Warner, not usually the most reckless or outspoken member of his party, was not alone in his outrage. “No member of the Senate had any clue” about the Abu Ghraib outrages, Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told the New York Times. “This is entirely unacceptable. I think it is a total washout.”

The Abu Ghraib revelations unleashed a pent-up tidal wave of resentment at the cavalier way that Bush and co. have kept congressional leaders in the dark over crucial and highly charged issues, one after another. Lawmakers are appalled that Rumsfeld sat on a detailed report from Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba about the Abu Ghraib situation for weeks and that they had to learn so much from, of all places, the Web site of the one information source that good Republican conservatives despise even more than the New York Times — National Public Radio. Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was furious that his committee had been kept in the dark too. “That’s unacceptable,” he told reporters on May 5.

Even Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi, the former Senate Republican leader, told the New York Times, “I don’t feel good at all about what I’m finding out about who didn’t know what.” Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the avatar of Reagan Republicanism over the past quarter century, was the most outraged and plain-spoken of the lot: “It’s abysmal; it’s criminal,” he said. And if, or rather when, the allegations are proved true, “somebody needs to go to jail,” he added.

The revelations of repeated torture and extraordinary humiliation of Arab prisoners in Iraq have obviously appalled lawmakers, Republican and Democrat alike. But there is a lot more to it than that. For the first time in this administration, Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska no longer look like an incorrigibly romantic idealist (Hagel) or an embittered, jealous presidential wannabe (McCain), both with Vietnam on the brain. Suddenly they look like prescient leaders of their party and the good consciences of the Senate.

How badly has this continuing scandal hurt the president’s clout on Capitol Hill? Far more than he, his staff or even Republican lawmakers themselves yet realize.

Unease, a smoldering anger and even fear at being cut out of the loop by Rumsfeld and his Pentagon have been building for months on Capitol Hill, especially in the Senate. Powerful mainstream senators like Warner, Lugar and Roberts are now saying in public things that would have gotten them in boiling hot water only a few weeks ago. These men will still not go as far as McCain or Hagel in blasting administration policy or Rumsfeld forthrightly. But they have come a long way already, baby. Rumsfeld is without a doubt on the skids with them. And the president’s evident determination to hang on to “his” Rummy through thick and thin is going to strain relations even more.

The White House and the Pentagon have systematically shut the Senate out of the consultative process on Iraq in a way not seen since World War I. The horrific pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib therefore did not hit a political vacuum or a strong buffer of support for the president and his defense secretary. Instead, they have served, some Senate GOP staffers privately say, to focus and harden fears and resentments that have been building for months.

The House is a tougher nut to crack. Historically, House members usually do not concern themselves with many foreign affairs issues — with the exception of hot-button ones of particular interest to influential lobbies or groups in their own districts. Also, the GOP majority of recent years under the leadership of Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas has been especially uniform in its views and in harmony with Bush on them. So far, no one there has broken ranks, and there have not been any independent, grim and public expressions of concern from House Republican leaders comparable to what has already been uttered by their Senate counterparts.

But talk to some House staffers who are privy to the thoughts and concerns of their congressmen and sometimes surprising expressions of anger and frustration come forth.

These so far fall into two categories: The first is that the czar, in this case the president, is still wise and good and just, and that it is his pesky advisors who are to blame. A remarkable amount of anger appears to be spreading in GOP House staff circles against Rumsfeld and the supposedly brilliant group of neoconservative intellectuals around him, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith — those who pushed the conquest and occupation of Iraq so remorselessly yet now appear to have not the slightest clue what to do next.

The second reaction is found less commonly among House staffers but is even more remarkable. That is the expressed belief of Republican conservatives that to retain the power that really matters (their majority in the House, with continuing control over its committees and fiscal powers), they may have to sacrifice the power that they regard as more superficial and transient: Bush’s holding on to the White House.

According to this line of thought (and I have been unable to ascertain from staffers how many Republican congressmen hold such a view), Bush, Rumsfeld and their hawks have already made such a mess out of Iraq that the next president, be it Bush or John Kerry, is certain to be on a hiding to nothing as he struggles with the war’s consequences next year. Indeed, it is inevitable that there will be a massive popular backlash against the sitting president, Republican or Democrat, come the midterm elections of 2006. Far better, therefore, that Kerry win in November and still be hemmed in on the domestic front by a Republican House majority that is then free of the albatross of Iraq. If Bush wins in November, according to this belief, there is a very real danger that after 12 years the GOP will lose the jewel in its crown — control of the House — in 2006.

