I wasn’t really around for Richard Nixon’s Watergate flameout, but was there as much enmity toward the man as there now is toward President Bush, or was he generally regarded as more of a sad, pathetic bastard who’d merely written his own political obituary, and in the process inadvertently exposed the country to his own darkly paranoid worldview?
Largely because of the war in Iraq, of course, there’s no such oh-it’s-just-politics pass for Bush, whose current 25-30 percent approval ratings still seem kind of high to me, and have for most of his second term. After all, Bush’s impending exit has already been touted in celebratory T-shirts that have gained popularity as much more than just some whimsical Blue State item. He’s routinely booed and heckled in public on the few occasions he’s not trotted out before a scrubbed audience. Anti-smear email campaigns are used, and regularly falsely attributed to celebrities, to try to prop up his administration as something other than the flaming trainwreck of a disaster that it is. And now graffiti — like the above item, and an entire series of professionally stenciled put-downs here in Los Angeles and in other big cities — openly scorns the guy. January 20, 2009, indeed…