Bush Administration support melting away

Everywhere they look the Bush administration sees their allies are falling away or falling from power.

Joe Lieberman, Bush's biggest enabler in the Democratic Party seems about to pay for providing the administration with cover and support. He's heading for a humiliating primary defeat against an anti-war challenger in a vote that could help define the right wing boundary line of the Democratic party.

Tony Blair's poodle-like support for Bush has cost him authority and prestige within the Labour Party and the UK public. Since he made it clear he would be stepping down as leader he's become a lame duck at an almost breath-taking pace.

The American right wing movement, already an uneasy merging of multiple strains of conservative tendencies and ideologies is splitting along fault-lines of economic, ethnic and fiscal philosophy. Bush has offered no coherent philosophy of government or power other than power itself.

In Israel, a perception is growing that the currently dominant Neo-Conservatives in the White House are too compatible with the Old Likud ideologies to provide Israel with perspective or an exit strategy. The Neo-Cons are explicitly anti-stability, and their naivete about the cultures and imperatives of the real Middle East is becoming more and more evident. Reportedly, even the President's father now opposes the unilateralist approach of his son.

The inherently millenarian and apocalyptic worldview of the theocratic Christianist movement and the disturbing influence they have over policy has seriously turned off more realist and moderate strains of American conservatism, while an increasing awareness of the realities of global warming has begun to alienate them from the Corporatist wing as well.

The pace of the break-up of what was an overwhelming right wing consensus has left the administration angry and disoriented. People keep asking them uncomfortable questions and challenging their bland assurances. They aren't used to it and find themselves floundering with only four months to go till mid-term elections.

The way incumbancy has been gerrymandered into undemocratic aristocracy may actually allow the GOP to retain power in both the House and the Senate, but this would just highlight the contradictions between national consensus and actual political power even more. If the Democrats do manage to win one or both houses in November the real story will be the disgusted Conservatives who stayed home and didn't vote.

The American people were traumatized and manipulated after 9/11. They are beginning to realize it.