Dear Nica Times:
In regards to your Sept 5. front page article “Ortega gets Negative Marks after 19 months”: The article states that 58 percent of the population “doesn’t support” the government of President Daniel Ortega. So that means that Ortega and his government has a 42 percent “approval rating.” Lucky him. That is twice as high as U.S. President George W. Bush and his regime.
Bush has an approval rating of less than 24 percent and the U.S. government as a whole has an approval rating less than 18 percent.
That’s by far the worse in U.S. history.
The United States is so bad off that Bush has had to borrow over $1 trillion from communist China, over 1 million people have lost their homes, and at least 1 million more are about to. The unemployment rate is at a historic high, over 46 million people do not have health care, and the FDA doesn’t have enough funding to inspect and protect U.S. citizens from poisonous food and other dangerous products from Mexico and China.
The U.S. government neglects to protect the borders from 12 million illegal immigrants, many bringing in drugs, committing crimes, driving down wages and pose a potential terrorist threat. At the same time, the U.S. government is using hundreds of billions of U.S. tax dollars to bail out their rich buddies and investors on Wall Street.
And the U. S. dollar, as Jesse Ventura puts it, “is in the crapper.” Need I go on?
Ortega and especially Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez are angels compared to Bush and the U.S. Congress.
And in the meantime Vladimir Putin took his country out of war and paid off Russia’s national debt while Bush put the United States so far in debt that it would take every man, woman, child and baby, paying $31,000 each to pay it off. That’s before interest.
So, I say to all those unsatisfied Nicas and Venezuelans: It could be much worse; you could have the Bush government running – or destroying – your country.
Gene McDonald
Escazú, Costa Rica
Editor’s Note: President Ortega does not have a 42 percent approval rating, nor did the article say that. There were several different questions asked in the M&R Consultants poll last August. The question mentioned in the article was whether people “support” Ortega’s government: 58 percent said no, 16 percent said they give him a “vote of confidence,” 20 percent said they “support him with reservations,” and 6 percent didn’t answer. Regarding his approval rating, people were asked “How do you rate the performance of Daniel Ortega’s government so far?” Only 18.4 percent answered “good” or “very good,” 38 percent said “average,” 41 percent said “bad” or “very bad” and 2 percent didn’t reply.
