Virtual Reality - Lowering The Bar On Iraq - Poll included MSGOP

[dArKeR]

George W. Bush’s political career has always benefited from low expectations. Now he’s trying to apply those lessons to post-Saddam Iraq.

On his first campaign trip to Iowa and New Hampshire, George W. Bush toyed with the defining theme of his political career. “Please stow your expectations securely in your overhead bins,” he announced to his plane full of reporters, “as they may shift during the trip and can fall and hurt someone—especially me.”

THAT WAS BACK in June 1999, when he was governor of Texas—a job he won by trouncing expectations (including his mother’s, as we’ve just learned from her latest book) that he could never compete with incumbent Ann Richards in only his second race for elected office. On board his plane in the presidential election (an aircraft he first named Great Expectations), Bush enjoyed recounting how many times he’d whupped the conventional wisdom. He even reminded voters of his favorite political trick the day before the 2000 election in Arkansas, coining his now famous Bushism: “They misunderestimated me.”

As president, the dynamic has been familiar. Against expectations, he has passed huge tax cuts, consolidated his party’s power in Congress, and won a surprisingly brief war in the treacherous terrain of Afghanistan. Yet in Iraq, the lessons of Bush’s political career have never looked so unhelpful. This is proving to be his first serious challenge where expectations are far higher than he has so far delivered. Small wonder that the Bushies are scrabbling to find a way out.

http://msnbc.com/news/983293.asp?0cl=c1

Poll included left side:
Is the American news media producing accurate reporting on Iraq?
No. The press is overemphasizing bad news
No. Things are worse in the Iraq than the media says
Yes. The picture is fairly balanced and accurate