Mr. Bush, your party is jumping ship without you.

click to enlarge You are in trouble when George Will and William F. Buckley begin to think not only is Bush's foreign policy strategery flawed, but it is so horrid, it has the chance to sink the Republican Party back to where it was during the Great Depression. George Will from ABC's This Week: They do not want to have, as they had in 2006, another election on Iraq. George, it took 30, 40 years for the Republican Party to get out from under Herbert Hoover. People would say, "Are you going to vote for Nixon in '60?" "No, I don't like Hoover." The Depression haunted the Republican Party. This could be a foreign policy equivalent of the Depression, forfeiting the Republican advantage they've had since the '68 convention of the Democratic Party and the nomination of [George] McGovern. The advantage Republicans have had on national security matters may be forfeited. And from Buckley's column (courtesy thesaurus link) : The political problem of the Bush administration is grave, possibly beyond the point of rescue. The opinion polls are savagely decisive on the Iraq question. About 60% of Americans wish the war ended — wish at least a timetable for orderly withdrawal. What is going on in Congress is in the nature of accompaniment. The vote in Congress is simply another salient in the war against war in Iraq. Republican forces, with a couple of exceptions, held fast against the Democrats' attempt to force Mr. Bush out of Iraq even if it required fiddling with the Constitution. President Bush will veto the bill, of course, but its impact is critically important in the consolidation of public opinion. It can now accurately be said that the legislature, which writes the people's laws, opposes the war. If Christopher Hitchens ever leaves the plantation, you might as well order the tombstone for the GOP.