Next up was:

Heading into the final chapter of his presidency, fresh from the sting of a midterm election defeat, Bush finds himself with fewer and fewer friends. Some of the strongest supporters of the war have grown disenchanted, former insiders are registering public dissent and Republicans on Capitol Hill blame him for losing Congress.

At this point I was downright giddy, but then reality reared its ugly head as the exuses began:

A certain weary crankiness sets in with any administration after six years.

It happened to Reagan, it happened to Clinton and now it was happening to Bush.  Let's review: Illegal arms sales to a foreign enemy to fund a guerrilla war in a sovereign nation versus a blowjob versus misleading our country into a war, not planning for said war and a stunning midterm "thumpin." Yes, a weary crankiness about covers it.

A former State Department official chalks up disenchantment with the Bush Doctrine to:

...a radically different approach to world affairs naturally generates criticism. The emphasis on promotion of democracy, the emphasis on regime change, the war of choice in Iraq -- all of these are departures from the traditional approach so it's not surprising to me that it generates more reaction.

Well sure, it's just that we're all traditionalists...a stay the course type of people, if you will.  The "reaction" has nothing to do with the lies, incompetence, or the constantly shifting rationales for this war.

They then move onto a total break from reality:

The willingness to break with Bush also underscores the fact that the president spent little time courting many natural allies in Washington, according to some Republicans. GOP leaders in Congress often bristled at what they perceived to be a do-what-we-say approach by the White House.

Did this bristling happen before or after they pulled out their rubberstamp  to approve virtually every proposal Bush put forth?  

And did you know that:

Bush allies in Congress, interest groups and the conservative media broke their solidarity with the White House out of irritation over a number of issues, including federal spending, illegal immigration, the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers, the response to Hurricane Katrina and the Dubai Ports World deal.

How odd that some these issues that "broke their solidarity"  go back to Bush's first term,  yet were never expressed until the Republican majority was threatened.  

And then the neocons weighed in.  It's not that the war was wrong, it just wasn't done right.  Said Richard Perle:

If I had known that the U.S. was going to essentially establish an occupation, then I'd say, 'Let's not do it,' " and instead find another way to target Hussein. It was a foolish thing to do.

Yes, if only the chairman of the Defense Policy Board had known.  And another neocon from the American Enterprise Institute says:

There's a question to be sorted out: whether the war was a sound idea but very badly executed. And if that's the case, it appears to me the person most responsible for the bad execution was Rumsfeld, and it means neocons should not get too angry at Bush about that.

They shouldn't get mad at Bush even though he kept Rumsfeld on even as the war spiralled out of control and retired generals took the unprecedented step of calling for Rumfeld's dismissal.  Don't blame Bush for not firing that study in incompetence sooner.  

The article finishes with thoughts from Kenneth Adelman, another member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board.   The man who declared that Iraq would be a "cakewalk" and who drank a toast with Dick Cheney after the fall of Saddam Hussein said of the disaster that is Iraq:

Most troubling, he said, are his shattered ideals

There are 2865 dead U.S. soldiers, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, destroyed lives and a destroyed country, but the most troubling aspect of this war are the shattered ideals of a neocon.

An article that started with so much promise, devolved into excuses for the incompetence of George Bush and his enablers from the Republican Party and the maudlin ramblings of disallusioned neocons.