BUSH PLANS TO TURN PUBLIC OPINION AROUND... TONIGHT BUT HE'S MORE LIKELY TO STRENGTHEN THE CASE FOR IMPEACHMENT

Fresh off one of the worst public relations disasters of his miserable career-- Wednesday's escalation speech-- Bush is hoping that he'll get lucky tonight. He plans to use his endearing macho man demeanor-- no one will say if he'll be wearing the "Mission Accomplished" codpiece or not-- on 60 Minutes to rally the increasingly surly American public around his desperate plan to escalate his catastrophic war in Iraq. But the Regime isn't just putting all its eggs in Bush's basket; they're also rolling out 2 more big guns: they have the bumbling Steven Hadley and the venal Dick Cheney-- neck-and-neck in opinion polls with Paris Hilton-- going on TV to, respectively confuse and growl and snarl at people today as well. (We've all seen the crazy Cheney show; Hadley, the National Security Advisor, had this to say about the man whose abilities and good intentions are most pivotal to the success or failure of Bush's hubristic surge nonsense: "The reality on the streets of Baghdad suggests Maliki is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action.") Hey we need to send 21,500 more American soldiers into that caldron.

The Bush Regime media blitz is likely to be another nail in the impeachment coffin, which has taken on a life of its own as Bush has repeatedly told Congress that he doesn't care what they or the military or public opinion thinks about Iraq; it's his war and he'll fight it any way he likes.

Lee Hamilton, not exactly a partisan hothead, predicts that "We are headed towards quite a donnybrook in Congress... We had hoped that there would be more progress towards a more bipartisan approach." Bush Regime operatives are scrambling to see if they can get a "respectable number" of Republican senators to vote against the non-bindling sense of the Senate resolution condemning the escalation. Right now the only Republican commitments they have have been scraped from the bottom of the barrel: McCain, who will say anything to get elected president, Lieberman, who will say anything that entails the spilling of blood, Lindsey Graham, who will say anything McCain tells him to, Kyle (AZ), Cochran (MS), Allard (CO), Hatch (UT), Hutchison (TX), McConnell (KY), Sessions (AL), Thune (SD), and, of course, Cornyn (TX).

The White House knows the resolution is going to pass-- and pass big. But that won't stop them from shipping the troops to Iraq. "Bush aides said that current funds are enough to get started, and they are counting on the notion that it will take two months until the supplemental appropriation bill providing more war funds comes to a vote. By then, they said, extra troops will be on the ground and it will be too late for Congress to stop them." But will it make Bush impeachment hearing inevitable? The vaunted Republican lockstep unity of the past 6 years is rapidly fraying around the edges. If Bush goes ahead in Iraq, against the will of Congress and against the will of the people, and if his policies continue to fail as miserably as they have thus far-- or, as many predict, worse-- the case for impeachment will be unavoidable regardless of how badly Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer want to avoid it.