It took some freakin’ nerve for George Bush to have presented a domestic policy state of the union address this week. We’re talkin’ irradiated extract of chutzpah, man. Dipped in a heavy faux-testosterone solution, and rudely seasoned with a thick battering of gall.

Of course, we’ve known for some time to expect anything but truth and good governance from Karl Rove and his band of merry pranksters, but this is something else. Here’s a guy who’s built his entire presidency on the basis of stoking fears of foreign terrorists, and now he wants to change the channel and pretend like he isn’t losing two wars, along with American security, our children and their fortunes, and the good will of the world – all at once. Remember “I’m a war president”? Well, if you don’t mind actually, Karl would rather you didn’t.

Try to imagine how badly the White House wished they could avoid this speech entirely, and then cube that amount a few times. After Bush’s beleaguered performance just the other week trying to sell his latest Ponzi scheme masquerading as a strategy for Iraq, the last thing they needed was for him to go on national television and get a chilly reception from Congress (Memo to Democrats: I know you’re trying to portray yourselves as the civil party, but it should have been a whole lot chillier) as he peddled his latest lies.

The prior speech had nothing to do with winning the war, and everything to do with rallying the public at home. So what happened? A nervous Bush trotting out yet another and oh-so-familiar set of meaningless bromides (remember 9/11!) instantly telegraphed weakness, fear and incompetence to the American public. His job approval ratings have now cracked 30 percent – the latest major poll has him at 28 percent – and are nearing Nixonian record lows.

Mind you, this is for a wartime president. And one who has (as of yet, but don’t blink) not been tarnished by scandal. Who is presiding over a decent (though far from robust) economy. Who is still getting some tail wind in a few places from being in office when the planes hit the buildings. And who has mostly managed to please the social conservative radical right with his court appointments, his scapegoating of gays, and his stem-cell policy. If you add those conditions all together, a president would almost have to work at it to be down to 28 percent.

Which is precisely what Bush has done. Most people now trust the guy about as far as they can drop-kick him. And the public doesn’t really know the half of it. How many of those folks have a clue what the Downing Street Memos are, for instance? Still, people understand this guy intuitively now, and they not only dislike and mistrust him, they’re growing enraged by him. I heard a person-on-the-street interview on the radio the day of his state of the union speech, and this randomly-chosen middle-American woman blurted out “I haven’t even heard what he’s said yet, and I’m already furious”.

Bush is a gambler, and he especially likes to gamble with other people’s stakes. That worked for a while – or, more accurately, that appeared to most of a docile public to work – but now there is a powerful hostility out there, and nowhere can I see a reservoir of good will for him to draw on, at least anywhere outside the 700 Club. If I were laying odds in Vegas, this week for the first time, I would say his chances of making it to the end of his presidency are now less than 50-50.

Think about it. He’s got to last it out for a full two years. That’s twenty-four more months of increasingly rapid downhill velocity, beginning from a nearly comatose starting point of 28 percent. Most presidents want more time in office. I can assure you that Bush and Rove will soon be wishing they had quit at one term, when they seemed like just an unpleasant but vaguely annoying necessity in the minds of most Americans, slightly better than the Democratic alternative. But now, burning public outrage, impeachment, and a ranking as history’s worst presidency look to me like a best-case scenario for these guys. And it only goes south from there. Like maybe domestic indictments for war-profiteering. And/or an appearance on war crimes charges before the very International Criminal Court which they’ve been trying for six years to destroy.

And who will bail them out? Rest assured that the only folks in Congress who despise Bush more than the Democrats are the Republicans. They saw what he did to them in the 2006 election, and they know that that was nothing next to the rout that’s coming their way in 2008. Already they’re jumping ship on the war, and pretty soon you’ll see a lot more than that. If you’re looking for a canary in the coal mine, keeping watching the biggest political prostitute east of the Pacific Coast Highway, Senator Norm Coleman from Minnesota. Once a long-haired anti-war protester when that was hip, he was a Democratic mayor then became a Republican when that was hip (though, of course, Republicans are to hip about what television is to informative). Now faced with Al Franken (for than matter, it could be Al Frankenstein) getting ready to destroy him in 2008, he’s already ditched Bush on the war. Expect more of the same from the likes of Coleman, including perhaps yet another party-switch, returning him to the Democrats. The one thing any candidate for any position in any race will not want in 2008 is an (R) following their name on the ballot. Bush has turned that into the kiss of death. A pedophile running for sheriff might do better.

