Cheese eating surrender monkeys

Not who you think. It's the Bush Administration on Harriet Miers:

The White House has begun making contingency plans for the withdrawal of Harriet Miers as President Bush's choice to fill a seat on the Supreme Court, conservative sources said yesterday.

"White House senior staff are starting to ask outside people, saying, 'We're not discussing pulling out her nomination, but if we were to, do you have any advice as to how we should do it?' " a conservative Republican with ties to the White House told The Washington Times yesterday.

The White House denied making such calls.

How bad has message management gotten in the White House? Did someone forget to oil their noise machine?

So the White House continues its policy of making messes and wondering why other people can't clean it up instead (remember it was John Kerry's fault there's no plan to get us out of Iraq). Normally they turn to Rove with a shovel, and he somehow buries the story, or digs up something else to deflect attention from it. But now that every mention of Rove in the news is followed by the phrase "possible federal agent leaker under investigation," it only reminds people of the problems going on at 1600.

I wouldn't be surprised if Bush and company were looking for an easy way out. And for most of the country, it's not going to happen. If Bush can pull the plug on Harriet and get a pander pick to the hard right, we may actually see his poll numbers rise and he shores up recently wavering right wing support.

With the right spin, Bush is back above 50%, and the rest of us are doomed.

Wouldn't surprise me in the least.