And Now, for Something Completely Different: This Period of Bush's Reign Potentially the Most Dangerous

Here's the flipside of those who say the Bushies have entered a period of irrelevance, from Op Ed News:

If it's true that the next presidential election has already begun, then it's also true that the end of the Bush regime is unfolding as well. I should be feeling some satisfaction in that, and, I will, when it's over.

This could be the most dangerous period of Bush's reign. The carefully layered walls of Bush's bubble are disintegrating as the outer layers of purchased politicos are beginning to peel away, revealing the core ideologues of the cabal. Long gone are wistful architects of the new, bloody American imperialism like Wolfowitz and Perle. As they receded, loyalists like Rice, Hadley, Gordon England, etc. advanced up the chain they forged with their military industrial alliances into catbird seats, lording over our defense budgets, plotting out their imperious ambitions with no fear in their fiefdom.

Stepping out from behind the curtain into the positions of power are faces of past bloody mis-adventures like Negroponte, and engineers of the new American fascism, like Gen. Hayden, whose tenure is marked by the admission of the treasonous act of spying on Americans he shared with the president who directed him there.

This bunch's retreat from their privileged bunkers at the end of Bush's term will be marred by more than misplaced furniture and missing typewriter keys. They are neck-deep in two occupations (both with active, violent resistance), complete with over a thousand prisoners, most held without charges, and many subject to torture which continues even in the wake of the revelations at Abu Ghraib; they are actively engaged in another similar face down of another sovereign nation, Iran, threatening them with preemptive war without any evidence of any threat, direct or otherwise; and our nation is being held hostage to outrageous prices for gas and oil, fueled in a great part by the very militarism that Bush's father promised in the first Gulf war would secure the flow of oil in the Persian Gulf.