It is for this reason that I have begun to believe that Bush’s chances of survival are now overshadowed by the likelihood of his early political demise. He is essentially already in a free-fall without doing anything. Imagine what will happen when Congressional oversight investigations reveal the true workings of this administration, or even if the public sees its members continually refusing to answer questions posed by Congress. Republicans who facilitated those crimes by bottling up such investigations for six years will now be furiously attempting to put as much distance as possible between themselves and this one-man wrecking machine, ditching him any way possible. Indeed, it is not at all unimaginable that we could now witness the counterintuitive sight of Republicans leading the charge to take down Bush (and thereby amputate their gangrene-infested limb before the whole body is irreversibly and fatally infected), while Democrats actually sit back and drag their heels, leaving him to fester in office, prolonging the agony and damage.

And my guess is he’ll stay, no matter what. This guy won’t be like Nixon, who left after party elder Barry Goldwater marched up Pennsylvania Avenue and told him he had to go. George W. Bush doesn’t give any more of a damn about preserving the Republican Party than he did about 3,000 American troops in Iraq, and we all know what became of them. Heck, even (or perhaps especially) his father could tell him to resign and he wouldn’t listen. This guy’s one and only constituent is his own extremely fragile sense of self-esteem, carefully nurtured by a lifetime of screw-ups and Bush family-name bail-outs and golden opportunities. His only chance of continuing to delude himself is to believe that everybody else is all wrong, and to keep playing to whatever friendly audiences can still be found (pretty soon even military bases won’t cut it). To resign would be to unquestionably admit to that everyone is right and has been right all along – he is a clown and a failure of epic proportions.

But think about what this scenario implies. Not only are our fortunes, our military, our national security, the lives of those troops who follow the 3,000-plus already annihilated, our national reputation and now the entire Republican Party (not that I care, mind you – no one could deserve it more) being simultaneously ground to dust, but this is all happening in service to protecting one man’s fragile ego from confronting the same awareness of his failings that more or less the entire rest of the world long ago well understood. It is breathtaking to contemplate how very much can be sacrificed on the altar of guarding the self-esteem of a solitary sad sack in the White House. Which of us could bear the agony of explaining to the mother of the 3,059th American fatality that her child died not to uncover weapons of mass destruction, not to bring democracy to the Mid-East, and not to enhance American national security, but rather because George W. Bush cannot admit to failure? My god, the mind reels at the prospect. I think I’d prefer street patrol in Baghdad to that duty.

And so here we find ourselves in this laughable – if it wasn’t so utterly tragic – scenario of watching Rove furiously trying to change the channel. The president can’t exactly go AWOL on the state of the union, like he did when he was in the Texas Air National Guard (though I won’t be surprised if that is precisely what happens a year from now – you read it here first!). On the other hand, every time he opens his mouth before a national audience, it’s like taking a meat cleaver to his job approval numbers, assuming you can even find them anymore. What to do?

The desperate solution is the completely ridiculous idea of sending this fool up to Capitol Hill, having him wrap himself in the courage of a wounded soldier and a New York subway hero, and then trying to sell some jive domestic agenda that they just made-up while they were sitting around the office the other day, in-between creating foreign policy disasters, feeding the cronyism machine, and surfing Republican porn sites (don’t ask). Like he’s got the credibility for that! Like a Democratic Congress is going to let Baby Bush within two continents and an ocean of touching health care policy, when even a Republican Congress shut him out from ‘spending his political capital’ on Social Security two years ago, back when he was still mostly not-yet-hated!

