It wasn’t so long ago that the conventional wisdom on the right was that Pres. Bush was a perfect leader whom God had sent to lead the nation through perilous times. When things did not go well, it wasn’t the fault of Dear Leader — who, after all, took his cues from God’s voice in his earpiece — instead the fault lay with liberals who dared to criticize him.

They called us “Bush haters” — and attacked our patriotism by suggesting that criticizing the president equalled hating America. (Unless the president’s name is Clinton or Carter — in which case it is the duty of rightwing patriots to rip the President of the United States to shreds.)

Now how the worm has turned. If there is a more rightwing doctrinaire idealogue than Rich Lowry toiling in the vines of punditry today, I can’t think who it might be. So it is worth noting that now even Rich Lowry hates Pres. Bush and America:

Is President Bush still the nation’s commander in chief? Yes, he continues to return the salute when boarding Marine One, but it’s a role he sometimes seems on the verge of abdicating.

He has left the question of troop levels in Iraq to the generals on the ground. Gen. George W. Casey Jr. told Bush a few months ago that they would wait and see how Iraq looked after Ramadan, which ended in late October. Well, Iraq looked worse. Now the administration seems to want to wait to see the conclusions of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group or one of its internal reviews of Iraq policy before making any new departures. In the meantime, Iraq looks still worse. As the administration waits, Iraq burns.

And:

Bush simply has failed to run his war. Historian Eliot Cohen describes how, in contrast, the best American wartime president conducted himself: “Lincoln had not merely to select his generals, but to educate, train and guide them. To this end he believed that he had to master the details of war, from the technology to the organization and movement of armies, if only to enable himself to make informed judgments about general officers.”

Bush has taken the opposite approach and — for all his swagger and protectiveness of executive prerogatives — is becoming a disturbing study in lassitude in the executive branch.

Of course, Mr. Lowry does not acknowledge — much less apologize for — his own full-throated support for Pres. Bush while he was taking the country to war on nothing more than a tissue of lies and an aristocratic whim.