WaPo: "Embittered Insiders Turn Against Bush"

Ever wonder why it is that an administration the Mainstream Media tells us every 3.2 seconds is "intensely loyal" goes after its own, ripping out the throats of anyone the Bushies have already turned against, driving the insiders to go outside the flock?

Well, with the neocons, I think they're just trying to cover their own asses. As soon as the MSM started saying the "age of the neocons" was no more, Adelman, Perle and other neocons began to come out to blame the Bushies. It's not that the neocons have gotten smarter or no longer want such outrageous things (leveling Iran and the Palestinians for Israel's sake, for example); no, they just don't want to be seen as powerless. So it's better to attack the Bushies than be seen any longer as the problem on which Bush's failed wars (plural) were based.

The weekend after the statue of Saddam Hussein fell, Kenneth Adelman and a couple of other promoters of the Iraq war gathered at Vice President Cheney's residence to celebrate. The invasion had been the "cakewalk" Adelman predicted. Cheney and his guests raised their glasses, toasting President Bush and victory. "It was a euphoric moment," Adelman recalled.

Forty-three months later, the cakewalk looks more like a death march, and Adelman has broken with the Bush team. He had an angry falling-out with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this fall. He and Cheney are no longer on speaking terms. And he believes that "the president is ultimately responsible" for what Adelman now calls "the debacle that was Iraq."

Adelman, a former Reagan administration official and onetime member of the Iraq war brain trust, is only the latest voice from inside the Bush circle to speak out against the president or his policies. Heading into the final chapter of his presidency, fresh from the sting of a midterm election defeat, Bush finds himself with fewer and fewer friends. Some of the strongest supporters of the war have grown disenchanted, former insiders are registering public dissent and Republicans on Capitol Hill blame him for losing Congress.

A certain weary crankiness sets in with any administration after six years. By this point in Bill Clinton's tenure, bitter Democrats were competing to denounce his behavior with an intern even as they were trying to fight off his impeachment. Ronald Reagan was deep in the throes of the Iran-contra scandal. But Bush's strained relations with erstwhile friends and allies take on an extra edge of bitterness amid the dashed hopes of the Iraq venture.

"There are a lot of lives that are lost," Adelman said in an interview last week. "A country's at stake. A region's at stake. This is a gigantic situation. . . . This didn't have to be managed this bad. It's just awful."