By Ellen Ratner
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves ..." – "Julius Caesar," by William Shakespeare Here's my paraphrase of an old ethnic joke that is strictly verboten in our age of political correctness:

Question: What do you call a basement full of Republicans? Answer: A whine cellar! Yes, with apologies to the Great Bard, the party that used to strut and fight is now "strutting and fretting its (last) hour upon the stage (until the congressional election of '06 and the presidential election of '08) when it shall be heard no more." If, dear reader, by the end of Bush's second term, you have come to believe that it was a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" well, don't blame me. By then I will have been warning my readers for many long years. Consider recent events. The winds of Hurricane Katrina blew away the last shreds of Bush's credibility. Mike Brown, the disgraced and fired head of FEMA, fell on his sword for the president, but the people of the Gulf paid the bill. And did those he-men Republicans, the Conquerors of Baghdad, the Blood Heirs to the Throne of Kabul and Pretenders to the Twin Kingdoms of Syria and Iran, step up to the plate and say, "Sorry"? Sure, Bush winced and whispered sorry – while Karl Rove's minions blamed the mayor, the governor, the levee commission, the weather, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Congress, New Orleans' impoverished population and Judge Crater, missing since the 1930s. Meanwhile, 50 or more people a day are blown up in Iraq. Remember all those "whiny liberals," those "traitors" like Ted Kennedy who were "unpatriotic" by speaking truth to liars in calling our occupation of Iraq a quagmire? Well, if the pools of blood and heaps of body parts in Baghdad, Ramadi, Fallujah and Samara don't qualify as a quagmire, then I've got some WMDs in Iraq to sell you. Has anyone from the Bush White House stood up and said so much as an "Oops!" – as in oops, we should have put in more troops; or oops, we should have sealed the borders; or oops, we never trained our soldiers for this kind of urban combat? How about: Oops, we shouldn't have invaded to begin with? No, but all of the administration whining sounds like alley cats in heat. Blame the jihadis, blame the Sunnis, blame the porous borders, blame the "disloyal" Democrats, blame Syria, blame Iran, blame al-Qaida, blame Judge Crater. I guess taking responsibility is the Achilles heel for the pseudo-tough. The latest Bush self-pity-party has been over the nomination of his crony Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court. Now does the Bush dynasty begin to resemble the last days of the Roman Empire when emperors who were hereditary idiots began appointing their horses to public office. Even as a liberal I'm shocked that with all of the highly qualified conservative candidates out there – real judges with real track records and real judicial reputations – our president rips out a page from Tammany Hall and appoints some hack to sit on the highest bench of the third branch of our government. I would have fought the nomination of somebody like Janice Rogers Brown with everything I had, but hey, at least we knew where she was coming from. But Harriet Miers? She is so weak – and Bush believed his base was so stupid they'd just roll over once again (as they have again and again and again.) But it turns out that they won't – not this time. They've drunk the Kool Aid on Iraq, and Social Security reform, and the war on terror and everything else. But now, they actually remember reading his lips when he promised them a conservative Supreme Court. So Bush holds a whiney press conference to defend his nomination of Miers, not from predatory Democrats, but from ... Republicans! And what is her strongest credential? That she's a Christian. I have nothing but respect for Christians and Christianity, but somebody better tell Bush that the vacant office is that of Supreme Court justice and not pope, and that he's the president of the United States and not a member of the College of Cardinals. Whining is what people do when they have run out of solutions; when they are overwhelmed by events; when they feel that they're "misunderstood." It's what people do who can't accept reality, can no longer roll with the punches, when the wit has run dry and the excuses run out. But it's not what presidents do. Not good ones, anyway.