For the moment, however, members of the House are silent. GOP leaders are keeping their heads down, hoping the whole mess will go away in the next news cycle. Whatever the unease and resentment building against Bush there, he still has several months to rally the faithful, jut his jaw and look manly. House members will not distance themselves from a president who shares their core beliefs before the fall and, even then, only if come September he is looking like as much a lost cause as his father did by that time in his unsuccessful reelection campaign against Bill Clinton in 1992.

In the Senate, Bush’s problems are far more immediate: If the Abu Ghraib scandal continues to metastasize, as it shows every likelihood of doing, then the biggest pressures Bush will face to drop his beloved Rumsfeld will come not from the big, bad media so many Republican true believers still believe to be liberal, or the supposedly wimpy Democrats on the Hill, but from the leaders of the Republican Senate majority themselves. Majority Leader Bill Frist, of course, is a Bush loyalist and totally onboard with the White House. But the Tennessee doctor has been strikingly out of step with his own committee chairmen of Foreign Relations, Intelligence and Armed Services on the issue.

The danger is real enough for Bush, staffers for mainstream Republican senators say, that the two hard-charging mavericks, Hagel and McCain, may set their party’s tone, or even agenda, on dealing with Rumsfeld. Other Republican senators are already so disgusted with Rumsfeld’s bungles that they at the very best will not publicly defend him. The 92-to-nothing bipartisan resolution passed on Monday condemning the Abu Ghraib abuses signals that the turning point is very close, and may already have been reached. GOP Senate leaders showed none of the usual efforts to delay or water down a resolution that, after all, was highly damning to the administration run by their own party.

If there was a single moment when congressional Republicans’ doubts about Iraq germinated and started to bloom, it was when Bush was forced to unleash his $87 billion request for rebuilding Iraq last August. As luck would have it, the request came out just as Islamic guerrillas in Iraq assassinated Shiite Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, United Nations special envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and several hundred of their officials, supporters and other victims in a blitz of bombings.

Successful politicians, especially in a system like that of the United States — where every congressional seat is up for grabs, at least theoretically, every two years — cannot afford the luxury of the neocon fantasy of bringing American-style democracy to Iraq. They keep their seats for a lot longer than two years by delivering the bacon and the pork for their constituents and by being plugged in to what the folks back home are thinking. And the remorseless rise in body bags coming home from Vietnam — sorry, Iraq — combined with the unyielding refusal of the reviving economy to generate well-paying new jobs, alarms them. Even the growing casualties and death toll did not seem to matter so long as the people running things in the Pentagon and the White House still looked as if they knew what they were doing.

But that is no longer the case. Bush remains convinced that Rumsfeld is a genius. Almost no one in the Senate majority, apart from Frist and a couple of other true believers, agrees anymore. Even in the House, the murmurings of staff members have grown into a chorus of cicadas.

Many congressional leaders had circulated with Rumsfeld on May 1 at the annual White House Press Correspondents dinner as the Abu Ghraib story was breaking, and the carefree way he and Wolfowitz enjoyed themselves that evening is now also reverberating on Capitol Hill. What for so long seemed the secretary’s greatest asset — his blasé coolness and imperturbability through every crisis — is being widely reinterpreted as arrogant and even reckless delusion.

Yet as Bush made clear in his visit to the Pentagon Monday morning, he remains determined to keep Rummy on — a determination that should be taken literally. For this president is, to quote the one book he appears to ever seriously consult, “an Israelite without guile.” He could not bring himself to acknowledge a single personal mistake or error of judgment when pressed four times in his press conference last month. Nor could he bring himself to personally apologize to the Iraqi people for the torture and abuse revelations when he went on Arab television, supposedly with the express purpose of doing so. All this pales compared with the magnitude of error and miscalculation he would have to admit, however tacitly, if he dropped Rumsfeld now.

By keeping Rummy, Wolfie, Dougie and the gang on, the new gap between Bush and seasoned Senate loyalists like Hatch and Lott could grow into a Grand Canyon. Bush probably imagines that his House majority is made of sterner stuff, but by no means all of them are. The House is far more responsible to public opinion than the Senate is, and historically, in times of crisis, congressmen tend to defer to outspoken senators on issues of national security and foreign affairs — as presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson have discovered to their cost.

If it were not for the steady stream of catastrophes followed by bombshells erupting from Iraq, Bush would be looking good. Kerry’s performance so far has been lackluster, and the Bush-Cheney campaign’s $60 million ad blitz in early spring drove up Kerry’s negatives to satisfyingly high numbers. Even the flat jobs growth rate — boosted only by part-time jobs devoid of health benefits — could be massaged into a feel-good numbness.

