Last night, George Bush said “The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people.” Then he said, “Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.”

I agree with both statements, and since the mistakes we’re talking about here are of such a magnitude that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid correctly labeled them “the greatest foreign policy blunder in all of American history” (and that doesn’t even include the graft which is about to be uncovered), that’s quite enough for me. If one takes his two statements even remotely seriously, then he himself has provided all the rationale necessary for his impeachment and removal from office, without even bothering to make reference to Katrina, mountains of debt, torture or warrantless domestic spying.

Of course, the problem is that he doesn’t take his own words remotely seriously. For Republicans of a certain class, there are two kinds of ‘responsibility’. One is reserved for indigent African Americans locked down in death row execution factories south of the Mason-Dixon line. The other is for the folks who grew up wintering at Vale and summering on the Mediterranean. For the former group, ‘responsibility’ means a two-bit lawyer who drinks before your trial and sleeps during it, a sham appeals process, and then a shitty end to a shitty life. For the latter, it means mouthing some empty words to placate an angry hoi polloi, and then returning to your particular depredation of choice, whether on Wall Street or the banks of the Tigris.

So Bush ‘took responsibility’ for his failures last night, but only because he was forced to, and fully intending for those words to apply to him about as much as they ever have throughout a life of substance abuse, expunged arrests, shallowness, callowness and failure, all leading inevitably to the only place such a record logically could – the presidency of the United States, a position to which he was obviously entitled by birthright.

Yeah, it’s been a pretty good ride so far, but I have some news for him: It’s over. George W. Bush is going down.

It seems that we Americans are the learning-impaired whom Santayana warned about, doomed to repeat history over again (and not even particularly gracefully). We’ve had our Vietnam redux, and now comes Son of Watergate. Lies about an unnecessary and unpopular war, children of privilege exempted from fighting it, civil liberties scandals, misuse of government agencies, war profiteering. It was all there before, it’s all there now. We know how it ended last time, and so it shall again.

Bush may survive the coming years as president physically intact, particularly because he has a couple of key assets working in his favor (more on that below). That is to say, there may be a body named George W. Bush occupying the Oval Office, surrounded by Secret Service dudes, signing bills, and such and such, for another two years. But his presidency is going to disintegrate with dramatic velocity.

That process actually began a long time ago. After the 2000 election debacle, a very un-humble Bush governed as though he had won a landslide, when in fact he lost the popular vote and stole the Electoral College. After the 2004 election, Bush bragged about the political capital he had earned and was now going to spend. The truth was, his bank account had already been emptied by the time of the January 2005 inauguration, as was made rapidly and abundantly clear when Bush tried to employ his phantom capital for purposes of looting Social Security, only to be bloodied into submission. The more Bush pitched his plan, the more it literally lost public support. In point of fact, the only thing Bush had actually earned in the disgusting campaign and election of 2004 was the right not to be confused with the pathetic piñata of an alternative choice named John Kerry that he and Kerry had mutually constructed over the course of the prior year. Some accomplishment, that.

Today, even at this still early juncture, hardly anything of the Bush presidency now remains, other than the one thing they least want – an insane foreign adventure gone completely and horribly awry, but inextricably chained to their ankle, as consumptive of Bush’s standing as it is of Iraqi civilians. Nowadays, this once-powerful president who used to revel in bullying Congress and the press couldn’t get a bill passed on Capitol Hill extolling the virtues of George Washington.

But this is just the beginning. First Bush lost his credibility, then he lost Congress. He has now entered in to a self-reinforcing downward spiral which will drag him down from his current position in the minds of most Americans as one of the worst presidents ever, to the far lower status of some sort sewer-dwelling slime-creature, a mutant monster produced by the inadvertent mixing of Saddam Hussein’s, Richard Nixon’s and Alfred E. Neuman’s DNA.

It’s all coming together like a perfect storm. I must confess that I hate that metaphor. It’s not that it isn’t compelling. It’s actually perfectly compelling. As tasty as a four-star meal. As accurate as a laser-beam. As brilliant as a supernova.

Okay, okay, I’ll stop – I promise. You get the point. This metaphor is a wonderful way to describe a confluence of circumstances all driving towards some massively overdetermined outcome. But because it is so good, it has also become nauseatingly ubiquitous. As common as a penny. As dependable as sunrise. As familiar as a spouse’s irritating habits.

