President Bush beat the rest of the field like an orchestra timpani in my poll to find out who's least admired among a list of shaky characters.

A couple weeks ago, I asked y'all to vote on who you thought should have the lowest approval rating: George W., Saddam Hussein, Kenneth Lay, O.J. Simpson, Barry Bonds, Jeffrey "Let's Do Lunch" Dahmer, and Sarah, the nasty old former bartender out at the Dry Creek Cafe on Mount Bonnell Road.

One guy e-mailed me all honked off for including Osama bin Laden in the same poll with George W. I never mentioned bin Laden in my poll, and I told the guy so. Seems he had gotten bin Laden and Saddam mixed up.

Isn't that how we got into this Iraq mess in the first place?

Bush was a shoo-in for lowest approval rating with 534 votes, or 62.17 percent of the vote. Sarah came in a distant second with 89 votes, or 10.36 percent. What this proves is that there are more people chapped about the war in Iraq than there are folks who have been thrown out of the Dry Creek Cafe.

The rest of the field came in like this: Hussein, 83 votes (9.66 percent); Dahmer, 47 votes (5.47 percent); Simpson, 45 votes (5.24 percent); Bonds, 32 votes (3.73 percent) and Lay, 29 votes (3.38 percent).

So Bush didn't do so well here. But I always figured that even if George W. Bush's dog hauled off and bit him, he could always head out to his old oil patch stomping grounds and be universally loved.

Boy, was I wrong.

Even out in conservative Odessa, the newspaper last week ran an editorial attacking the administration's "aggressive promotion of democracy" through military conflict.

I spent a couple of days last week in Odessa, not exactly hippie territory. As I was coming out of La Margarita, a Mexican restaurant, I noticed a bumper sticker that said, "If Mary was Pro-choice, there would be no CHRISTMAS!" So this mall thing is Mary's fault? No Mary, no Gap?

Inside the restaurant, a guy over by the cash register was wearing a red Halliburton jumpsuit. In Austin, that's a Halloween outfit.

Odessa is not yoga class country. Want a massage in Odessa? Rub yourself.

Still, the Odessa American had an editorial Wednesday saying the Bush administration's policy "bids fair to have the United States involved in open military and lower-level conflicts for years and even decades to come. . . . The administration seems to have learned nothing from experience over the last four years," the editorial concludes. "Sadly, America could be the worse for it."

Is there no place this guy can go and not get bagged?

To be fair, Ken Brodnax, the American's editorial page editor, points out that the newspaper has Libertarian roots and was "not particularly enthused about going to Iraq in the first place."

"But this is still Bush country, and this is generally a pretty conservative area, so he still has huge support out here," Brodnax said.

Hey, it's nice to know there's at least one place left where people would vote for Bush over Jeffrey Dahmer. Although there might be a runoff.

© 2006 Cox Texas Newspapers, LP

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