BUSH IS FEELING VERY, VERY ALONE-- NOT COUNTING THE GUYS ON THE PAYROLL, McCAIN AND, OF COURSE, LIEBERMAN

If you don't think Iraq has spiraled out of control, you're one of the few. Even extremist loons like Georgia far, far right senator, Saxby Chamberpot, is uneasy about giving Bush a green light on escalation. Chamberpot is up for re-election in 2008 and most of the Republican senators speaking up on the topic who also are (Gordon Smith, Norm Coleman, Susan Collins), have given the Bush/McCain escalation doctrine a big thumbs down. And, for a change, it looks like there will be more Republican defectors than there are Ben Nelson type sell-outs among Democrats. (Referring to Lieberman as a "Democrat" is strictly for the terminally delusional and would be something akin to calling that big wooden horse outside the gates a Trojan super-weapon that would put an end to their war with the Greeks once and for all.) Today's Washington Post makes the point that the surge plan's critics say it's just more of the same failed lack of strategy. [The photo above is of Bush and Chamberpot in... better days.]

If Republicans are putting distance between themselves and Bush on Iraq, Joe Biden has an entirely opposite reason for attacking him. Biden is desperate to get out of the Senate and he seems to think that attacking the Bush/McCain escalation is his ticket to ride. And even a Republican backbencher of no consequence, who's a two-neighborhood gerrymander away from forced retirement, is calling Bush's performance as commander in chief "inexcusable." Big news: nobody loves a loser. And one thing you've got to say about George W. Bush-- I mean the full man from start to finish, is that he is, by any definition, a loser.

I think Pat Buchanan loved rubbing that in today. He seemed to take great delight in pointing out that Bush's erstwhile allies abandoned him without a look back-- out "to salvage their own tattered reputations"-- as he pathetically prepared to watch his 30% approval rating plunge even further, as it is sure to do when he announces his stillborn plan to send more American troops into the midst of the Iraqi Civil War.

As the Iraq war heads into its fifth year, more than half a dozen [neocons] have confessed to Vanity Fair's David Rose their abject despair over how the Bushites mismanaged the war that they, the "Vulcans," so brilliantly conceived.

Surveying what appears an impending disaster for Iraq and U.S. foreign policy, the neocons have advanced a new theme. The idea of launching an unprovoked war of liberation, for which they had beaten the drums for half a decade before 9-11, remains a lovely concept. It was Bushite incompetence that fouled it up.

"The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can't execute it, it's useless, just useless," wails Ken Adelman, who had famously predicted in The Washington Post that "liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk."

Bush's team of Powell, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice, says Adelman, "turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional." Their incompetence, he adds, "means that most everything we ever stood for ... lies in ruins."

Professor Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins, whose book on war leaders Bush used to carry about, says his mistake was in not knowing "how incredibly incompetent" the Bush team would be.

Richard Perle is sickened by the consequences of the war he and his comrades so ardently championed. "The levels of brutality... are truly horrifying, and, I have to say, I underestimated the depravity."

Calling the Bush policy process a "disaster," Perle blames Bush himself: "At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible. ...I don't think he realizes the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty...

David Frum, the cashiered White House speechwriter who co-authored the "axis-of-evil" phrase, faults the president. While he provided the words, says Frum, Bush "just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of maybe everything."

Where Frum, four years ago, accused antiwar conservatives of being "unpatriotic" haters of America and President Bush, he is now saying that that same president either lacked the I.Q. to realize what he was saying or lacked a belief and commitment to follow through.

As Rose writes, this is "the most damning assessment of all." Moreover, it is an indictment of Bush's judgment that he could clasp so many such vipers to his bosom.

Rose describes James Woolsey, the ex-CIA director who was ubiquitous on the op-ed pages and national TV making the case for war, as "aghast at what he sees as profound American errors that have ignored the lessons learned so painfully, 40 years ago" in Vietnam.

Buchanan, no defender of Bush's competence or IQ, takes umbrage at the neocons cuttin' and runnin' from their tar baby. "No neocon concedes that the very idea itself of launching an unprovoked war against a country in the heart of the Arab world-- one that had not attacked us, did not threaten us and did not want war with us-- might not be wildly welcomed by the "liberated." No neocon has yet conceded that Bismarck may have been right when he warned, 'Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death'... Meanwhile, brave young Americans, the true idealists and the casualties of the neocons' war, come home in caskets, 20 a week, to Dover and, at Walter Reed, learn to walk again on steel legs."


UPDATE: BRITS TELL BUSH HE'LL SOON BE ON HIS OWN

And with Bush's poodle being pushed out of government, even the Brits will soon be abandoning the hapless American president to his folly. Today's Guardian reports that Gordon Brown, Tony's Blair's successor as PM, has a similar view to Gordon Smith's (R-OR) of Bush's catastrophic and ineptly run war in Iraq. "Brown acknowledged that mistakes were made in the aftermath of the invasion and promised to be 'very frank' with President Bush. He also said that Britain is likely to scale down its commitment of troops to Iraq over the next year-- even as the White House is considering dispatching thousands more, at least temporarily... In the interview, recorded on Saturday, Brown also said he believed there should be some form of inquiry into the aftermath of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. 'There are lessons to be learnt, particularly from what happened immediately after Saddam Hussein fell,' he told the BBC. 'One is that in Iraq itself there is absolutely no doubt-- and I think people will agree on this in time-- that the passage of authority to the local population should have begun a lot earlier, so they had to take more responsibility for what was happening in their own country.' He said the experience of insurgency in Iraq and Islamic extremist terrorism had proven that 'we will not win against extreme terrorist activities and propaganda activities unless we have this battle for hearts and minds as well.' The Treasury chief said he believed Britain was unlikely to join any future U.S. plan to temporarily increase troop numbers in Iraq, aimed at stemming the current bloodshed. Britain would 'continue to move troops from combat to training, to complete the redevelopment work' and was likely to scale down their presence over the next few months."


SO ALONE THAT EVEN THE MORMONS ARE OVER HIM!

Abandoned by Americans, mainstream conservatives, the military, neocons, the Brits... and now even Utah, the reddest and most clueless place in America, has figured it out: Bush BAD.