But Iraq will not stay quiet. It will not stop coughing up horrifying and disgusting surprises. Bush and Rumsfeld appear to be genuinely unconcerned by this, but Capitol Hill Republicans clearly are coming to see it very differently. They are professional politicians who cannot afford to live in a permanent fantasy in which they imagine themselves walking in the steps of Winston Churchill.

But when it came to this year’s primaries, the Tea Party’s momentum was late-starting. It wasn’t until Aug. 24, when Joe Miller stunned Lisa Murkowski in an upset absolutely no one saw coming, that its potential became clear. As soon as the result came in, the Tea Party Express, which had quietly dumped $600,000 into Miller’s effort, turned its focus to Delaware, another state that was on no one’s radar. That support, along with the media’s sudden interest, transformed right-wing gadfly Christine O’Donnell into a player, and three weeks later she was declaring victory over Mike Castle, a nine-term congressman and fixture in Delaware politics.

It made you wonder what would have happened if the Tea Party had waged this focused an effort earlier in the year. For instance, Rep. Mark Kirk, a moderate congressman from just north of Chicago, won the GOP Senate nomination in Illinois on Feb. 3. He beat his closest competitor by 37 points, but he only finished with 56 percent of the vote — jarringly low when you consider the unanimous backing he received from state and national GOP leaders and his overwhelming financial and name-recognition advantages.

In hindsight, Kirk may have dodged a big bullet. The field was crowded, with multiple candidates claiming chunks and bits of Tea Party support. A clear challenger to Kirk never emerged, and the kind of national investment that the Tea Party Express made in Alaska and Delaware was missing. But what if Illinois’ primary had been scheduled for Sept. 14 — after Alaska? Kirk would have made an awfully ripe target for the emboldened Tea Party movement. The same probably goes for Roy Blunt, the ultra-establishment former House GOP whip who somehow escaped the Tea Party’s notice in his Aug. 3 primary in Missouri.

As it is, though, the Tea Party is out of Republican targets for 2010. But 2012 is just around the corner, and the Tea Party may pick up right where it left off when the next round of Senate primaries convenes..

This, at least, is what history suggests. The last time there was this much upheaval within the GOP was in the late 1970s, in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s challenge to President Gerald Ford in the 1976 primaries. While Reagan fell just inches short in that race, the writing was on the wall: The GOP’s demographics were changing and the conservative wing that Reagan represented would soon dominate; Ford’s win would be the Rockefeller crowd’s last stand.

After ’76, New Right activists set out to purge the remaining liberal Republicans from the party — a task that only took on more urgency when liberal Republican senators provided critical votes for Jimmy Carter’s Panama Canal treaty in 1977. To the right, this represented a blatant sellout of American sovereignty. In the 1978 midterms, the right organized several high-profile primary challenges. In New Jersey, they united behind a Reagan aide named Jeffrey Bell and took out an icon of liberal Republicanism, four-term Sen. Clifford Case. In Massachusetts, they rallied around a radio talk-show host and anti-busing crusader named Avi Nelson and nearly knocked off Sen. Ed Brooke, the only black Republican ever elected to the Senate. There was no collective name for the movement that did this, but in spirit and style, it was very much the Tea Party’s precursor.

And the movement didn’t stop in ’78 — not with Reagan running again in 1980, and not with liberal Republicans still roaming the halls of Congress. Down went Sen. Jacob Javits, Herbert Lehman’s literal and ideological Senate heir, in New York’s ’80 GOP primary, felled by a then-obscure Al D’Amato. Only after Reagan’s election did the purge mentality cease.

If that model holds, the Tea Party will be just as thirsty for GOP blood in ’12 as it is today — still enraged by TARP votes the way the New Right was still infuriated by the Panama Canal treaty in ’80.

Because only 10 GOP-held Senate seats will be up in ’12 — a consequence of the party’s drubbing in 2006 and weak showing in 2000 — only three incumbents seem at obvious risk of becoming the next Bennett or Murkowski: Olympia Snowe, Orrin Hatch and Richard Lugar.

Of the three, Snowe — at least for now — faces the most peril. A PPP poll last week found that 63 percent of Maine Republicans say they’d prefer a new, more conservative senator to Snowe in ’12. Her approval rating among self-identified conservative Maine Republicans is just 26 percent. And in a head-to-head trial heat with Chandler Woodcock, the party’s 2006 candidate for governor, she trails by 5 points, 38 to 33 percent.

Snowe’s offenses are lifelong; she’s the closest thing left to a Rockefeller Republican. So it’s hard to imagine her undergoing some kind of magical ideological transformation in time for ’12. That said, she could still conceivably save her seat, since the Maine electorate is unusually friendly to independent candidates. Her popularity remains strong and deep outside of the GOP base, so she could plausibly leave the party and wage a successful third-party bid.

