George Bush's most vocal supporter in Suffolk, Chuck Fisher, had another missive in the News-Herald Sunday blasting me and the News-Herald, mostly me, over what he sees as a somewhat anti George Bush tilt in opinion pieces written by me.

Mr. Fisher's implication is that I'm somehow unpatriotic and out of step with public opinion.

Obviously, Mr. Fisher has not turned on his television for a couple months. The president's approval rating is 36 percent. That's as bad as any president has ever had. Except for Nixon, no president at this point in his second term has been less than 50 percent.

I recently came across the following commentary on the president's 36 percent approval rating that

I found amusing, or scary, depending on how you look at it:

"Those are pre-coup numbers," the pundit wrote. "That's when a politician in a third world county becomes so unpopular that a couple of generals decide to show him the door. Nixon at the height of Watergate was at 39 percent, three points higher than Bush is right now. And people despised Nixon.

"To say ‘people like Bush' under these circumstances is to be so inaccurate that I have to question either your intelligence or your motives. How much cognitive reasoning ability do you need to figure out that 36 percent approval rating means people don't like George Bush."

That about sums it up. I'll leave Mr. Fisher to come to his own conclusions, but I think I'm in pretty good company.

It's not so much, really, that I hate President Bush. I don't. In fact, as an American, I need and desperately want President Bush to be successful.

I have a son who will soon be of military service age and I'm also in a big mortgage. I want us to win in Iraq (whatever winning is) and for the housing market to continue to blaze, but I have my doubts that either will.

Nonetheless, I believe he has mismanaged the Iraq war and has done more to undermine the freedom and security of the United States than anything a terrorist could have done.

Apparently a lot of other Americans think so, too.

Mr. Fisher even goes beyond his normal Prutsok bashing in this piece to take jabs at Cindy Sheehan, the woman who's son was killed in Iraq and whose individual protest has single-handedly brought the president's poll numbers to the dismal point they are at now.

If I'm correct, he implies that she is a socialist and other such nonsense which has no bearing on the fact that her son was killed in Iraq and she would simply like to know why.

What Mr. Fisher and the shrill minority (36 percent) seem to forget is that in America, we n the 64 percent of us who disappove of the job the president is doing, have a right to that opinion and to express it in both newspaper articles and by camping out at the gate of the president's ranch. That's what America is about. I'm not sure what the America is that Mr. Fisher envisions n apparently one where citizens are duty-bound to slime anyone who has an opinion on an issue that differs from Sean Hannity's and Rush Limbaugh's, but I don't think I want to live there.