Bush Fatigue (with updates)

Here is a great post from Atrios:

Number of times the term "Clinton fatigue" appeared, according to a Nexis search, in major papers during July of 1999: 27.

Clinton Gallup poll approval rating in July of 1999: 64

Number of times the term "Bush fatigue" has appeared, so far, in July of 2007: 1, courtesy of Byron York's hair.

Bush Gallup poll approval rating in July of 2007: 31.

I've complained about this stuff for a long time (here is an example), but one would think that Bush's very low approval ratings would result in a lot more than a single reference to "Bush fatigue" in July 2007.

I know that I am pretty tired of all the bullshit. I used to enjoy attacking Bush, but every time I see him on TV these days, I wish that he and the rest of his incompetent administration would just go away. And although I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling this way, the Corporate Media is basically giving Bush a free pass when compared to what they did to Clinton during the PenisGate Scandal.

Jamison Foser has more on this:

[W]e have long noted that leading news outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times have, by all available evidence, devoted significantly fewer resources to covering scandalous Bush administration actions than they devoted to covering President Clinton's relationship with a staffer.

When the Monica Lewinsky story broke, the Times and the Post -- like nearly every other news outlet in the country -- dedicated extraordinary resources to covering it. The day after the story broke, the Times and the Post ran a combined total of 19 articles about it, five of them on the front page. Twenty-eight reporters combined to write more than 20,000 words about a "scandal" that boiled down to whether the president told the truth about a consensual relationship that was ruled immaterial to a civil lawsuit that was thrown out of court for being entirely without merit. That's 28 reporters and 20,000 words -- at just two newspapers in just one day.

That relentless wall-to-wall coverage continued unabated for more than a year.

Fast-forward a few years. We have a president who has lied to the country in order to take it to war against a nation that didn't attack us, created a network of secret prisons, embraced torture, held people without trial or access to lawyers or even being charged with anything, used the government to spy on its own citizens, used "signing statements" to declare that he will not follow the very laws he is signing, and presided over an administration that is routinely described as "lawless" and that generally behaves as though the United States Congress has no more authority than the Ridgemont High School student council. Among other transgressions against the truth, the law, the Constitution, and human dignity.

And, it is important to note, those are not my conclusions. Those are conclusions that have each been reached by countless legal experts, scholars, and editorial boards, based on facts reported by countless journalists and placed in countless news reports by countless editors.

So, given what the occupants of the nation's most influential newsrooms clearly know -- what they have said and written before -- shouldn't the media be devoting greater coverage to the basic matter of whether or not we still live in a nation of laws?

Foser goes on to note that, on Thursday evening, CBS News devoted a mere 109 words to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller's testimony contradicting the sworn testimony of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, then spent 490 words on Oscar, the cat who knows when people are going to die.

OK, so the Oscar the Cat story is pretty cool, but come on.

UPDATE: What Digby says:

On the Stephanopoulos bobble head roundtable this morning, Cokie Roberts raised the baton and started the drumbeat: the Democrats risk moving waaaaay too far to the left and that is going to be a biiiiig problem for them "just like it was in Vietnam." Yes, she said it out loud. And David Gergen agreed whole heartedly.

Does anyone recall these gasbags saying that Bush was moving so far to the right with his monarchic, fundamentalist, shock and awe presidency that it was going to be a biiiig problem for them? I must have missed all those warnings. Now that he's at 28% and the conservatives are on the run after having proven that there really is a limit to how far the crazed radical wingnuts can go, they are still warning about the Democrats moving too far to the left. These people have not had an original thought in 40 years.

Amen. Who the hell is this so-called "left" anyway? Something like 55% of the country support legislation to withdraw from Iraq by next spring. Are all these people left-wingers?

The Democrats' big problem right now isn't that they might move too far to the left -- they should instead be worrying about what could happen to them in 2008 if they ignore the wishes of the American people with regard to Iraq.

UPDATE II: Here is a great cartoon connecting Oscar the Cat with the Bush Regime.