W's poll numbers are tanking weekly, so DUers .....

[caledesi]

What was the watershed moment for Bush*?
Watershed Definition: A critical point that marks a division or a change of course; a turning point: “a watershed in modern American history, a time that... forever changed American social attitudes” (Robert Reinhold).

[eleny]

1. I believe that when Mr & Mrs Repuke's wallet was hit - they finally cared

So I voted the increase in gas prices.

[MADem]

2. Katrina was surely the tipping point

...but had it been a stand-alone gaffe, he might have recovered from it, even with the cake eating, guitar playing, and Heckuvajob Brownie.

It was all the other shit coming before, with Katrina on top, like a fetid cherry on a shit sundae, that 'turned the tide' as it were.

And then, the hits just kept on coming!

[caledesi]

3. I chose Katrina because it was on TeeVee and the general

public could SEE this tragedy and have a visceral response.

[electropop]

7. Dead children floating in the water - it was the first time many

lost the ability to ignore their moral compass and lost the ability to pretend Bewsh is a "decent Christian".

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

4. I voted for Katrina because it combined stand alone aloofness

incompetence, cronyism , corruption and the death of American citizens in a situation that could not be suffocated and put down with the blanket of 9/11 and "national security". Plus, it was televised and it changed some of us forever.

[tridim]

5. I think it was Shaivo..

Even my Repuke parents thought that whole thing was BS. Katrina was the exclamation point.

[TheWraith]

6. Katrina was where it all started to come apart.

Bush's entire facade of being a strong and compassionate leader was drowned by the storm. After that, it started going downhill a bit faster, and it's been accelerated even more lately with the profusion of scandals.

[Ediacara]

8. It was Katrina

Katrina is what caused 1) the media to stop kissing up to Bush, and 2) it forced a lot of generally non-political Americans to look critically at the nation's leadership. The combination of those two factors, has led to a consistently critical eye on this administration ever since. People were generally aware that Bush was not so smart, and rather incompetent, but they believed he was a nice guy and a good leader, and thought all this talk about Valarie Plame and rigged voting machines was all liberal hate. Katrina was the straw that broke the camel's back, and forced people to look at Bush as something other than a nice guy and a good leader, and most of the public has finally come to the same conclusion most of DU came to in 1999, Bush is at best an incompetent fool, and at worst... well I don't think we've seen him at his worst yet.

[MrBenchley]

9. Terri Schiavo

The drunk that didn't come back from vacation when he was told Bin Laden was about to attack raced back to DC in the dead of night to meddle in a private tragedy that was none of his fucking business, on behalf of some of the scummiest loonies in America.

[Stinky The Clown]

10. Katrina ... for interesting reasons ......

It was a disaster that hit 'red state' America.

It was as badly handled as anyone could imagine (bush couldn't even help his supporters)

It was the first time the media, overcome by truth, spoke truth. And they were outraged.

It was the first national event in which the king could neither protect nor deflect. He owned every sad, awful bit of it, the Nagin/Blanco basher/bleaters notwithstanding.

It got worse, not better, over time.

The media had access and they used it.

Everything alleged by we on the looney left came to be the truth.

The media saw the truth in the stipulations of the looney left and said so.

Bill Clinton was nowhere in sight. And if he were, James Lee Witt would be at his side.

And the media would have shown that.

Common thread ..... the media .... for the one time in the last ten years .... doing its job.

[Recursion]

11. I go with Katrina

That was the first time I heard "moderate" people starting to get pissed at him. The biggest complaint was along the lines of "We're the USA for Christ's sake, why are we responding like some 3rd-world country?". I talked to a lot of people who had assumed that we had spent the preceding few years actually making progress in the field of homeland security and that evacuating a city full of people would be something we were very good at. And then the inevitable question was "well, OK, what have we been spending all that money on, if our Federal agencies can't even coordinate with state and local agencies?"

Katrina was the inflection point, to use a math term. After that, a lot of people stopped giving Bush the benefit of the doubt. It wasn't a terrorist attack but in a lot of ways it was really close (what if some terrorist had blown up the levies? would it have killed that many people? would the superdome and convention center have been the hellholes they were?) And for once, people were asking -- and seeing asked on television -- questions about accountability and responsibility: why was the Louisiana National Guard not left with enough non-deployed troops to effectively respond? Why weren't communication and chain-of-command protocols in place beforehand (this is the sort of thing the DHS was designed to implement, right?)? Why did television news reporters know more about the situation on the ground than emergency response managers? How did FEMA go, in less than half a decade, from being the absolute bar-none star of government success stories to being unable to respond to a fairly predictable disaster? W had sold them on the line that he could keep them safe, and this was the chink in that armor.

It was an objective failure of government at all levels, but particularly at the federal level. It's not something talking heads could spin away. It snapped a lot of people I know out of their belief in Dubya. That's not to say they started to dislike him right away, but ever since then with each new piece of news they haven't been giving him the benefit of the doubt, whereas before they were.

[applegrove]

12. Showed his & his administrations true face in Katrina. Even a hurricane

could be used as social engineering. The time for blaming local authorities for lack of levies is way after the crisis is over and people are safe. Not during..so you can sit on your hands and turn another district GOP.