Just about every polling entity is or will be coming out with new data showing Americans are down on "President Bush's handling" of the war in Iraq.

Newsweek is the latest, with this one:

Sixty-one percent of Americans polled disapprove of the way President George W. Bush is handling the situation in Iraq; just 34 percent approve, according to the latest Newsweek Poll conducted Tuesday, Aug. 2 to Thursday, Aug. 4.

That's pretty low approval. And then you may realize a small thing like Saddam Hussein's trial is around the corner, and then you may realize that the world will begin hearing - in graphic detail - why it was better that Saddam was removed than left in power.

His trial will start this fall. He has been charged with ethnic cleansing against the Kurds; using WMD against his own people in Halabja; widespread slaughter of Kurds and Shia in 1991; the 1983 Barzani massacre; and the assassination of Shia religious leaders in 1974. That's just for starters.

Saddam Hussein is a genocidal maniac who would still be filling mass graves, throwing children in kiddie prisons, offering terrorists sanctuary and presenting a threat to America were he still in office. Now, President Bush has not been in public, making these points, for some time. He simply has not been telling the other side of the story, and few have been telling it for him. So when public opinion shifts like it has, it's not surprising that it's because there has been a single side of the story geting airplay. But that will change once the gavel bangs down and Saddam's trial opens.