But when we build our infrastructure so poorly that the seas pour into our own cities, and then we leave our own cities looking as bombed-out as Baghdad, and we leave Americans to fend for themselves while the rest of us watch on tv a city sink that so many of us know and love. . . .

Katrina also brought home, however, the impact of Iraq here, at last.  With so many National Guard and their equipment overseas, they could not serve their purpose here.

From the high in approval following 9/11, it seems clear to me that these events damaged public trust.  

1. Iraq.  Undoubtedly, his 9/11 bounce comes down to Earth when he suggests invading Iraq.  His approval ebbs and flows with events in Iraq - he got nice bumps up from the invasion itself ('mission accomplished') and from Iraq's first election.  His approval dropped slowly but surely as the war wore on.

2. Abu Ghraib.  This is the event that marks the time when he first falls below 50% approval and never really recovers.  But your analysis is wrong - Americans felt sickened by the allegations because they shook the assumption that America is good.  The president gets blamed whenever this happens (i.e. LBJ and My Lai, for a Dem example.  He fell below 50% too).

3. Hurricane Katrina.  Bush got a big bounce from winning the 2004 election, but squandered whatever confidence he recovered.  He never climbs above 50% again, continuing his steady decline.

One was Bush fooling around with that guitar.

One was him doing his flyover.

One was him getting that weird taped briefing, which they stupidly showed us after the fact to "prove" that he was on it from the beginning.  He didn't ask a single question.

And finally, there was him standing up with Brownie, daring to congratulate him on his heckuva job.

Those images got stamped into the national consciousness right next to the ones of the people sitting on their rooftops or wading through water up to their chests or sitting abandoned in wheelchairs outside the superdome.

The Wall Street meltdown was the tipping point for the Republicans ... at least temporarily.

The press continues to neutralize both issues.

Iraq has been spun as a potential pro-US democracy in the mid-East - so it was worth it.

Katrina - I just don't think the media was that upset about it.
Remember the emphasis on looting? The people forced into shelters were characterized as thugs and worse.

And look at the Democrats.
Kerry was given, or bought, the nomination of the Democratic party in 2004. He didn't condemn Bush for misleading us. He tapped danced around the war saying idiotic garbage like, "help is on the way". He expressed no anger at Bush and his administration.

Then, in 2006 - Lieberman received the support of the two stars of the democratic party when Lamont bravely offered a principled challenge to this oaf. Obama swept up to Connecticut and lauded him. Clinton was also a "good democrat". War? What war?

And, of course, in 2006, when the democrats took control of both houses of congress, everyone knew it was about Iraq, Iraq and Iraq. And they did nothing. In fact, they allowed an escalation to take place with which our Pres-Elect is truly infatuated.

So - no. I don't think that Bush's lies about Iraq were his undoing. His rhetoric and spin has been accepted as reality by everyone. The few who want to hold him to account, like Feingold and Kucinich and Nader, are marginalized or ridiculed by the democrats and ignored by the media.

And with Katrina, I think this has satisfactorily been spun as an error in judgement, or a forgivable lack of planning. I was listening, but I heard not a peep from Obama during the campaign about the plight of black and white people whose lives have been devastated by this disaster. No calls for a Marshall Plan for New Orleans.

He and the necons took advantage of 911 and used it to push their Iraq agenda.  A plan to hit Iraq was an old plan that was on the books since the Clinton administration. The necoons tried to sell it to Clinton but he never took the bait.  I believe it was put on the books  by the Jewish neocons in the Bush administration to protect Israel.  Guys like Wolfowitz, Feith and Pearle were the main pushers who wanted to hit Iraq. Wolfowitz was the first person in the Bush administration to say we must hit Iraq because they are responsible.  It was a bag of goods sold to Bush and Bush who knew better could not resist, since Sadamm tried to kill his father after the first Gulf War.  The neocons and the Bush administration knew the American people were angry and wanted someone to pay for this.  It was easy to sell the attack in Iraq since  the people were in a lynch mob mentality and wanted anyone they could find to pay for this atrocity plus it was a midterm election year and any U.S. rep or senator running at that time would look very unpatriotic and maybe their political life was on the line.  

It was an easy sell job.

His personal behavior on 9/11, the constant changing and elevating reasons for why we needed to attack Iraq (none of them believable), and his choices for VP and his cabinet were the foundation of what we could expect. I can't think of anything the history books can say about what he did good for the country.

I'm not convinced that Iraq hurt him that much here. After 9/11 the country was more than willing to lash out at anyone. (It definitely has done a number on us internationally). Having a volunteer military, using mercenaries and controling the media Bush has been able to shield Iraq from public scrutiny.

Iraq was an "over there" thing; yes, we saw the pictures and the death toll, and soon enough, we learned that it was all cooked up, planned, engineered, and we felt anger and betrayal, but it was still out-of-sight enough for most people that it could be ignored; we were too busy shopping and taking the equity out of our homes and watching our retirement plans grow.

Katrina, however, was a different story.  That was here, on our own turf, and I think a light went on for a lot of people and allowed them to take the true measure of the president - they looked at the totality of the Bush presidency - that iconic photo of him observing the devastation from Air Force 1 pretty much summing it up - and found it severely wanting.

In the last 6 months, Bush got his version of FISA and the no-strings attached $700 billion TARP funding.

History may judge him differently but that is impossible to know.   Like Truman before him he is being asked to not let the door hit him in the A$$ on the way out.   He mismanaged the war in Iraq for 2-3 years and we could have been where we are now in 2005 but hindsight is 20/20.  

It was a political gameble that won him re-election but cost him his legacy in the short term.

Katrina is window dressing and a PR fiasco created because the stink of Iraq rang so true in the late summer of 2005.   If he had been winning the war in 2005 it would have been harder to make the incompetent comander in cheif stick but with the mess in Iraq it wasn't that hard and the media was annoyed at itself for feeling conned on Iraq and was out for blood and Bush's inept PR on Katrina was a perfect storm that effectively ended his days of 50plus popularity.

IT's been a slow burn and the current success in Iraq is falling on deaf ears as it probably should.

History may judge the war in Iraq a succes 20 years from now and may see his economic intervention in the waning days as an important moment that prevented complete collapse but we won't know that for a long time.

In the short term he is not the fiend made out by the left but he is also no Reagan.

I know when I booed Bush at the US Capitol on January 20, 2001 that I did not trust him and I expected very bad things to soon happen.

He did not disappoint me in that regard.

......in answer to:

The Bush Admin proved the conspiracy theorists were right all along; they always contended that the elites are in power, at all times, no matter whether the structure is democratic or not -- such is irrelevant.  

It is sad, but social constructivist's won the day, when explaining Bush's defeat!  It makes us seem powerless, but it offers the better explanation.

We are a society controlled by the media (NBC=GE, FOX=Murdoch, ABC=Disney etc.), and Bush was brought down by the very media (note, it was NBC that first called the Iraqi domestic events a "civil war," not the govt.)

We all remember how (unfairly, need I say) the media treated Hillary, literally making a joke of the whole debate process? (Watch the SNL mock debate clips and then the actual ones!)