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: