Wow. Just... wow.

Bush is totally, like, busted.

It seems like things are going into a freefall for the conservative movementarians. Bush approval at an all-time low, FoxNews ratings dropping by 20%. There is no joy in mudville.

With all the bad news coming out of Iraq, and the hard reality dawning that our military -- once perceved more or less universally to be invincible -- is in fact a mortal creation with limited powers, the word seems to have come down from the pigs who direct the Republican Noise Machine that it's time to begin preparing for the end.

In the past week, Bill O'Reilly, William Kristol, William F. Buckley and a host of lesser lights in the media/thought apparatus that drove the effort to whip up suppport and launch the war have all shifted stance to accomodate a result which no one really wanted to see, but which most of us on the anti-war side always feared and suspected: failure.

UPDATE: See also the intellectual Father of Neocoservatism denouncing Iraq in relation to his ideals. Oh, man.

The most important aspect of this for all the so-called conservatives, of course, is who to blame. Glenn Greenwald has another great post on this. Latest Iraqi war casualty -- conservative belief in "personal responsibility":

Those who insisted on this war, who started it, who prosecuted it, who controlled every single facet of its operation – they have no blame at all for the failure of this war. Nope. They were right all along about everything. It all would have worked had war critics just kept their mouths shut. The ones who are to blame are the ones who never believed in this war, who control no aspect of the government, who were unable to influence even a single aspect of the war, who were shunned, mocked and ridiculed, and who have been out of power since the war began. They are the ones to blame. They caused this war to fail.

The point here is that no one with a shred of opposition to this whole endeavor was ever in any position to influence any decision which could have had any effect on the outcome. But they're (we're) gonna get blamed.

The argument that's going to be made is that we didn't participate in the Tinkerbell Strategy: we didn't clap loudly enough, believe hard enough.

And that's why this thing was such a catastrophe. Not because it was a crazy idea in the first place. Not because it was sold to the Public though flim-flam, fear and outright lies. Not because Rumsfeld wanted to prove his pet theories about how a modern military worked. Not because Bush alienated every possible ally. Not because the Green-zone staffers in charge of reconstruction were political appointees with no experience, concerned with setting a flat tax rate and insuring that the eventual Iraqi judiciary they were trying to create would stand strong against abortion. Not because of corrupt no-bid contracts. Not because we couldn't keep the electricity on, or even prevent mile-long gas lines in an oil rich nation. Not because we disbanded the Iraqi army and purged their entire pre-existing power structure.

Certainly not because we tortured people, kicked in doors, kidnapped wives and daughters. America always has the moral high ground, of course.

No. It's my fault (and maybe yours) because I (we?) didn't want any of this to happen.

Get ready. You're gonna hear it loud and proud.

I was planning on doing a little bloggin' about Abortion, which is coming up as an issue and is sort of poorly articulated by a lot of activists on the left. I probably will throw my two-cents in the ring later on, but when I read this post by Patti, I thought, "heck, just link to that."

She's got a nice, refreshingly balanced view, and hits a lot of points that I think are important when discussing the fundimental issues. Also some creative use of graphics. Go read.

We were told they'd be financing their own reconstruction by now. Huh. Things fall apart.

The attack in Samarra began at 7 a.m., when a dozen men dressed in paramilitary uniforms entered the shrine and handcuffed four guards who were sleeping in a back room, a spokesman for the provincial governor's office said. The attackers then placed a bomb in the dome and detonated it.
...
No group claimed responsibility for the attack, but some Iraqi officials pointed a finger at Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the terrorist group believed to be responsible for many of the attacks on Shiite civilians and mosques over the past two years.

This sounds more like the work of old-school Ba'athists than Qaeda to me, though maybe they're all part of the same network at this point. It's a cold-blooded move, destroying a holy site, designed to provoke maximum outrage after years of instability, hardship and violence. It's working:

Later, the Basra police took 10 foreign Arabs who had been jailed in connection with terrorist attacks from their cells and shot them to death, apparently in retaliation for the shrine bombing, a police official said.

Sistani issued another statement on Wednesday warning the faithful not to attack any Sunni holy sites. But the angry mobs had already begun shooting, firing rocket-propelled grenades and setting some mosques on fire. Imams at three Baghdad mosques - Al Sabar, Al Yaman, and Al Rashidi - were killed, the Interior Ministry said. A fourth imam, Sheik Abdul Qadir Sabih Nori of the Amjed al-Zahawi Mosque, was kidnapped, officials said.

More than 25 Sunni Mosques have been attacked in Baghdad, some of them totally destroyed. There have been additional acts of reprisal throughout the country. If the political and religious leaders are unable to quiet the storm, US forces are going to be in a very complex and dangerous situation.

As long as this violence doesn spill over to our people, it'll remain a minor story. If violent civil disorder persists and Americans are caught in the crossfire (or worse, pinned into their bases and then attacked by opportunists there), it could be the bloody beginning to a new chapter this saga of misfortune, malfesance and incompetance.

