The year as seen by Sidney Blumenthal

I think Sidney Blumenthal does a better job of summing up the year 2005 as it relates to George W. Bush than Krugman did. He refers to Bush's "victory" in 2004 as a Victory in name only . Like I predicted at the time Blumenthal thinks the turning point was the Terri Schiavo debacle.

The first shift in Bush's political fortunes came with his unprecedented intervention in the case of Terry Schiavo, a woman in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years, whose husband's attempt to have her feeding tube removed was upheld after 14 appeals in Florida courts, five federal law suits, and four refusals to hear the case by the supreme court.

Bush rushed to sign a bill transferring the case from state to federal courts. For weeks Republicans strutted and the Democrats cowered. Then, on March 21, the spell carried over from the election campaign was broken: an ABC News poll found that 63% backed the removal of Schiavo's feeding tube and 67% believed that politicians urging she be kept alive were demagogic and unprincipled.

Of course trying to ride the dead horse know as Social Security Privitization didn't help but the final straw was his non-reaction to Katrina.

After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on August 29, Bush's aides held a fraught debate about which one of them would have to tell the president he should cut short his vacation. Four days after the hurricane landed, Bush left his ranch, and on Air Force One watched a custom DVD of television news coverage assembled by his staff. He had not bothered to see any of it on his own.

He praised his feckless chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael Brown - "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" - and nominated his former personal attorney and White House legal counsel Harriet Miers for the supreme court. Though friends offered testimony of her evangelical religiosity, conservatives did not trust her because she had once made gestures toward women's and civil rights, and Bush got her to withdraw.

And yes the Harriet Miers nomination didn't help. Schiavo, Social Security, Katrina and the Miers nomination all led to an erosion of confidence that finally spread to the cluster fuck of choice in Iraq. One turning point that turned in the wrong direction too many. There is more, go read the entire column.