Six-hundred-fourteen days, and counting. Nineteen months. It doesn’t seem possible or even bearable.

… 

The American people have turned their backs on George Bush and his dreams of planting the seeds of democracy in Mesopotamia at the point of a gun and seeing them spread like kudzu across the Middle East.

    He’s failed in his quest for victory in Iraq and for a world put in order by a new and stronger United States, and his brash blundering into a dangerous land has made us all much less safe.

    The president’s approval ratings are below his knees, sinking to 28 percent in one recent poll, and he cannot recover short of the kind of miracle that parts seas and feeds the multitudes.

    The war that was never ours to win by military means - the only button this president who never learned war ever learned how to push - is lost. Bush and Cheney and the rest of their cronies and co-conspirators are toast.

    The question is: How did such ordinary-looking men - seemingly unable to carry out even the smallest non-political tasks of governing - succeed in doing such extraordinary and lasting damage to our country, our military and our body politic in so few years?

    With Congress in the hands of the Democrats, and the 2008 election looming dead ahead, the president can’t even count on key figures in his own Republican Party to stand behind him as he embarks on a long and painful lame duckhood.