I’m naturally elated and this time with good reason. The George W. Bush presidency has never seen worse days than it’s seeing right now. According to the Pew Research Center, Bush’s overall approval ratings have reached their lowest point yet at 38 percent. Americans, to say the least, are not happy with the state of the union.

The downward spiral of the administration can best be traced back to March and April of this year, when Republican lawmakers did their damnedest to prolong the life of Terri Schiavo, a brain-damaged Florida woman. 76% of Americans disapproved of Congress’s intervention in the case. The debacle ruffled the feathers of many traditional conservatives who want the federal government to play as little of a role as possible in such matters. An autopsy performed on Schiavo after her death showed her brain had degenerated to 615 grams; to get some perspective understand that an Alzheimer’s patient’s brain rarely gets below 800 grams.

The public’s discontent over Iraq simmered over the summer and reached a fever pitch with the demonstration of Cindy Sheehan outside of Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. Then in September Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. Bush’s “perceived” slow reaction to the unfolding disaster coupled with the glaring incompetence of former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Arabian horse enthusiast Michael “Brownie” Brown. He has now even resorted to using the ‘c’ word (“conservation”) when speaking about how to alleviate the mounting strain resulting spikes in gas prices. I’m sure crow never tasted as foul as it did then.

Over the past several months the Republican party, not just the administration, has been mired in numerous scandals; White House pseudo-reporter Jeff Ganon’s unmasking as a gay male escort (read: prostitute), Bush advisor Karl Rove’s involvement with the exposure of Valerie Plame’s CIA operative status, and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s indictment for circumventing campaign finance laws have all put the GOP under intense public scrutiny.

The straw that broke the elephant’s back is one Harriet Miers, the president’s pick to take Sandra Day O’Conner’s seat on the Supreme Court. The right wing considers her nomination outright treachery as Bush had long promised his conservative base that he would nominate judges of a similar ideology as Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in order to tilt the court to the right. Miers, while clearly not an arch-liberal, is no flaming conservative. Democrats, on the other hand, are calling the nomination cronyism in the classic Brownie sense due to her lack of experience (while she has worked as a lawyer, she has no judicial experience and has never argued a case before the Supreme Court) and her close relationship with the president.

I am really quite overjoyed to see the once-arrogant and smirking Bush now humbled. So why am I skeptical about the whole situation? The tides are changing, but for the wrong reasons.

It may sound elitist, but I think the majority of people are stupid sheep; my friends certainly thought so when Bush was re-elected. But if all the people who voted for him are so stupid, what does that mean when they start defecting? It’s not because they’re wising up. It’s because they’re self-centered. They don’t care that Bush and his cadre of neo-conservatives had been itching to go back to Iraq ever since the last Gulf War and used the tragedy of 9/11 to scare people into supporting the 2003 invasion, or that things like Guantanamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison have diminished our moral standing throughout the world. All they care about is being able to fill up their gas-sucking Hummers with cheap fuel. And Bush? He could give a spotted owl’s ass about the environment and a sound energy policy. The only reason he is now encouraging gas conservation is that there is no other option.

People are focusing on irrelevant or minute details in the myriad scandals that the Republicans are fending off. Some are getting so hung up (so to speak) on Jeff Gannon’s escort ‘services’ (and the absurdity of a hardcore Republican supporter providing such services) they lose sight of the bigger picture: a man with no real journalistic experience was able to attend White House press briefings for over a year. Karl Rove and Valerie Plame are not the story; they are but a small part of the more important issue, being that the Bush administration was shaping their intelligence according to their policy instead of the other way around. Tom DeLay may have officially stepped down from his position as majority leader, but he still wields considerable influence over the goings-on in the House.

Finally, the Democratic response to Harriet Miers: she may have never worked with the Supreme Court, but she has experience as a lawyer, and that counts for something. More importantly, before they reject her outright, the Democrats should consider the fact that the Republican backlash is due to her lack of conservative credentials. (Now-Chief Justice) John Roberts was not only a brilliant legal mind, as has been often said, it’s also probably safe to assume he is not going to rock the boat; that’s what the next nominee was expected to do, and because Miers is expected to respect precedent, shouldn’t the left be happy to be spared the prospect of another Scalia? Besides, if the Republicans are going to mutiny against the president and block Miers’ confirmation, the Democrats would be better off voting in favor of her so that when she’s shot down and another, more controversial nominee is brought up they have the right to say they are voting against him/her on the grounds of her ideology, and not as a knee-jerk reaction to snub President Bush. It may be a pessimistic way of looking things, but that’s politics: the merits of an idea vs. its long-term impact on the rest of the playing field.

So don’t get me wrong. I enjoy watching a worm squirm. I just want the furor being raised to be about something more important than an 8 inch cut ‘top.’ Maybe I’ll feel better a year from now when the Democrats will have gotten their act together and retake Congress. “You can call me a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”-John Lennon