW II. The approval ratings previously cited puts "Good Americans" support for Bush at between 50 million and 75 million, if we consider only adults.

Channel 5 KING-TV, NBC's affiliate in Seattle, continues to report on the Iraq War with language suggesting that Iran is solely responsible for the continued violence in Iraq. Somehow these people (a subsidiary of Belo Corp.) can't come to admit that Bush is the reason for violence in Iraq; Bush and no one else. Nor will they admit that our allies in Saudi Arabia are funding the arming of Sunni Muslims who are the "insurgents" doing most of the killing of Americans. And all "insurgents" are continually said by KING5 to be alQaeda even though study after study indicate that alQaeda is a minor fraction of resistance to US occupation of Iraq. In reporting on the war, the station's news department says that "insurgents" always "ambush" US troops while US troops merely "engage" the enemy and that the "terrorists" always "kidnap" or "abduct" Americans solders while American forces "capture" the "terrorists."

The same station reports that Saddam Hussein was solely responsible for the war by refusing to obey United Nation requirements that even the United Nations refused to take action against. Hussein's failure to turn over weapons that didn't exist was possibly the main refusal. Then, when ex-CIA undercover agent Valerie Plame Wilson was called to testify before Congress, a KING5 reporter/anchor said that the Democrats requested her testimony to "slam the Bush administration." After Bush had vetoed a funding bill for Iraq in May, the same "journalist" reported that the Democratic Congress had "failed" to supply funding for the troops.

Such reporting should be expected from this bunch of Dumb Belles and Miller Redfield clones who can't present Iraq war reports in straight, unbiased fashion without using propaganda phrasing on all matters. They also constantly report that all crimes were committed by the "suspect," thereby libeling anyone under suspicion in a crime, but who is innocent. Like Miller, (the clueless reporter on the Murphy Brown TV sitcom) they haven't got a clue.

A while back, the author of this article contacted a former colleague at The Denver Post who had been elevated to the editorial page on which he wrote that the "Do Not Call List" of the federal government was unconstitutional because it infringed on freedom of speech. When told that the issue involved regulation of commerce, not freedom of speech, the confessed Republican replied he knew better because he had "read the Constitution" and he knew a judge. All courts hearing challenges to "Do Not Call" have ruled it a proper use of power to regulate commerce and not an infringement on speech. Such it is with a Bush supporter; refuse to listen to others while pretending to be a master on a subject never studied. And so it is for readers of that newspaper ever getting factual material on the issues of the day from an outfit that quit caring about knowledgeable presentation years ago and which wholeheartedly endorsed Bush, even though it has long been clear that he is a buffoon.

With such stalwarts of the mainstream media ~ which mirror most of the media ~ joining Fox News to misinform America, it becomes clearer why Bush has not been totally abandoned.

Many on the political right, including members of the Bush administration, have howled long and loud about prosecuting for treason news organizations or journalists for printing information that was already known in one manner or other but have never uttered a word about prosecuting for the Plame outing, which destroyed an important intelligence operation of the Central Intelligence Agency. An example was the call to prosecute the New York Times for a report about the United States monitoring financial transactions of alQaeda; never mind that Bush had already claimed repeatedly that tracking alQaeda money by his administration had disrupted the terrorist organization's financial status.

It is also strange that people can't grasp the concept that an indigenous people would take up arms to defend their nation from a foreign power. They couldn't see that Vietnamese would resist America's intrusion into South Vietnam. They can't grasp the concept that Iraqis, non-Iraqi Arabs and non-Arab Muslims would resist US invasion and occupation of a Muslim Arab nation. That from many of the same people who claim that they need their weapons to resist a tyrannical US government and who would resist to death a foreign nation invading the US, arresting or killing the president and his administration and installing a puppet regime. They imagine themselves as heroes if called on to resist foreign invasion, but those who resisted in South Vietnam or Iraq are considered criminals, dead-enders, terrorists, insurgents, who are deserving of only death.

Such are they who are Bush supporters.

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Authors Bio:
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Thomas Bonsell is a former newspaper editor (in Oregon, New York and Colorado) United States Air Force cryptanalyst and National Security Agency intelligence agent. He became one of American journalism's leading constitutional experts through years of study at Georgetown University Graduate School of Government in Washington, D.C., and tries (without much success) to be patient with people who argue endlessly on subjects they have never studied. He is the author of "The Un-Americans: Trashing of the United States Constitution in the American Press", a critique of the mainstream media for ignorance of, or disdain for, our constitutional principles of self-government. He left newspaper work years ago, disgusted at the direction the Fourth Estate ~ under the mismanagement of ineffectual, out-of-touch, can't-do executives ~ was taking away from honest responsible journalism and the observation that there was no place in the mainstream media for a progressive, or liberal, constitutional "expert". Bonsell is an honors graduate of Woodbury College (Los Angeles, California) with a bachelor of business administration degree. He is profiled in Marquis Who's Who in America. (Self-portrait, above, was handled to make author/artist appear prettier than he actually is.)

Personal motto: Have brain; will use.