Oops. Didn’t I just promise I’d stop? Like Reagan would say, “There he goes again!” Sorry for the dishonesty – I’m in training in case the Bush administration calls to offer me a job...

Anyhow, you see my beef with the metaphor. It’s way overused!

But I can’t help myself for this column. There is a very perfect storm headed directly for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. By that I mean a massive wall of bad news for George Bush which will self-magnify inexorably into his worst nightmare.

I’ll show you what I mean. But let’s begin by taking an inventory.

The president starts with an approval rating of about 30 percent and falling. He has shot his credibility with the public by lying about Iraq. He has shot his reputation for competence by presiding over Katrina, Baghdad, deficits and more. (Imagine a former two-term governor of hang-em-high-Texas so lame that he can’t even pull off the execution of a mass murderer without turning the guy into a martyr and hero. Now that’s incompetence!) He has earned enemies at home and abroad by spending six years arrogantly running roughshod over anyone who got in his way, destroying careers, lives and countries when he wasn’t also questioning the patriotism of true patriots. He has trashed long-standing American allies and the UN, both of whom he could otherwise now be calling upon for help. And, while they won’t tell you this, even politicians in his own party know that he is now destroying their careers by association. He has, in short, created a rather large army of angry enemies, anxious for the chance to rip the bark off this punk for what he’s done to them and their country. Imagine a phalanx of Max Clelands behind the wheel of giant earthmovers, and you begin to get the picture.

That’s the starting place. There stands Clueless George, having deficit spent every form of capital imaginable – moral, fiscal, strategic, reputational – at the very moment when every bucket in the world would not be enough to bail him out of the sinking boat in which he’s squatting.

True, the guy does have a few assets to bank on. One of the best is Cheney. Unless he goes down first or simultaneously, the worst that will happen to Bush is that they’ll lock him in the White House mess for two years and hand the keys to the country over to James Baker. Anything to keep Cheney from having his finger on the trigger. But since we seem to be condemned here to repeating history, Cheney and his Halliburton connections may come to make Agnew look like a Vestal virgin by comparison, once the dirt is out. (Watching Dick go down would be entertaining enough in its own right, but then seeing prostitute-in-chief John McCain scramble to convince a very foul-mooded The Decider to tap him as the next Jerry Ford would be truly priceless.) Hey, there’s a trio to draw to – Bush, Cheney and McCain. In any case, you can probably scratch that ‘asset’. Heck, these days the House might just impeach Cheney on account of his snarl.

Bush also has at least 2/9 of a Supreme Court to depend on, and possibly 4/9. Scalia and Thomas are ideologically hopeless anyway, but they are also joined at the hip to the Frankenstein they created in Bush vs. Gore, so there’s two sure votes. Roberts and especially Alito would love to join them in protecting the president from subpoenas and investigations, and of course they owe him for their appointments, though it is possible that they may nevertheless decide to jettison this stinker, choosing to look out just for themselves like the good little Republicans they are. My guess is that Kennedy, in the middle and smarting badly from not getting elevated to Chief after knowingly making a fool of himself to deliver the White House for Bush in 2000, would happily join the other four to his left in putting the little creep in the dock. So scratch that one, too. Payback’s a bitch, eh?

Where does that leave Bush? Actually, at the end of the day, the president’s greatest asset in the next two years is simply the clock itself. If a critical mass isn’t achieved in the next eight to twelve months for impeachment, most likely there will be neither the time nor the stomach in 2008 for most folks to take out the garbage, when it’s already set to walk itself out the door in January 2009, anyhow. It depends on the magnitude of what is revealed, of course, but many people might rather just let it fade to black than have to face another impeachment ordeal.

That leaves Bush with a few tattered cards in his hands right now, but he’s also got a world of hurt facing him.

It begins with Iraq, of course. Basically everybody who matters has now spoken on this issue and said ‘it’s over – let’s get out’. That was the gist of the Baker report, that was the thrust of the election, and now Congress and even the pathetically sycophantic general staff that Rumsfeld had put in place at the Pentagon to say yes whenever their strings were pulled has found a wee bit of courage to oppose an increase in troops.