The transparent attempt to change the subject from Iraq was not only ludicrous, but demonstrates precisely how out of touch this White House is from the mood of the American public. I mean, raise your hand if you think your employer-provided health benefits are “gold-plated”. And raise your hand if you think that the same guy who gave us whopping lies about Iraq, a completely botched occupation of the country, a looming disaster in that other war in Afghanistan, no response whatsoever while New Orleans drowned, ditto on Darfur, ditto on global warming, religious dogma instead of science, a plan to destroy Social Security and an ocean of national debt, is who you want to be tinkering with the health care system in America? The same guy who doesn’t read newspapers, doesn’t read books, and who has the attention span of crack-addled ten year-old blasting Public Enemy and playing a PSP with one hand while text-messaging with the other? I don’t think so.

And speaking of health care policy, how many Band-Aids can be affixed to our basket case of a supposed system before the patient goes into cardiac arrest? While we continue to spend about half-again as much of our GDP on health care as do comparable countries in the world (12 percent, versus about 8 percent elsewhere), 50 million of us have no coverage whatsoever, and those of us who do are paying more each year for the privilege of getting less in return. The solution to America’s problem is transparently obvious, so much so that some of our state governments are now stepping into the breach where the federal government continues to drop the ball. All we need to do is adopt the same utterly rational system that every other industrialized democracy in the world utilizes – single-payer universal health care – and we could fix the system and save a ton of money to boot as we excise useless insurance companies, worse-than-useless HMOs, and the profits and bureaucratic costs associated with both. Maybe his TelePrompter accidentally skipped that screen the other night, but I don’t recall the president proposing this obvious solution to a huge American crisis in his speech.

Then there was the jaw-dropping sight of George Bush jaw-boning the rest of us on global warming. How is it that the ‘first gentleman’ of this country of 300 million people is the last man or woman amongst us to recognize the tsunami that is literally and figuratively headed our way? How hysterical would this be if it weren’t so painfully tragic?

Before answering these questions, it’s worth considering a plain and conspicuous puzzle about the spiraling decline in which the Bush presidency is now locked. And that is simply this: Why don’t they change course? Every president, especially second-termers, worries about his historical legacy. This guy had the luck of all the fortunate benefits detailed above, and yet already has serious historians (and not just lefty ones) talking about whether he is the worst president in American history, a full two years before he leaves office with what is almost assuredly another half-term of more damage done. Everything this president does and stands for, and the way in which he does and stands for them, runs palpably counter to public opinion and an increasingly nasty national mood. Plenty of presidents have shown that they can redeem themselves if they change their attitudes and their policies. As long as you don’t wait too long, the public is likely to forgive and move on.

In the current context, moreover, there is even the obvious model of Schwarzenegger in Caleefornya, who came into office riding the Republican wave and immediately tanked horribly by playing a Bush-like conservative terminator. He has now completely remade himself as essentially a liberal and – therefore – a popular governor and winner of his reelection campaign last year. Likewise, you’re starting to see the same thing in Congress, as lighter-than-air chumps like Coleman (last year’s agenda: destroy Kofi Annan; this year’s agenda: oppose Bush’s war and vote for minimum wage increases – get it?) are desperately scrambling to recreate themselves as moderates. It might even work, if their next opponent is as strategically lame and gutless as Democrats were until about six months ago. Short of that, though, any candidates running against these GOP dinosaurs in 2008 should be able to use their party affiliation, their prior support for Bush, and their voting records as the best argument imaginable to hand these sorry losers a stack of pink slips. So the question remains, given this looming self-imposed disaster, why doesn’t George the Chimp ape Arnold the Barbarian and salvage what he can from this melt-down of a presidency?

There are three answers. The first is that things have probably gone way too far now for any sort of redemption like that granted to previous presidents who screwed-up. Once the administration admits by its actions that the war is lost – and therefore, by definition, also was a mistake – they have the problem of justifying the over 3,000 American deaths on their hands (not to mention – but, in fact we don’t mention them – perhaps two-thirds of a million Iraqis), along with America’s security and fiscal resources gone forever down the drain, there to keep company with the country’s tattered reputation. But, alternatively, as long as he keeps pretending, Bush, at least, can avoid the elephant in the room, and nearly a third of Americans will continue pretending with him (I want the phone number for these people’s drug dealers, man – that is evidently some righteous good stuff they’re getting!).

