WaPo:

"It's astonishing," said Pat Caddell, who was President Jimmy Carter's pollster. "It's hard to look at the situation today and say the country is absolutely 15 miles down in the hole. The economy's not that bad [Huh? My personal economy sucks] -- for some people it is [like anyone who's about to lose their house], but not overall. Iraq is terribly handled, but it's not Vietnam; we're not losing 250 people a week [the mind reels] . . . . We don't have that immediate crisis, yet the anxiety about the future is palpable. And the feeling about [Bush] is he's irrelevant to that. I think they've basically given up on him."

No, Pat--if I may call you Pat--we haven't "given up" on Bush at all.

We think Bush made the mess we're in, that He likes it just fine, and that He thinks the only thing wrong is that it's not messy enough. Yet.

And I'm completely confident that Bush can do a good deal more damage before he goes, if indeed he does go.

Another Versailles courtier relieves himself:

Let's blame the Internet:

"A lot of the commentary that comes out of the Internet world is very harsh," said Frank J. Donatelli, White House political director for Ronald Reagan. "That has a tendency to reinforce people's opinions and harden people's opinions."

Anything but blame Bush, eh? Thank Heavens, though, that at last they aren't blaming The Clenis. Or maybe they did, and the writer was gracious enough to shield them from their folly.

Now the "balance paragraph":

And the president's team takes solace in the fact that the public holds Congress in low esteem, too. More than half disapproved of Congress generally, and Democrats in particular, in the latest Post-ABC survey, though their ratings were still better than Bush's.

Of course, what the writer doesn't mention is that Congress's numbers plunged only after their capitulation on Iraq.

And now, since the writer is done getting quotes from washed up Beltway consultants, he almost does a little actual reportage. So near, and yet so far:

The deep antipathy to Bush has fueled grass-roots support for impeachment. Democrats have resolved not to do that, remembering the division ...

The "division," forsooth? That's what Democrats remember? It sure God isn't what I remember. What I remember is a slow-moving, media-fuelled, Republican coup run by operatives of the Federalist Society, that culminated in the theft, in Florida, of election 2000 and Bush v. Gore.

... when a Republican Congress impeached Bill Clinton in 1998 for perjury and obstruction of justice to cover up his affair with Monica S. Lewinsky. His public support, though, never fell as far as Bush's. Clinton's worst disapproval rating, 51 percent, came during his first term, and he soared to his highest approval rating days after the Lewinsky scandal broke.

Uh huh.

As if the American people couldn't distinguish between a ginned up scandal that metastatized into a failed perjury trap over a blowjob from the destruction of the Constitution under Bush.

Is there something about associating with Beltway consultants that makes you stupid?

NOTE Of course, the answer to saving the country from Partisan division is Vanity08. Not.