So what does Bush do? He pulls in another group of discredited neocons (Kagan, Kristol, etc.) to draft plans for doubling-down on other peoples’ investment in Iraq. That this same escalation policy hasn’t worked under the more favorable conditions of the past only points out how additionally unlikely it is to work now. The concept is absurd for myriad reasons, but chief among them is that even if it works in the short-term, it is unsustainable for very long. Just as America’s adversaries in Iraq were smart enough not to fight a traditional set-piece war that they would surely lose but have instead adopted a guerilla strategy with which they will surely win, so they would be smart enough to simply out-wait the already exhausted American patience for the war following this latest escalation.

Not that any of that matters, anyhow. According to any moderately reliable (i.e., not faith-based) estimates of what it takes to successfully prosecute an anti-insurgent campaign, the twenty to thirty thousand additional troops that the administration is talking about adding doesn’t even come close to doing the job. The new top general in Iraq wrote the book on this topic, and his formula calls for over 100,000 more troops just to pacify Baghdad, and that doesn’t even factor in the civil war now raging in Iraq. Imagine trying to keep the Confederate and Union armies (sans gray and blue uniforms) from ripping each other to shreds, while simultaneously fighting a Viet Cong insurgency that you also can’t recognize when you’re looking at it – and doing all this with a third of the forces you would need to even hope to be successful. Now you get some sense of the scale of the folly being contemplated.

Or not contemplated at all. As I have noted before, the only real objective of the White House at this point can be to prolong the status quo until Bush gets out of office, so that at least one person on the planet can be convinced that when the next president pulls the troops out that it was this retreat that caused the war to be lost. That the deluded individual in question is the current commander-in-chief – the same guy who couldn’t be bothered to allow service in Vietnam to interrupt his endless one-man frat party at home – makes this one of history’s greatest crimes of heartless destruction ever. That this president can actually come to Americans and talk about sacrifice in the current context sends shivers down our collective national spine, as though we were observing the chilling mechanical descriptions of a cold-blooded serial killer who feels nothing for his victims – which is precisely what we are seeing, but on the grand scale of the international conflagration he’s launched.

The good news is that this act is unlikely to wash, at least not for long. The American public may give this guy another six months to see if his ‘surge’ can miraculously turn the war, especially in recognition both of the pangs we all feel for those already consumed by it and of our desire for their deaths to have meaning – but I can’t imagine they’ll stand for much more than that, and they may well not even put up with half a year.

Whatever happens, though, Iraq will form the corrosive backdrop to the series of developments that will drag this presidency down. I’ve always believed that Bill Clinton would have been unceremoniously dumped into the Potomac during his impeachment trial if it had happened during the time of a recession. Lucky for him he was presiding over a boom economy instead. Similarly, an otherwise popular Ronald Reagan survived Iran-Contra, when he might not have against a more daunting backdrop.

But this president has completely worn out his welcome through lies, bullying and arrogance. His backdrop is a job approval rating in the sub-basement, four levels down, and a lot of angry folks ready to step outside and dance. That’s where he starts. Iraq alone will continue to bleed him white over the coming year. Imagine all of that as a backdrop to a series of additional developments which are likely just around the corner, not to mention the perfect storm of several or all of them hitting simultaneously.

The economy is one. The middle class has been just sort of hanging in there for the last six years, keeping their noses slightly above water, maxing out their credit cards while prices rise and incomes stagnate, all while having to listen to the president complain about their lack of gratitude for the great economy he’s given them. God help Bush (or not) if there should be a recession in 2007, which many economists are predicting. You wanna see surly?

Meanwhile, the Democratic Congress will launch a series of investigations into a White House which has completely avoided scrutiny and oversight for six years. My guess is that the corruption, incompetence and plain unconstitutional as well as garden variety illegalities in this White House are continent-wide and ocean-deep. And it starts with war-profiteering, which – in the context of kids dying daily for this Vietnam-dodger’s war sold on lies – will make surly look like a Brownies bake sale. Bush might find himself lucky to avoid Ceaucesceu’s (and Saddam’s) fate. At the very least (Any of you White House reporters out there listening? Here’s a question to ask at the next press conference), he should be given a rifle and packed off to Baghdad to implement his own policy once his term has ended.

