Free Republic

June 3, 2015CNN POLL: GEORGE W. BUSH MORE POPULAR THAN SINKING BARACK OBAMA John Nolte EXCERPT......Bush’s favorability increase — his first in positive territory since leaving office — is likely due to two things. First, Bush has been nothing but a class act as a former president. He has stayed out of the public eye, except to further the causes like those of America’s wounded warriors. He’s removed himself completely from politics. People appreciate a class act, and Bush has been nothing but.Secondly, Bush’s approval numbers were primarily dragged down by the Iraq War. In hindsight, though, the American people...

In the fall of 2003, a few months after Saddam Hussein's overthrow, U.S. officials began to despair of finding stockpiles of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The resulting embarrassment caused a radical shift in administration rhetoric about the war in Iraq. President Bush no longer stressed Saddam's record or the threats from the Baathist regime as reasons for going to war. Rather, from that point forward, he focused almost exclusively on the larger aim of promoting democracy. This new focus compounded the damage to the president's credibility that had already been caused by the CIA's errors on Iraqi WMD. The...