CNN: Obama ALREADY Less Popular Than Bush, page 1

Just for the record, the people of Iraq and Afghanistan are not "brown"... They're Caucasian. Iraq is the birthplace of Western (Caucasian) Civilization.

But bolstering presidential popularity numbers through military action wasn't invented in the Bush administration, by any means.

Bill Clinton, for instance, deployed more American troops on more useless military ventures than any president in U.S. history, a record that still stands. Every time Clinton's numbers sagged due to his many domestic scandals, he would deploy our troops or launch an illegal missile attack on Iraq or the Sudan, or exhaust our entire cruise missile arsenal on a civil war in Bosnia. The "Flower Child" president was, indeed, quite trigger happy.

Before that, George H. Bush deployed nearly 200,000 American troops to kick Saddam Hussein out of tiny Kuwait, an enormous PR move for the sagging Bush administration. Perhaps he should have gone all the way and overthrown Iraq while he had the chance and the public approval — I think he could have won the 1992 election if he'd just been a little more militaristic.

Before that, Reagan did a lot of saber rattling for 8 years but never actually staged any major military operations, unless you call Grenada a "major" operation. Reagan's approval numbers remained fairly high throughout his presidency because he was just a likeable president, although his powerful vice president probably twisted many arms behind the scenes.

Before that, Carter demonstrated his total ineptitude at military operations, and the American public hated him like poison by the end of his only term. His predecessor, Gerald Ford, couldn't do anything to improve his low approval ratings.

Now, Richard Nixon was a unique president. Many uneducated liberals out there erroneously think Nixon escalated the Vietnam war, but the annual death toll of that war tells a different story. Before he entered the White House, American troops were dying by the tens of thousands in Vietnam, hitting the highest annual death toll of the entire war under the Johnson administration. As soon as Nixon entered the White House in 1969, the combat deaths in Vietnam steadily decreased over the next 3 years, and Nixon's public approval ratings were high enough to get him re-elected in 1972. Except for the Watergate Scandal, Nixon may have gone down in the history books as one of our greatest presidents, believe it or not.

Lyndon Johnson entered the presidency by default, you may recall, when JFK was assassinated in 1963, and he was actually elected to the office less than a year later, still riding the wave of JFK sympathy. Overshadowing his questionable contributions to the public welfare, Johnson escalated the Vietnam war into a meat-grinder for American troops, and he was rightly despised by the American public by the end of his term in 1968.

JFK, of course, came into the office as a hero of WWII, and his public approval was never higher than when he was spouting off patriotic Americanisms. If he had lived, he would have undoubtedly been re-elected in 1964, meaning that JFK would have had to deal with the escalation in Vietnam. I do seriously doubt that JFK's public approval would have survived that war.

— Doc Velocity