Bush has lurched into the true twilight of his presidency

The humiliating impotence of the president’s final year is beginning,
says alexander cockburn

The one thing a president cannot afford to be is ridiculous. This week George Bush lurched into that fatal category and into the true twilight of his presidency, festooned with all the traditional discomfitures. Senior aides and close advisors are parleying with literary agents and finding compelling reason to quit the White House and spend more time with their families. In public even the First Lady seems to be edging away from her stricken mate.

The latest, fatal instrument of Bush's public humiliation is the National Intelligence Estimate proclaiming in its unclassified version that Iran stopped trying to build a nuclear weapon in 2003, thus deliberately, with humiliating clarity contradicting Bush and Cheney's unending invocation of the Iranian nuclear threat.