Bush is hemorrhaging support of the big boys...

Posted by Evan Derkacz at 12:47 PM on February 27, 2006.

In the past week, the Bush administration and the neocons have been hemorrhaging bigtime supporters so badly you'd be forgiven for assuming there's another Cheney hunting party in the works.

First, in an upcoming book, Project for a New American Century signatory Francis "the End of History" Fukuyama declares that neoconservatism "should be discarded on to history's pile of discredited ideologies."

Wow. The Alex Massie article also notes that "Mr Fukuyama now thinks the war in Iraq is the wrong sort of war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time."

Strike one.

Then Bill O'Reilly advocated for withdrawal from Iraq on his radio show due to Crazy People Underestimation -- the idea that we couldn't have known just how crazy "these people" really were.

Strike two.

Now, National Review editor at large William F. Buckley believes that "One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed... and the administration has, now, to cope with failure."

Strike three.

Each has, of course, found a way to remain at the president's side and to actually, with a presumably straight face, blame the very outcome predicted by progressives well before the fighting started as the result of one or two unforseeable hitches in an otherwise noble and practical plan. But the war? On that the con, the former neo-con and the con-man agree... it's over.

But what will the reaction be? Well, Glenn Greenwald has the "tar and feather him" catalogue of Right Wing reactions to Howard Dean's relatively tame statement from two months ago that the war was a failure. Will Michelle Malkin, Ben Shapiro, the Jawa Report ("Howard Dean Traitor and Ally to Zaqueery") and the, uh, National Review be so unkind to these three "traitors"? (Unclaimed Territory)

--> Sign up for Peek in your inbox... every morning! (Go here and check Peek box).

Evan Derkacz is a New York-based writer and contributor to AlterNet.