Maltese, the President DID lower taxes. My federal tax bill went down and I'm far from rich.

The President does not work in a vaccum, and does NOT hold all the power in the country. While the Republican Party on paper controls both houses of Congress, it is a very slim and fractious majority. He cannot simply decide on Monday to do something and have the House and Senate hack off on it and have it law on Tuesday, as his plans for Social Security, taxes, and various budgetary items have shown. The President is in many cases a small part of what goes on. An example of this would be the numbe rof Presidential Vetoes out of his office. At the moment, I believe the number of Vetoes by the President is 0, as he knows the vetoes would be overridden by the congress he supposedly controls.

Things are getting better in Iraq. There is a small portion of the country that is not under control, and that's all the media cares to report on. If you asked a soldier in the Hurtgoen Forest in Germany at the close of WW2 how he thought the war was going, he probably would have said we were in deep trouble and were losing. Why? Because that small sector of the war the soldier saw was where we were getting pounded. The casualty rate was enormous, soldiers were going in as fresh troops one day and out on a stretcher (if they were lucky) the next. While this was going on, the Third Army was rolling up the Southern flank of the Reich and the war was ending. These soldiers in the forest would never have known it, though, as they only saw their sphere of action.

Dab, I believe you said your brother is a Marine, in which case he falls into the same category as the soldiers in the forest. The Marines are in some of the toughest sectors in the fight (Fallujah for example), and don't see a lot of what is going on in the rest of the theater.

The US is also fighting the war on terrorism on other fronts than Iraq, but Iraq is the only one that makes the news. We have soldiers in the Phillipines assisting the fight there. We have soldiers all over the Horn of Africa, and many other places in the world that don't get media coverage, but that doesn't mean they are not fighting terrorism. I have a friend who has spent more time in Africa over the last 4 years than he has spent in the US, but there aren't any cameras covering what he has done. Iraq is merely the cause celebre that people opposed to the President's policies are using to attack what he has done, while most of what he has done was done with the full consent of congess, including the democrats.