How low can he go

I seem to be suffering from outrage overload again. Nothing really inspired a rant today even though there was plenty of outrage. This did attract my attention however.
New Bush, Iraq Poll Numbers

In the months since the Congressional elections, President Bush has lost substantial support among members of his own party, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.
Mr. Bush’s approval rating dropped 13 percentage points since last fall among Republicans, 65 percent of whom now say they approve of the way he is handling his job as president, compared with 78 percent last October.
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.
Twenty-three percent of those polled approved of the way Mr. Bush is dealing with the situation in Iraq. Twenty-five percent approved of his handling of foreign policy.
Even the president’s campaign against terrorism, long his signature issue, is seen positively by only 40 percent of those polled, while 53 percent disapprove.

So is Bush losing Republican support because even the Republicans now realize he is dangerously incompetent? I'm afraid not. Melinda Henneberger reporting from Conservative Political Action Conference says it's because he's not enough of a wingnut. Are they unhappy because the Bush/Cheney cabal has mismanaged the Iraq war, the war in Afghanistan and foreign policy in general. No.

"We cannot afford to be 'Bush Republicans,'" Phyllis Schlafly said, to great applause, in the vast Omni Hotel's largest ballroom. "This has got to be a grassroots party," and works best as such, as when "the whole conservative movement rose up to tell George Bush that we could not have Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court."

Not unlike opponents of, say, the war in Iraq, the crowd here is fed up with non-binding blah-blah on their core issues: "We don't just want words" of support on abortion and gay marriage, said Schlafly -- who, as Helen Mirren recently said of the queen, has been carrying on with the same devotion and hairstyle for the last half-century. Today, again, she was dressed in red and wearing her trademark eagle pin.

Her biggest applause line, though, was not on abortion but on the issue of what she called "sovereignty."

"We've got to stop this nonsense of teaching our schoolchildren in foreign languages," she told the crowd. "We cannot afford to let Mexico turn us into a two-language nation."

She was incensed, she said, that that George Bush had made such a big deal of signing the bill into law that would provide for a fence along part of the border between the countries: "Was that dishonest? I've been looking at TV every night and haven't seen that fence being built yet. We want that fence!"