“It’s not so much that he is an embarrassment, it’s that there is an exhaustion,… People are tired of defending him.” -GOP analyst Rich Galen, on President Bush

Yet the GOP continues to back Bush every inch of the way. Hypocrite much?

The Unsilent Treatment

Bush fatigue in the GOP.
(Howard Fineman, Newsweek)

June 11, 2007 issue - Knowing Newt Gingrich, I was a little alarmed when his secretary told me where he was. “He’s in Hawaii, doing Pearl Harbor,” she said. I envisioned him in Snoopy goggles and scarf, strafing the islands in a biplane, shouting slogans at liberals below. Turns out “Pearl Harbor” is his latest historical novel; our hero had deployed himself to the Pacific theater for book promotion and a vacation.

As for bombs, he’d dropped them back in Washington-on the White House. The former Republican Speaker denounced his own party’s sitting president as a hopeless incompetent, a Jimmy Carter clone. “You hire presidents, at a minimum, to run the country well enough that you don’t have to think about it …” he told The New Yorker (clearly thinking about it). The news wasn’t what Newt said, but the silence that followed.

Karl Rove not only didn’t call Gingrich on the carpet, he did not call at all-not because he agreed with him, of course, but because what was there to say? None of the GOP’s innumerable 2008 candidates defended George W. Bush, whose name they rarely utter in any context, anywhere. In Congress, Republicans privately called to thank Gingrich, claims his press aide, Rick Tyler. “The general view was that it was long past time for someone to speak up,” he says.

Coming from someone always on the cutting edge of cutting people down, Gingrich’s bombing run signals a new twist in the GOP’s every-man-for-himself ‘08 survival strategy: it may not be enough to ignore Bush; you may need to attack him to prove your bona fides to the public at large. “It’s not so much that he is an embarrassment, it’s that there is an exhaustion,” says Rich Galen, a GOP analyst who has worked for both of the Bushes and Gingrich. “People are tired of defending him.”

Article at MSNBC.com