"they'll turn the game board over as they leave."

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE
November 17, 2005

President Bush's positive job rating continues to fall, touching another new low for his presidency, the latest Harris Interactive poll finds. Bush's current job approval rating stands at 34%.

"Seeing the Bush Administration go down is not going to be a pretty site. Like angry confused children, as it dawns on them that they will not be able to win this game, that they will soon completely lose the ability to swindle the American public, then they will decide that if they're going to lose, were all going to lose and they'll turn the game board over as they leave." ----- Bloganator at Huffington Post.

Then from Robert Scheer over at the Huffington Post:
"You've got to hand it to Dick Cheney; no other modern politician has come so close to perfecting the theater of the absurd. Even as he protests his innocence of lying about matters of state, he lies about matters of state.

Parsed out, Cheney's recent statements amount to a defensive claim the Bush administration didn't lie so much as it was just calamitously incompetent, too eager for invasion to bother to do its due diligence.`The reality, however, is that while the Yalie president may not be the brightest star on the horizon, the owlish Cheney is nobody's dummy. What he is nand has always been, is the most bald-faced of the administration's war hustlers, shamelessly peddling, for example, the cloak-and-dagger tale of a Hussein operative meeting with 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta in Prague long after U.S. intelligence had dismissed it.

Similarly, it was Cheney who was instrumental in getting Colin Powell to make the astonishing claims of the intelligence source code-named "Curveball" the centerpiece of the secretary of state's prewar presentation to the United Nations. Now, thanks to a definitive investigation by the Los Angeles Times published Sunday, we find out that top German intelligence sources in charge of interrogating Curveball had already declared him an unreliable source.

"We were shocked," a high level German intelligence officer told the Times. "Mein Gott! We had always told (the United States) it was not proven -- it was not hard intelligence."

But perhaps the most outrageous lie Cheney and the White House kept -- and keep -- making is that invading Iraq was a sensible part of the response to 9/11."In February 2002, after a briefing on the status of the war in Afghanistan, the commanding officer, Gen. Tommy Franks, told me the war was being compromised as specialized personnel and equipment were being shifted from Afghanistan to prepare for the war in Iraq -- a war more than a year away," noted Graham on Sunday. "Even at this early date, the White House was signaling that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was of such urgency that it had priority over the crushing of al Qaeda."",

In making his continued one-man jihad against the facts, Cheney is apparently throwing Hail Mary passes to that part of the Republican base which will believe anything it is told -- having already lost the trust of the majority of Americans.But as Rep. John Murtha said in response to the slander by a Republican congresswoman that he, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran, is a coward for arguing for the quick and complete withdrawal from Iraq, 'You can't spin this. You've got to have a real solution. This is not a war of words, this is a war."
Yes, Cheney's war.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-scheer/cheneys-trouble-with-the_b_11117.html

Well, this has been sort of a connect-the-dots post, with me bringing in material from several sources.

As it is Bush at 34% means next spring, unless something miraculous happens, he can do fundraising for Repubs, but probably not public campaign appearances. By late spring the Abramoff trail should start, and Scanlon will squeal and start getting Repub congressmen indicted. By early fall the Scooter Libby trial could start.

Things don't look good for the Republicans , and the crack up in the ranks are a sign that panic is starting to set in. There probably will be a withdrawal or re-deployment, because if Bush tries to stay the course, with 57% of Americans thinking he's a liar,he will end up getting destroyed politically, and if Cheney is any indication of the mentality, or lack of, his stay the course idea will take the Republican party down with him.

As Thomas Friedman notes today," If ours were a parlimentary system Bush would have to resign by now."

Its too bad we have to wait til Nov 2006 for some substantial reaction to this regime to take place.Lets see ,2 years of Korean War took Harry Truman down to 23% approval. So Bush still has further down to go. It is messy, and it is going to get messier.
Since we don't have a parlimentary system , we are stuck with this turkey for another three years.