Wingnuts wig out: It’s finally started to happen — things have gotten so bad in Iraq and the president is doing such a horrendously crappy job of leading the nation that his once-solid Republican base is eroding. Not that they actually “get it,” they apparently are just tired of staying the course with George, according to National Journal’s PollTrack:

President Bush’s approval numbers have long been somewhat deceptive. On the one hand, a popularity rating hovering in the 30s and 40s indicates that a lot of Americans don’t care for him. But partisan breakdowns have often revealed that he’s still popular with his conservative Republican base. A new CBS News survey shows the Iraq war sapping some wind from Bush’s sails.

In a poll that CBS News conducted with the New York Times in late October, 68 percent of Republican respondents approved of Bush’s war policy. Just 21 percent of independents and 7 percent of Democrats said the same.

Fast-forward to now. The long-awaited Baker-Hamilton report on Iraq is out, and Bush is scrambling to hear alternatives on how the White House should proceed before announcing what has been billed as a significant policy change in Iraq. The most recent CBS poll, conducted late last week, tracked a 21-point drop-off among Republicans in support for Bush’s handling of Iraq. Three-quarters of all respondents disapproved, a hike from the 64-percent disapproval in the previous survey.

CBS respondents aren’t the only ones feeling negative. Zogby pollsters tracked 74-percent disapproval of Bush’s war policy. Less than a third of Zogby and CBS respondents approved of Bush’s overall performance. The president fared a little better in a CNN poll; respondents gave him a 37/57 split.

The CBS survey also shows a bleaker overall outlook among respondents. For instance, 70 percent said the country was on the wrong track. That’s among the highest figures on that question seen all year, and up 6 points from the late October survey. Pessimism among Republicans also jumped in this area — up 10 points to 40 percent not liking the way things are heading.

But that doesn’t mean Republicans are about to join independents who ran into the arms of Democrats this election year. Republicans were much more pessimistic about the new Democratic Congress; 52 percent had a negative reaction, whereas 62 percent of independents and nearly nine in 10 Democrats reported positive feelings about the 110th Congress.

The parties were more aligned on the question of whether Congress and the White House would be able to work together, but given their take on the change in leadership, independents and Democrats may be pointing to Bush as the culprit. A little more than a third of Democrats and independents agreed the two branches would cooperate; Republicans were evenly split, 47/47, on that question.

And while Republicans have lost some confidence in Bush and his war policy, they have more faith that the president will eventually settle on a better course. Nearly three in five said Bush could make good decisions on Iraq, whereas just 23 percent of independents and 9 percent of Democrats said the same. Republicans were also more likely to share Bush’s vision for Iraq: Nearly half said the country would become a stable democracy eventually, although not in the next two years. A negligible number across the political spectrum, however, said a free and democratic Iraq would be reality in the next year or two.