Visiting the troops...

[PSU84]

... is pure political theater. Poll ratings down? Pull off a stunt.

The real issues are needless death and destruction in Iraq, going to war based on lies and deception, undermining the UN and NATO at every opportunity, exempting the Defense Department from civil service laws as a first step toward replacing the civil service with a "spoils system" of federal employment, privatizing services in the Park Service and Forest Service to make them more friendly to "development," incurring massive federal budget deficits by cutting taxes for the top ten percent of earners, focusing tax cuts on unearned income (interest, dividends, and capital gains) while raising the share of all taxes paid by workers, failing to address corporate accounting scandals, awarding huge government contracts to favored companies, encouraging industries to sue federal government to prevent it from enforcing environmental regulations and then making sweetheart out-of-court settlements with those industries, undermining the basis of Medicare so that private insurers can cherry pick the healthiest and least costly elderly. And still to come: turning Social Security from the most successful income support program in history into a giant 401(k) with huge profits for private
fund managers, and turning Medicaid from matching payments for medical service for the poor into a limited block grant for the states.

These are the issues, not some publicity stunt dreamed up by Karl Rove.