Of course, the administration is already girding for the fight, ‘lawyering-up’ by unceremoniously dumping overboard the hapless Harriet Miers and bringing in the big guns in the form of Fred Fielding (evidently even Ted Olson didn’t want the job, and something tells me it was never offered to Jimmy Baker). From this point forward, every legitimate Congressional attempt at oversight of the administration will be met with refusals based on claims of national security and/or executive privilege. Wanna know what the White House was (not) doing about Katrina? Sorry, executive privilege. The source of the lies about uranium in Africa or the centrifuge tubes? No can do, Bro. National security, doncha know?

That’s where, ultimately, Bush’s probable five Supreme Court votes against him and in favor of retaining a tattered semblance of democracy will be key, as will the precedent of the unanimous Court ruling that forced Nixon to turn over the tapes in Watergate, forever sealing his fate. But even before that, Bush-fatigue will rapidly wear thin on an already ill-disposed American public, well primed to believe the worst about the abomination in the Oval Office. His obfuscatory refusals to Congressional requests for information on war-profiteering and more will be seen for precisely what they genuinely are, and they will not be appreciated in the court of public opinion. There may not be too many things you can count on in American politics, but one of them surely is that the American public is not going to be much interested in the technicalities of democratic theory and constitutional law when a massively unpopular president with both lies and blood on his hands tries to hector them about doctrines of executive privilege and separation of powers that he himself never bothered to learn when he was earning ‘gentleman’s C’s’ in school. In a word, fuhgeddaboudit.

Which brings us to the beauty of the Constitution and the wisdom of the Founders. Bush need not even have broken any laws to be impeached, convicted and removed from office. We happen to know for sure that he broke at least one major one, because he admitted violating the FISA law in order to authorize illegal wiretaps. But even without that slam dunk, an impeachable offense is literally whatever a majority of the House of Representatives says it is (thanks to the late Gerry Ford for that quite correct formulation), even if that happens to be nothing other than the crime of being dumb. And a subsequent conviction requires only that two-thirds of the Senate agree to whatever charges are presented by the House. Then it’s out the door you go, as if you were some poor broke-down character in a George Thorogood song. And not necessarily “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer”, either. “Bad to the Bone” would work just fine here, as would “I Drink Alone”, “You Talk Too Much” or “Move It On Over” (“...little dog, the big old dog is movin' in”).

But, of course, the Republicans in the Senate would protect this guy, such that you’d never get near to the 67 votes needed to oust him. Or would they? Here’s where it gets really interesting. They may be mean, and they may be policy-dumb, but GOP politicians (just like any others, only more so) are all about survival and career, and they’ve figured out that George W. Bush is about as healthy to either of those as the bubonic plague, and equally contagious. Already, the opportunistic weasel who daily impersonates Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman has broken from Bush on the war. Maybe he’ll even change his party affiliation a second time, going back to being a Democrat again (“Hmmm. I see the wind is blowing to left today.”) Heck, maybe he’ll even grow out his ponytail once more and lead demonstrations against another stupid American war of horrific destruction! Whether or not we get lucky enough to see that bit of entertainment, be assured that these GOP cats know what sunk their ship in 2006, and the ones lucky enough to have survived that electoral meltdown (many, in the Senate, only because they weren’t on the ballot last year) won’t be waiting around for a repeat performance on steroids in 2008. Till now, it has been implausible for them to jump ship after so tightly tying themselves to the previously popular president. This will still be true in 2008, but that devil will nevertheless represent a better shot at survival than the deep blue sea of continuing to stick with Bush. Those gale-force winds knocking you over in 2007 and 2008 will be the slipstream chasing Republicans speeding by at about Mach 5, running as far away from Bush as they can, as fast as they can.

Which means – especially if there is a whiff or two of Halliburton war-profiteering in the headlines – that what we’ll see in the coming year is a massive Republican cutting of bait, perhaps taking the form of participating in the tossing out of their own homies, Dick and Junior, even if that means anointing the evil San Francisco liberal (and therefore closet lesbian and child molester) Nancy Pelosi as president. (Sorry Hillary!). W is the ultimate Republican ball-and-chain, and if you throw these guys in the water, they’ll chew off their own legs rather than drown. Bush spent six years pissing all over Congress, anyhow, so they can get themselves all worked up into a royal lather if they want, whooping and hollering about the danger of imperial presidencies and the “outrageous” scandals they “had no idea about”, in order to cover their hasty retreat.

