Joe Sobran writes an epitaph for the administration of Bush the Younger.

(Note: The link above will take you to Joe's current on-line column. The archive is here. Not all of his past columns are available in the archive.)

No president since Richard Nixon has faced such a welter of problems, and even Nixon, until his final days in office, never faced such rapidly dissolving support. No single “smoking gun” like the Watergate tapes is likely to finish Bush off, but he looks unexpectedly desperate, confused, ineffectual.

What does he stand for? Only one thing: the failed war he has already staked his reputation on. He has subordinated everything to that, and in its absence it would be impossible to name any philosophy, conservative or otherwise, he could be identified with.

Ouch! Big time.

So conservatives are now afraid that when the dust has settled, their philosophy will be identified with Bush’s failure. That would be unjust to their philosophy, but they’ve asked for it. It’s too late for them to repudiate him now. He hasn’t betrayed them as badly as they’ve betrayed their philosophy by supporting him all these years.

The president Bush most resembles is not Nixon, but Lyndon Johnson, who also tried to expand the Federal Government in every direction and fatally split his base. Democrats paid a heavy price for supporting his war in Vietnam along with his multifarious social programs. They tried to recoup by pretending he hadn’t happened and moving leftward, but liberalism got a bad name and by 1994 they’d lost the electoral majority they’d taken for granted since the New Deal.

Now Bush has given conservatism a bad name — with a lot of help from conservatives who should have known better. Was keeping John Kerry out of the White House worth the price of backing Bush’s war?

Now that's a cheap shot. Any Freudian worth his angst will tell you Kerry would have become one of the all-time greatest warmongers, if only to prove those Swift Boat guys wrong.