Cold comfort: The list of Pres. Bush’s former supporters grows longer every day. Now even Ken “Cakewalk” Adelman — a loud and agressive cheerleader for the war — has changed his tune:

The weekend after the statue of Saddam Hussein fell, Kenneth Adelman and a couple of other promoters of the Iraq war gathered at Vice President Cheney’s residence to celebrate. The invasion had been the “cakewalk” Adelman predicted. Cheney and his guests raised their glasses, toasting President Bush and victory. “It was a euphoric moment,” Adelman recalled.

Forty-three months later, the cakewalk looks more like a death march, and Adelman has broken with the Bush team. He had an angry falling-out with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this fall. He and Cheney are no longer on speaking terms. And he believes that “the president is ultimately responsible” for what Adelman now calls “the debacle that was Iraq.”

…”There are a lot of lives that are lost,” Adelman said in an interview last week. “A country’s at stake. A region’s at stake. This is a gigantic situation. . . . This didn’t have to be managed this bad. It’s just awful.”

Next up, every Democrats’ favorite 2008 GOP presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich:

“People expect a level of performance they are not getting,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said in a speech.

The conservatives are collapsing under the weight of their immense self-deceptions. We should be swimming in schadenfreude, if only the trap they’ve gotten us into weren’t so damn serious.