It might even save a few of their skins, and it will rid the rest of us of the cancer on the presidency (which happens, once again, to be the president and vice-president themselves), but it will not stop the broader bloodletting. The GOP train-wreck of 2006 is going to become the GOP Chernobyl of 2008, to the point where the party may become so discredited that its very survival is jeopardized. It is seriously possible that the one-man wrecking machine known as George W. Bush may be able to add the Republican Party to the extensive laundry list of destruction he’s already compiled, which presently includes Iraq, Afghanistan, New Orleans, the Constitution, and nearly a million lives, along with America’s reputation, finances and national security. Even if you happen to love your country, you gotta admit that’s an impressive list, ain’t it? I mean, how many people do you know who could single-handedly destroy so much so fast, including whole cities? Jesus Christ, the guy’s like a human MIRV.

And we’re not even done yet! Finally on our list of coming attractions there’s the question of an Iraqi Tet. Those who know or remember their Vietnam history will recall the Tet offensive of 1968, in which the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong launched a surprise attack against the American-defended South. Although the attack was ultimately unsuccessful in military terms, it was a massive psychological victory. Americans had been hearing from their government for quite some time that all was going swimmingly, and that “the boys will be home by Christmas”, but when the attack penetrated all the way to and beyond the gates of the US embassy in Saigon, they finally realized that they were instead actually hopelessly mired in a hopeless war, and public support thereafter began melting away.

I’ve been expecting (not to be confused with welcoming) for some time an Iraqi equivalent of the Tet offensive, and the time is now more ripe than ever from the perspective of the Iraqi resistance, with American public opinion already trending strongly against the war. Even a single missile hitting a vulnerable target rich with non-combatants in Iraq’s Green Zone might be enough to really energize opposition amongst the American public, driving home with the clarity of a sledgehammer the degree to which the war is lost. What, beyond all the items enumerated above, could possibly impel Bush yet further into the ash heap of history? An Iraqi Tet.

Put all these together and you have a perfect storm which will wash over what is left of the Bush White House.

But, better yet, this is actually a perfect perfect storm. Why the extra superlative? Because, not only is this storm perfect in the sense of a massive confluence of overwhelming disasters furiously bearing down upon a fantastically deserving George W. Bush, but it is also morally perfect.

With this storm, the universe is speaking. It is reminding us that, yes, there is actually some justice out there. And it is winking at us ironically, taking the very tools that were used to harm and deceive us and employing them for the purpose of destroying those who wielded them with such malefic intent. Bush could have been demolished by getting caught siphoning off federal funds for cronies, or perhaps having oral sex with an intern (which would have been pretty high on the irony scale in its own right). But it is fitting and proper that it was Iraq that has led to his demise. This war was designed, in large part, as a tool to ensure his political dominance on the home front. Bush and his team even talked openly before 2000 about how a quick and successful war could give them the power necessary to drive home their domestic agenda. It could hardly be more just, therefore, that this most disgusting example of political cynicism ever has come full circle to destroy those who employed it.

This administration is going to unravel before our very eyes in the next two years, just as it should. It is an open question as to whether Bush will survive officially as president. But there is no doubt about the general arc of the story. If he is still clinging to office by the morning of January 20, 2009, he will be doing so as the most widely reviled president ever, and the desire to get him shoved out the door already will be overwhelming. We may well inaugurate some footnote of a pol as president that day, but all attention, all emotion, all relief and all hope will be focused instead on the disinauguration of the current one.

For the rest of our lives and beyond, ‘Bush’ will become a one word appellation for stupidity, arrogance, predation, radicalism and national suicide, just as ‘Benedict Arnold’ comes down to us today, even after two centuries, as a euphemism for treason.

The only people who will be happy that we had this clown in office for eight years will be Dan Quayle, who has finally managed to shirk the title of Biggest Joke in American Politics, Bill Clinton, whose presidency has now come to look grandly accomplished by comparison, and Hillary Clinton, who likely will be sworn-in (ugh) on that January day, having utterly pulverized the pathetic sacrificial lamb of a Republican nominee in the previous November’s election, a landslide that all but sends the Grand Old Party to America’s political party burial ground, there to join the Federalists and the Whigs in its rightful resting place.

Good riddance, American Caligula.