I think it's going to continue getting uglier. Brace yrself.

UPDATE: it's going to get increasingly politically tricky too... when you've lost O'Reilly, you've lost a lynchpin of support.

Not an administration firing on all pistons:

President Bush knocks over some lab samples as receives a tour of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory... in Golden, Colo. Bush's trip to the site is part of a two-day, three-state trip to promote the energy proposals he outlined in his State of the Union address. Along the route, Bush has touted longer lasting lithium-ion car batteries and solar roof panels that can turn homes into mini power generators. Bush's visit to the government lab comes as his administration scrambled over the holiday weekend, just before he arrived, to restore the jobs of 32 people laid off in budget cuts.

That's a photo caption, by the way. Emphasis mine.

Energy is an issue nexus I care about quite a lot because I believe it's central to our ability to maintain a good standard of living, rebuild the American middle class, and also to raise up people around the world who are less fortunite. Sort of pathetic to see it made into a complete political shell game by the Republicans.

This is the Right Idea. Francene Busby is trying to replace Criminal War Profiteer Duke Cunningham, and she gives a decent stump.

This is a big part of what makes politics work online. You have to build a relationship with the Public. Media is a big part of this. I wouldn't have gotten so hard into Dean if this hadn't been one of first things I saw. Creating compelling candidate media and then supporting it with an active team of talented writers who can create compelling campaign message on an hourly basis is the new-media two-step that's proven to work. It's kind of surprising to me that more people haven't done this.

Gotta tell ya, I been watching this one, and it's exciting: Kinky Friedman for TX Gov. He's making all the right moves online. The cartoons are slick, and getting really good candidate media out online is a huge part of getting people you don't know engaged in your project.

I think there's an enormous potential for independent political actors who have a different idea of how and why to govern to make great gains in the next 20 years. I'm still a fan of taking over the Democratic party (and of burning down and rebuilding the GOP too), but to be honest the Democrats are fucking squares. I'm a freak-power man myself, and I don't ever really see myself having a comfortably home under that big tent. It's a big tent, but everyone in it of consequence is deeply (and beautifully) square. As the Hammer of Truth notes:

There’s going to come a time in American politics when we’re tired of ex-wrestlers, action heros, and writer/author/country singers and want staid guys in suits to lead us. Until then, and as long as the establishment politicians are fun-hating windbags who only stop legislating morality long enough to take a bribe or shoot their friends, Go Kinky!

Fuck yeah. Maybe once I'm old and networked enough, I'll head on back to Oregon and stomp it up. Rowdy bloggers running for office on the open source ticket. Frank already promised to work for me, so there's that. Could be fun.

I've been enjoying very much the blogging of Glenn Greenwald, who's got a very well-done post up looking at what's going on with the contemporary "Conservative" heads:

[P]eople like Michelle Malkin, John Hinderaker, Jonah Goldberg and Hugh Hewitt are not conservatives. They are authoritarian cultists. Their allegiance is not to any principles of government but to strong authority through a single leader.

They love them that Daddy State, yes they do. The post is around 2800 words, and they're good ones.

Update: Greenwalkd responds to some responses. One of the most interesting bits is the quote he found from Bill Kristol (who's sort of the consiglere of neoconservatism) saying that "Bush was the movement and the cause."

So you may or may not have heard about the NASA scientist who was being pressured by the Bush Administration to STFU about global warming:

NASA's top climatologist, James E. Hansen, recently urged swift action to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming. When he did, the agency's public affairs machinery went into overdrive.

NASA officials ordered Hansen to submit for review any lectures, Internet statements and journalists' requests for interviews. Hansen recently posted a widely quoted report on a NASA Web site stating that 2005 was the hottest year since comprehensive weather records were first kept.

A NASA political appointee, William Deutsch, nixed an interview with Hansen on National Public Radio. Deutsch reportedly told another NASA public affairs officer that NPR was "the most liberal media source" in the nation and that his job "was to make the president look good."

Young Mr. Deutch (think phonetically for a second), is a 24-year old Bush/Cheney '04 campaign staffer who somehow got the assignment to be the PR hefe for NASA. A 24-year old who has been telling people he's got a degree in Journalism from Texas A&M. It turns out that this, is, in fact, a lie.

Now, I don't think it's all that bad to drop out of school. I've encouraged numerous young people in my field to do this. However, I do think it's sort of indicative of the Bush gestalt that this kid went ahead and claimed he had a degree. And even if he did, what the heck is a political flunky with no science background doing managing public communications from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration? Being a Deutch, it seems. This is also part of the Bush gestalt.

Anyone else notice that during the '90s little segment of the ABC intro had a flash of Clinton, "I did not have..." Weird. What happened in the '90s? Clinton Lied.

Man, Hank Williams Sr. looks pretty haggard.