A possibly pre-mature post-mortum from Peggy Noonan:

The beginning of my own sense of separation from the Bush administration came in January 2005, when the president declared that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the world, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation. This was at once so utopian and so aggressive that it shocked me. For others the beginning of distance might have been Katrina and the incompetence it revealed, or the depth of the mishandling and misjudgments of Iraq. What I came in time to believe is that the great shortcoming of this White House, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom. Just wisdom–a sense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not all there is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that are true of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes a loyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don’t need hacks.

As Daily Pundit’s Bill Quick said:

In the vein of LBJ and Walter Cronkite, I think it is fair to say that if George W. Bush has lost Peggy Noonan, then he has lost the Republican Party.

Or, to be even more emphatic, George W. Bush has succeeded what even a scandal ridden President like Richard Nixon could not do. He has completely shattered the Republican Party alliance, alienated both it’s libertarian and conservative wings, and tainted nearly every Republican official on the national level with the stink of an Administration that is clearly, as Noonan notes, not at all concerned with preserving anything resembling a Republican majority:

The White House doesn’t need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don’t even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place. (…) They are trying to lay down markers for history. Having lost the support of most of the country, they are looking to another horizon. The story they would like written in the future is this: Faced with the gathering forces of ethnocentric darkness, a hardy and heroic crew stood firm and held high a candle in the wind. It will make a good chapter. Would that it were true!

Noonan is talking principally of course about the immigration bill, which has outraged conservatives nationwide, and which has led to a dramatic drop off in GOP fundraising.

But this is about more than immigration. Bush has essentially lost credibility within his own party, and the Republican Party as a whole is suffering for it. Things are going to get worse before they get better, and 2008 is shaping up to be a very rough year for Republicans.

The question is, what will they do to rebuild the party from the mess that it will be in when George Bush leaves on January 20, 2009 ?