How to read polls

Polls can tell you many things - most obviously, in our circumstances, that the country hates George Bush.

Where it gets really interesting, though, is in the second-tier numbers about why we hate the chimp, how many more of us hate him over a given timespan, and more broadly, how we feel about chimpery.

The answers to this new CBS/NYT poll belie several commonly held assumptions. One being that chimp has been done in by Iraq, or by any other single issue. Look at the curve; his popularity, never strong to begin with after the 2000 coup, was falling before 9/11; continuously fell afterwards; spiked with the illegal war on Iraq; and has been in free fall ever since. You don't see an unbroken trend over six years without intrinsic causes.

Next, what you can see is that the downward trend has been accelerating - because now the base is joining the rest of us.

But that's just a triviality, all of it, because chimp will never be on a ballot again, right?

Wrong. Because Bush's failure is also the failure of his party and of his ideology. Take a look at those second-tier values questions: who comes closer to sharing your moral values (Democrats 50%, Rs 37%); who will better protect your civil liberties (Democrats 62%, Rs 22%); who has more new ideas (Democrats 45%, Rs 22%).

I said years ago that Bush would destroy his party with all the inevitability of the rising tide. The metaphor is apt, considering the drowning of New Orleans. I'll repeat it today: the chimp will destroy wingnuttery as a viable and "acceptable" view of the world.