When red and blue turn purple

President Bush is having an especially tough week with the Iraq war when he gets hung out to dry by Ahmad Chalabi and the U.S. Senate on the same day.

Chalabi is the convicted embezzler behind suspect intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, which the White House found irresistible before the war. He is now deputy prime minister of Iraq. His illuminating PBS appearance on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer came amid a grand tour of Capitol Hill and the White House.

Interviewer Ray Suarez homed right in on Chalabi's prewar role and the tales of menace he peddled to an eager audience. What did he tell the United States?

All he did, Chalabi purred, was make a few introductions. The Bush administration chose to believe what it heard, and it fell to the White House with all its intelligence resources to verify the accuracy of what it learned.

Suarez pressed on about the litany of certainty Chalabi spouted over Saddam Hussein's lethal armory. Oh, that stuff. Chalabi said that was his opinion and he did not expect the administration to simply take his word.

By now, even Republicans in Congress are feeling like chumps. For two years, they have been bankrolling a war in compliant silence, and putting the whole running tab — currently about $200 billion — on a credit card.

Prodded by Democrats, the Republican-led Senate finally asked the president — if it wouldn't be too much trouble — to provide lawmakers with progress reports on the war with an eye toward starting to get the hell out of harm's way sometime before the 2006 congressional elections.

For his part, the president has responded to critics with the bearing of a man with no plan: Disagree with me and you are a virtual traitor who might as well be planting bombs alongside the insurgents. Vice President Dick "Mushroom Cloud" Cheney is back on the attack with prewar levels of bellicosity.

Americans are quietly, resolutely having none of it. Red and blue states have turned purple.

Voters took 40 years to decide the Democrats had run out of ideas and integrity before they booted them from Congress. Republicans barely made it a dozen years. The end is near, and it's not only the war that has taken its toll.

Greed, incompetence and indifference drew the GOP away from any agenda remotely connected to the lives of ordinary people.

The legal and moral indictments that dog Republican leadership in Congress are all about hanging on to power and punishing opponents. That does not leave much time for congressional oversight of the executive branch, fiscal responsibility or the needs of taxpayers back home.

The United States won the Cold War because the Soviet Union went broke first, quipped a Washington congressman years ago. Now it's our turn. Blank-check spending on the Iraq war combined with tax cuts plunged the federal government into debt that will haunt generations to come.

Where were the fiscally conservative Republicans? They are in the federal trough up to their hindquarters doling out everything from corporate farm subsidies to pension breaks for major employers. Homeland security? They turned it into an industry.

Bush and the GOP worked overtime to ransack environmental regulations that directly affect the air we breathe and the water we drink. Midwest power plants don't have to modernize, and young lungs in the Northeast pay a price because of airborne pollution. At the very least we have to keep them healthy so they can spend a lifetime paying off the Treasury bonds purchased by Japan and China to finance epic deficits.

The separation of the Republican Party from ordinary lives starts very close to home and goes all the way to Capitol Hill. The state party sends out cheesy e-mails about the war, so maybe no one will remember the GOP supported the repeal of gas taxes for better highways. No connection to families idling off gas on crowded roads, or the backdoor draft through the National Guard.

Increasingly, congressional Republicans are vendors of a line of bull the public is refusing to buy or rent for another two or four years.

Lance Dickie's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is ldickie@seattletimes.com