Good Whitehouse Keeping Seal of Approval

Dear Mr. Mayor, I'll meet you if you get me a flat panel monitor.

One of the great mysteries to me about the president’s current 35-40% approval rating is that there are still that many people who think he’s doing a good job.  Thirty percent of Americans don’t make two hundred thousand dollars a year and far fewer than thirty percent work for oil companies or defense contractors.  It also occurs to me that at least 25% of the electorate still supported Nixon at the very end.  This Jim West story gives me a little perspective on this whole 35% thing though.  Jim West was (actually technically still is) the conservative Republican mayor of Spokane, Washington.  In his time as a state legislator, West had voted against a variety of gay rights issues.  It was long rumored that West himself was gay.  The Spokane paper decided to find out.  They got a computer expert to pose as a seventeen year old high school student on a gay chat line.  West began flirting with him online on his city owned laptop and even offered him a city internship/job as a way to get the faux student to meet him. The paper published the story. After that, allegations began to come out that West had molested scouts when he was a scoutmaster several years back.  

Confronted with this, West refused to step down and asked the voters for a second chance while pointing out that he’d been a friend of local business and “never done anything to harm our city”. So at minimum, the mayor of Spokane was a hypocrite, corrupt, and a liar.  At worst, he was also a child molester.  Interesting that none of these things harmed the city in West’s view.  Thirty five percent of the voters of Spokane voted against recall.  Possibly, they felt that the local paper had crossed the line.  Maybe they just liked having anyone who happened to be pro-business as mayor.  But think about this, Spokane approved of Jim West at about the same rate as the US currently approves of the president.  Of course, the president has killed more children with his non-strategy to win the war initiated on false pretenses than Jim West ever might have molested (he’s never been charged) or chatted up on the internet.  I sometimes think if Hitler happened to be American and there were a recall or a referendum, he’d still have a 28% approval rating.  

Just as interesting a recent poll found that four in ten Americans think that torture  can be justified in some circumstances.  You might also say that more Americans approve of torture than approve of W.  It’s a good thing America isn’t run by moral-relativist liberals or believers in "situational ethics" any longer.  At least conservatives know that right and wrong is a matter of absolutes.