DARK DAYS FOR THE DARK SIDE: LAURA BUSH MUST BE LOCKING UP THE LIQUOR CABINETS IN THE WHITE HOUSE

Gee, I turned on CNN when I woke this morning, around 5AM, and it was all about how Gonzales' support among Republicans had eroded. While I was sleeping? They even had professional South Carolina ass-licker supreme, Lindsey Graham, one of the most contemptible rubber stamps the Bush Regime has ever been emboldened by, on for an interview. Even the rarely rational, closeted homophobic senator, a member of the Judiciary Committee, is now admitting that Gonzales "has said some things that just don't add up."

And Republican senators, none of whom have an ounce of credibility after 6 years of conspiring with and enabling the Bush Regime to rape and pillage everything Americans hold dear, are one thing. Hard right propagandist Robert Novak is something else again. He has an even more dire message for the Rove and Cheney dead-enders than do Specter, Hagel and Graham.

With nearly two years remaining in his presidency, George W. Bush is alone. In half a century, I have not seen a president so isolated from his own party in Congress -- not Jimmy Carter, not even Richard Nixon as he faced impeachment.

Republicans in Congress do not trust their president to protect them. That alone is sufficient reason to withhold statements of support for Gonzales, because such a gesture could be quickly followed by his resignation under pressure. Rep. Adam Putnam (Fla.)... praised Donald Rumsfeld in November only to see him sacked shortly thereafter.

But not many Republican lawmakers would speak up for Gonzales even if they were sure Bush would stick with him. He is the least popular Cabinet member on Capitol Hill, even more disliked than Rumsfeld was. The word most often used by Republicans to describe the management of the Justice Department under Gonzales is "incompetent."


...The I-word (incompetence) is also used by Republicans in describing the Bush administration generally. Several of them I talked to cited a trifecta of incompetence: the Walter Reed hospital scandal, the FBI's misuse of the USA Patriot Act and the U.S. attorneys firing fiasco. "We always have claimed that we were the party of better management," one House leader told me. "How can we claim that anymore?"

The way they claim anything? By brazenly lying and getting their media shills to echo it.