Even the Republicans recognize it. Bush is not competent to run the government.

It's not that the government can't get anything done. It's that Bush, Cheney and Rove are so utterly incompetent that the government can't get anything done while they are in charge. That's not just my opinion. It is the opinion of arch-right-winger Robert "Prince of Darkness" Novak. Novak is speaking for the Republicans in Congress, too.

I am, as you probably know, no fan of Novakula. He provided aid and comfort to the enemies of America when he published the fact that Valerie Plame Wilson was an agent of the CIA. But his sources inside the top levels of the Republcan Party can't be matched. When he says that all the Republicans in Congress agree that the Bush administration is characterized by the "I" word, incompetence, you can take that to the bank.

From the Washington Post editorial by Novakula himself we get this statement:

The I-word (incompetence) is also used by Republicans in describing the Bush administration generally. Several of them I talked to cited a trifecta of incompetence: the Walter Reed hospital scandal, the FBI's misuse of the USA Patriot Act and the U.S. attorneys firing fiasco. "We always have claimed that we were the party of better management," one House leader told me. "How can we claim that anymore?"

America will take decades to dig out from under the debris resulting from the recent reign of "Prince George the Incompetent", who should have been a court jester but didn't even have the talent for that.

[h/t to Kevin Drum.]