USA Today:

President Bush’s approval rating has slumped to 31% in a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll, the lowest of his presidency and a warning sign for Republicans in the November elections.

The survey of 1,013 adults, taken Friday through Sunday, shows Bush’s standing down by 3 percentage points in a single week. His disapproval rating also reached a record: 65%. The margin of error is +/- 3 percentage points.

How low can he go?

“You hear people say he has a hard core that will never desert him, and that has been the case for most of the administration,” says Charles Franklin, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin who studies presidential approval ratings. “But for the last few months, we started to see that hard core seriously erode in support.”

According to Howard Fineman on Countdown, the White House thinks the Hayden confirmation hearings will help them. The NSA spy program will be front and center, and the Bushies think that’s a winner for them. More dissociative thinking?

Reuters reports that Moussaoui wants to withdraw his guilty plea.

Moussaoui, 37, said in an affidavit filed with the motion that he had pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy in connection with the attacks against the advice of his court-appointed lawyers because his understanding of the U.S. legal system was “completely flawed.”

Moussaoui’s court-appointed lawyers — who rarely speak to their client — said in a footnote that they were aware of a federal rule that prohibits a defendant from withdrawing a guilty plea after a sentence is imposed. But they said they filed the motion anyway “given their problematic relationship with Moussaoui.”

Make of that what you will.

John F. Harris has a lovely article in the Washington Post on the friendship between the late John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

There was a time — it’s been decades now — when politicians or pundits would call people “liberal intellectuals” and not mean it as an insult.

The phrase carried no sarcasm or disdain. Nor was it an abstraction. There were specific individuals who answered by the name….

… How to convey the way public intellectuals such as Galbraith and Schlesinger loomed over American politics and ideas for the quarter-century following World War II?

The easiest way would be to point to their latter-day equivalents. But there simply is no one these days who does what they did.

Froomkin says the Amazing Giant Perch actually was a large-mouth bass.

Lovely lib links:

Justin Rood at TPM Muckraker connects CIA director-nominee Hayden to “a top executive at the company at the center of the Cunningham bribery scandal.”

Might Al Gore run in 2008?

Elisabeth Bumiller reports that the President is occupied by plans for the presidential library he will build after he leaves office. He wants the library to include a public policy center. Jeez, who knew Bush had any interest in public policy?

Ezra says,

You just can’t make this stuff up. George W. Bush reportedly wants to start a think tank once he leaves office, dedicated to “the spread of democracy and Alexis de Tocqueville’s vision of America as a nation made better by its “associations,” or community groups.” Sigh. Truth is, I think I’d rather bowl alone than bowl with Bush.

Good’n, Ezra!

The view from Germany, via Spiegal Online: “For some time now, the president has become an observer of his own political decline.”

Paul Craig Roberts, “A Nation of Waitresses and Bartenders.”

“Who’s Crazy Now?” he asks.

A conspiracy theory, says Wikipedia, “attempts to explain the cause of an event as a secret, and often deceptive, plot by a covert alliance.” Claims that global warming is a hoax and that the liberal media are suppressing the good news from Iraq meet that definition. In each case, to accept the claim you have to believe that people working for many different organizations — scientists at universities and research facilities around the world, reporters for dozens of different news organizations — are secretly coordinating their actions.

But the administration officials who told us that Saddam had an active nuclear program and insinuated that he was responsible for 9/11 weren’t part of a covert alliance; they all worked for President Bush. The claim that these officials hyped the case for war isn’t a conspiracy theory; it’s simply an assertion that people in a position of power abused that position. And that assertion only seems wildly implausible if you take it as axiomatic that Mr. Bush and those around him wouldn’t do such a thing.

The truth is that many of the people who throw around terms like “loopy conspiracy theories” are lazy bullies who, as Zachary Roth put it on CJR Daily, The Columbia Journalism Review’s Web site, want to “confer instant illegitimacy on any argument with which they disagree.” Instead of facing up to hard questions, they try to suggest that anyone who asks those questions is crazy.

Indeed, right-wing pundits have consistently questioned the sanity of Bush critics; “It looks as if Al Gore has gone off his lithium again,” said Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Post columnist, after Mr. Gore gave a perfectly sensible if hard-hitting speech. Even moderates have tended to dismiss the administration’s harsh critics as victims of irrational Bush hatred.

I think Professor Krugman has been reading Glenn Greenwald.

But now those harsh critics have been vindicated. And it turns out that many of the administration supporters can’t handle the truth. They won’t admit that they built a personality cult around a man who has proved almost pathetically unequal to the job. Nor will they admit that opponents of the Iraq war, whom they called traitors for warning that invading Iraq was a mistake, have been proved right. So they have taken refuge in the belief that a vast conspiracy of America-haters in the media is hiding the good news from the public.

Of course, as long as they’re the ones running the government, and as long as they’ve got their own media reporting from Rightie Alternate Reality Universe, they don’t have to admit the truth.

Be sure to read the whole thing. It’s brilliant.

I found the Zachary Roth post to which Professor Krugman refers. It’s from February 2004, and it’s on the use of the phrase “conspiracy theory” by a number of prominent columnists.

… the phrase serves as a dismissal, closing off debate rather than opening it up.

Loopy us. At times we could swear that some commentators are using the label “conspiracy theory” to remove uncomfortable ideas from the public debate, without having to actually come up with countervailing evidence.

Or is that a conspiracy theory?