You can only polish a piece of dung so long

Once you realize that Bush IS just as callow, incurious, and arrogant as he appears, once you realize that nearly everything that passes his lips is scripted crap and likely wrong, he becomes an almost pathetic figure.

While some of us have realized this for years, it's only now that most of the country, even those willingly taken on a ride by Rove and Bush's image machine and their army of flacks are starting to realize what a cruel hoax this entire administration has been and what a disastrous path they've lead the country down.

Even Bush seems like he doesn't even believe his own BS anymore.

Unlike other two-term presidents, Bush hasn't grown in office, become an old familiar whose irritating traits and lapses could be accepted almost affectionately, like Reagan's dottiness. He's demonstrably diminished, dwarfed by the reality that he continues to deny and repeating himself in press conferences like a robot whose wiring is on the fritz, for whom words and phrases are nothing more than pre-programmed units of sound. He's more irritating and dangerous than ever before, because he doesn't know anything, doesn't know or care that he doesn't know anything, and yet persists in a path of destruction as if it were the road to salvation. It's finally dawned on responsible minds that Bush could take all of us down with him before he and the neocons are through.

Read the entire Wolcott piece here.