Sunshine On Our Shoulder

No less a conservative pundit than Robert Novak, a.k.a. "The Prince of Darkness," says Prez Bush "is in political trouble" and goes on at considerable length detailing why. The bottomline seems to be that Karl Rove and the other Rovians have been too busy with, well, the bottomline -- raising sky-scraper-high piles of campaign cash -- while neglecting the basics of keeping the troops in line. For example, according to Novak, the reelection campaign failed to deal with the stinkbomb that Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan laid last week when he suggested cutting Social Security benefits so that the richest 1 percent of us could have permanent tax cuts. Novak describes a "deepening malaise among Republicans in the capital" over Bush's failure to deal with deficit spending, over his failure to consult with congressional leaders before announcing his support for a hateful gay-marriage constitutional amendment, over his Economic Report which extolled the virtues of "out-sourcing" American jobs to cheap labor pools overseas, among other provocations.