The second explanation for the lack of a U-turn lies in the domain of the psychological, which will get you a very long way in understanding this president. All the smug certitude, all the unyielding ideological dogmatism, all the governing-from-the-gut bravado, and all the my-way-or-the-highway unilateralist nose-thumbing to Congress, Democrats, and most every other country in the world – all these things are of a piece. And all these things are manifestations of the bone-deep but submerged clarity he possesses about what a life-long failure is the person of George W. Bush. And, therefore, all of these are desperate facades which must be maintained with the ferocity normally reserved for life-or-death situations, because psychologically – if not actually quite literally – that is precisely what they are. Like the bully on the playground, Bush masks his fear in equal and opposite proportion to the sheer terror lurking just below the surface of his bonhomie regular guy from Texas act. This desperately frightened 60 year-old child – the son of a super-successful over-achiever who caught the world’s brassiest of brass rings – this continual screw-up of a scion perpetually stuck in his father’s shadow has spent a lifetime chasing self-esteem and hiding from his own failures in school, business and the bottle. Imagine how badly his circuits would blow if he had to admit to the blood on his hands and his true place in history. Ain’t gonna happen, man. Little Bush knows that if he allows the tiniest crack in that dike, Katrina’s flood would look like a runny nose by comparison.

The last explanation as to why Bush won’t change stripes is because doing so would mean destroying the entire raison d'être for the whole administration and the movement of the regressive right it represents. You don’t have to be a member of the Spartacist League to figure out that these guys are predatory latter-day robber-barons, come to launch the class warfare they’re always accusing the Democrats of whenever they whimper the meekest protest against the great fleecing of America. A quiet warfare, if possible (only because that means you can grab more, and more quickly), but ultimately however necessary.

BushCo – a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Cheney Wrecking and Demolition Company, Inc. – can’t govern well because that’s not what they came to Washington to do. Put it all together – the tax cuts for the rich, the national debt to drive out social spending, the assassination attempt on Social Security, the no-bid Halliburton contracts in Iraq, the silence on global warming, the drill-silly energy policy, the insurance and pharmaceutical industry scam known as the prescription drug bill, the running of interference for the current health care racket, and countless other examples – and it all adds up to a simple singular project: to move as much money as possible, as fast as possible, into the hands of the already fantastically wealthy. It's like the worst conspiracy theories in the world all come true, with conniving Monopoly Men sitting down at the Club over cigars and brandy and asking themselves “How can we capture the state and then bleed it white?” These guys can’t govern well, because it would be antithetical to their entire purpose for being there, and even for being at all. If they couldn’t pillage the public fisc, why waste their time in elective office, when they could instead be golfing or drunk-hunting? They are constitutionally unable to run the country properly because it’s not in their DNA. It would be like expecting cows to fly, protozoa to figure out Medicare Part D, or Democrats to show some spine. Each of these things could theoretically happen, but would you bet your mortgage on it? For that matter, would you bet a bean burrito on it? Even one with E. coli contamination?

But, speaking of Democrats and spines, something big actually did happen Tuesday night. Jim Webb gave a Democratic response speech that was short, powerful, and pretty damn honest. It was therefore a bit shocking to see, and at the same time shocking to think that it should be shocking. It shocked, in the first instance, because it has been so very, very long – with a couple of notable exceptions – since any Democrat fronting the party has been remotely straightforward or minimally courageous, despite a country in full crisis on several simultaneous fronts. And the very fact that this minimally responsible performance of the basic duties of an opposition party in a democracy should startle half-awake viewers itself shocks us into realizing just how far down the drain the republic has gone these last years.

