They needed somebody who had enough charisma to win an election, not a brilliant leader. I noticed the first criticisms of Bush from the right immediately after the 2004 elections. Before the election, they carefully controlled the public's access to Bush, limiting press conferences and carefuly filtering all of his contacts with the outside world. People didn't know how foolish he was, because all they ever saw was a man acting "Presidential". After the election, his handlers started setting him up to take the fall for all of the Republican Party problems. They started giving him more press conferences (so that people can see how ridiculous he is) and started letting him make public decisions instead of having all of his rulings filtered through others. Does anybody think that the phrase "I'm the decider" would have been allowed to reach the public in 2003?

The leaders of the Republican party know that they will take a popularity hit as people realize that they've been duped into voting for an incompetent leader, but they're gambling that they can spin people into believing it was all Bush't falut by the next election, so that they can dupe people into voting for false promises once again.

L.W.M., are you absolutely sure that coalition governments are better than coalition parties? If your theory is that a parliamentary system, or even a system of presidential direct elections would have diluted our monolithic military-industrial complex, and the attendant hegemonic wars, I'm not sure I agree. Frankly, given that our dysfunctional foreign policy is about all that a majority of both present parties seem to agree on, I suspect that it would continue even under a shaky coalition, just as it does today in Israel.

Or am I missing an element in your thinking?

Why wait for the historians to pass judgement when you can preempt them, i.e. Reagan was a great president, rather than a septuaginarian in the initial stages of Alzheimers who probably didn't know what was going on in the Oval office, much less the basement where the shredders were running non-stop.

The great conservative walk back will only escalalte as the casualties in Iraq increase and the primaries draw nearer.

But, props to Kurtz for his "broken clock" moment. Shouldn't he be writing some paean to Malkin or some other bloviator about now?

See, these poor conservatives were always against Bush. It's just that they praised him, defended him and voted for him because they were afraid, very very afraid.

Pity them, the poor things.

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dastardlydic, you've got one mighty bad case of moral blindness going on here.

Get this; the "real crime" is treason. Simple enough for you?

Libby is a traitor, so is Cheney.

Clinton's "real crime" was .... well, no one can really say. Mr Starr didn't really say.

Adultery? O.K. I'll take adultery over treason any day.

Adultery is bad for any regular citizen, but treason is a lot worse, especially for a president. Simple enough?

L.W.M., are you absolutely sure that coalition governments are better than coalition parties?

I wasn't advocating that, but I think it's possible to remove the impediments to third party participation without changing over to a parliamentary system entirely, unless I'm reading it wrong. You have a look:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_Law

Excerpted...

A third party can only enter the arena if it can exploit the mistakes of a pre-existing major party, ultimately at that party's expense. For example, the political chaos in the United States immediately preceding the Civil War allowed the Republican Party to replace the Whig Party as the progressive half of the American political landscape. Loosely united on a platform of country-wide economic reform and federally funded industrialization, the decentralized Whig leadership failed to take a decisive stance on the slavery issue, effectively splitting the party along the Mason-Dixon Line. Southern rural planters, initially lured by the prospect of federal infrastructure and schools, quickly aligned themselves with the pro-slavery Democrats, while urban laborers and professionals in the northern states, threatened by the sudden shift in political and economic power and losing faith in the failing Whig candidates, flocked to the increasingly vocal anti-slave Republican Party.

In countries that use proportional representation (PR), especially where the whole country forms a single constituency (like Israel), the electoral rules discourage a two-party system; the number of votes received for a party determines the number of seats won, and new parties can thus develop an immediate electoral niche. Duverger identified that the use of PR would make a two party system less likely. However, other systems do not guarantee new parties access to the system: Malta provides an example of a stable two-party system using the single transferable vote.

Monica Lewinsky was a Soviet spy.

Can't say I agree that the Libby trial is "just political", there were serious crimes committed by SOMEONE in the administration, and Libby lied about what he knew.

However, on this point:

Yet, when the liberals in office have a chance to stop it, they calculate that they would rather have the issue for the next election cycle than save a thousand or so American lives (and who knows how many Iraqi lives) in Iraq.

I could not agree more. How much spine does it take to stand up against something as plainly, clearly evil as torture? We should not see even one public figure brave enough to support such things, for fear of complete marginalization by his peers. Torturing or pre-emptively nuking Muslims should be as socially unacceptable a proposition in America as lynching blacks or sending Jews to camps. It is such a twisted logic that it cannot stand even a moment's scrutiny.

The lives that are being lost are real, Iraqi and American. Is it really that bad of a political move to say so?

RWAs' attentions are captured by whoever happens to be "out front" of the pack at the time, whoever is defining the terms of the debate. I do believe the Democrats will do best if they seize the moral high ground and not capitulate. You don't have to act like an authoritarian if you are speaking from true authority.

Torture and pre-emptive nukes are so blatantly immoral that anyone who points this out has immediately won the argument. It takes a whole lot of convincing to get people to pretend that dropping bombs on Iraqi women and children makes us any safer. It only takes a few moments of sober reflection to undo that spell, if only we can get people to take those moments.