As the saying goes, it's better to keep your mouth shut and let people think you're an idiot than to open it and remove all doubt.

Last Sunday the Bush team, trying desperately to stop the President's hemorrhaging poll numbers, decided to abandon three years of "mouth shut" policy and have Bush plead his case to the American people in an interview with Tim Russert. Bad move.

The interview was as you'd expect. What was unexpected, though, was the reaction of some of Bush's staunchest supporters, who proved that maybe there is, in fact, a limit to the amount of crap a person will swallow in the name of their cause.

Andrew Sullivan of The New Republic had these things to say:

[...] it was in the second part of the interview that things, to my mind, unraveled. Bush offered no compelling rationale for reelecting him. He offered excuses on the economy; and, on the critical matter of the country's fiscal health, he seemed scarily out of touch. [...]

OK, let me put this gently here. Is he out of his mind? [...]

[...] if this is the level of coherence, grasp of reality, and honesty that is really at work in his understanding of domestic fiscal policy, then we are in even worse trouble than we thought. We have a captain on the fiscal Titanic who thinks he's in the Caribbean.

Things weren't much better in The Wall Street Journal op-ed pages where Peggy Noonan had a similar involuntary response:

The president seemed tired, unsure and often bumbling. His answers were repetitive, and when he tried to clarify them he tended to make them worse. He did not seem prepared. He seemed in some way disconnected from the event.

Boy, that house of cards sure is looking a little shaky around the base!