But things are looking up a bit. In five minutes time, Webb was everything that John Kerry spent two years avoiding on his way to embarrassing himself into political oblivion throughout 2003 and 2004. While there are aspects of Webb that still leave me uncomfortable (like a certain latent machismo swagger, and the bad judgement to adore and work for Ronald Reagan – who was only slightly less Bush than Bush), the guy is already everything Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden will never be. Those chumps couldn’t even bring themselves to vote against the transparently deceptive resolution authorizing Bush’s horror-fest in the Mid-East. Webb, on the other hand, told him to piss-off right to his face before he even became a senator. Who else this side of Hugo Chávez has done that in the last six years?

I think we might be seeing a lot of congressional Democrats and a lot of voters rallying around Webb in the coming months. The public is rightfully desperate for someone to speak to them honestly. John McCain proved that without even delivering. All he had to do was pretend not to be pretending for a few years, and people adored him for being a ‘straight-talking maverick’. Boy, is that rich. But it shows the potential for a genuine political figure to attract hordes of devoted followers. The other cool thing about Webb is that, not only is he spot on and glowing mad about the war, but he’s also talking some of the badly needed talk about economic justice in this country, something no prominent Democrat has done credibly since October 25, 2002, the day Paul Wellstone died. Put this guy up next to Bush and the show would be over in seconds. The difference between them in policy terms would make Bush look the complete fool, never mind a comparison of character, competence or life achievements.

Altogether, there’s a great whooshing sound coursing through Washington now, the sound of an ideological hurricane blowing across the landscape. Think about it. Three years ago the president was golden, Republicans were united in lock-step doing his bidding, and Democrats were pealing off in substantial numbers to vote with the GOP, frightened of getting run over by Freight Train Bush. Now, W is drowning in his own toilet, Democrats are more united than they’ve been for a generation or more (courtesy largely of their opposition to him), and Republicans are now running away as fast as they can from Derailed Freight Train Bush. Heck, at this rate, even the mainstream media might get it before the decade’s out!

As one who for years couldn’t believe the raw rubbish that was treated seriously by baneful Republicans, spineless Democrats and a mercenary mainstream media, I have to say that I am nevertheless a little astonished now at the rapidity with which the wind’s direction has changed. And that process has only just begun. I will state again, as I have previously, that I think George W. Bush actually has the potential to destroy the Republican Party – a bedrock institution of American politics for 150 years – perhaps even completely, given the right set of conditions in the next two years. People are already furious. Iraq has only just begun to implode. If he hangs in office, if he hangs in Iraq, if the economy tanks, if (or when) people learn about the corruption of the administration and the Republican Congress that enabled them – any combination of these things could potentially relegate the party to oblivion, or at least to the South (which is essentially the same thing, anyhow). I think the Hispanic vote is forever gone. Young people have ditched the homophobic, war-manic, global-warming, spendthrift GOP in giant proportions (go figure!), and are unlikely ever to return during their lifetimes. (Somehow I don’t think the president’s healthcare proposal is going to rally them (or anyone) to the Republican banner, as truly electrifying as it may have been. Or his immigration policy. Or energy. Or...) And by the time the white middle-class suburban SUV crowd decides to return to the GOP (if it ever does) there may be no party left to come back to.

Right now, most Americans despise Bush and the we-couldn’t-get-rid-of-them-fast-enough former GOP Congress, seeing them and especially him as incompetent and dishonest. I suspect that even that ugly opinion is going to look very charitable in retrospect, two years from now. The sins of the Bush administration and the movement of rapacious regressivism which it leads run far, far deeper than naive Americans – long (un-)educated to ignore politics and live happily sedated by football and celebrity gossip – have any clue about right now. The distance from incompetent and dishonest to massively corrupt and treasonous is very great indeed, and we really have yet to even start down that path.  But make no mistake, we're going there.

When we cross that span, when people come to appreciate just how ugly this administration and this movement truly are, just how pernicious is their actual agenda, and just how much they’ve duped well-meaning, concerned Americans by means of a masquerade portraying themselves as upstanding regular-folk patriots protecting America’s heritage and national security – the polar opposite of their real identity – there could be some very serious hell to pay, indeed.

As well there should be.

Make it so, Number One.