 Hatch is more conservative than Snowe — far more conservative. But he also voted for the first TARP bill, back in the fall of 2008, and with 34 years of senatorial experience, he pretty much personifies the Washington wing of the Republican Party. Already, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a House freshman with strong grass-roots appeal, has toyed with the idea of challenging Hatch for the GOP nomination. And as Bennett’s example this year showed, ousting an incumbent in Utah can be easy: Without 40 percent of the vote at the party’s right-wing-dominated states convention, candidates can’t appear on the primary ballot. Bennett, another TARP supporter, failed to reach this threshold — and there are signs that Hatch could have trouble clearing it, too.

Indiana’s Lugar, at least on paper, is safer — if only because the most obvious Tea Party-backed challenger, state Sen. Marlin Stutzman, is likely to win a House seat this fall and might now want to risk it after one term. Stutzman came out of nowhere to wage a credible bid for the GOP Senate nomination, finishing 10 points behind Dan Coats in the May primary — a performance that led Red State to brand him a “rock star.”

Still, Lugar has run afoul of the right with his TARP votes and his more recent support for Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination — and he reeks of Washington insiderdom just as badly as Hatch. Who knows, maybe Stutzman will challenge him anyway? Or maybe it won’t even take Stutzman to make Lugar sweat.

Snowe, Hatch and Lugar are just the most obvious targets. Bob Corker and Jon Kyl also cast “yes” votes on TARP, and all are up in ’12. For various reasons, they seem less likely to attract the Tea Party’s ire in a primary, but nothing is impossible. (The scandalized Jon Ensign, who also voted for TARP, will be up for reelection, but few believe he’ll actually run.)

 Some believe that a poor showing by some of this year’s Tea Party candidates will give the GOP base pause about embracing more of them in 2012 Senate primaries. If O’Donnell and Sharron Angle lose, the thinking goes, a chastened GOP electorate will be more careful when it comes to balancing purity and electability.

But that thinking is flawed. Just remember: After he kicked Clifford Case to the curb in 1978, Jeffrey Bell lost by 10 points in the general election. But that didn’t slow the New Right down at all, just as a loss or two this fall won’t slow the Tea Party. In other words, what we saw last Tuesday in Delaware was both an exclamation point on this year’s primary season and a preview of what’s to come two years from now.

Lugar’s announcement is the latest in what’s expected to be a trickle of support among the Senate’s band of GOP moderates for President Barack Obama’s choice to succeed retired Justice John Paul Stevens.

In a statement, Lugar said he’d carefully followed Kagan’s confirmation hearing testimony and the debate about her nomination, including recommendations from his constituents, and concluded that she is up to the job.

“I have concluded that Solicitor General Elena Kagan is clearly qualified to serve on the Supreme Court and that she has demonstrated a comprehensive knowledge of court history and decisions,” Lugar said.

He added that Kagan has had a “distinguished career” in education and public service and is “well regarded by the legal community and her peers.”

Most Republicans argue that Kagan would seek to impose a liberal political agenda on the Supreme Court, moving to expand abortion rights, sanction gay marriage, and curb gun rights, among other things.

Political pressures are also playing a role a few months away from midterm elections, with interest groups leaning on senators to display their differences with Obama by voting down his nominee.

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina on Tuesday became the first Republican to say he’d join Democrats in backing Kagan.

Lugar is one of seven Republicans who voted to confirm Kagan last year as solicitor general. Three GOP conservatives who also did so — Sens. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Orrin Hatch of Utah and Jon Kyl of Arizona — are opposing her for the Supreme Court. The other three — Maine Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe and New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg — have yet to announce their intentions.

Collins, Gregg and Snowe are all considered potential GOP supporters of Kagan, as is Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts, who said Tuesday he hadn’t yet decided how to vote.

That means, Lugar says, that it’s time to “lay the groundwork” for “sustainable alternatives,” to “prepare for the next phase of our involvement in Iraq, whether that is a partial withdrawal, a gradual redeployment or some other option.”

And you can stop us now if you’ve heard this before.

When the president first announced the “surge” back in January, Lugar said he was “not confident” that the plan would work but declined to vote for a resolution opposing it. When the Senate voted in April to tie funding for the war to a timeline for bringing the troops home, Lugar joined most Republicans in voting no. And when Bush demanded that the Senate go back and pass a war funding bill without any timetable for bringing the troops home, Lugar caved and helped do exactly that.

Lugar said this morning that “we need to see a strategy for how our troops and other resources in Iraq might be employed to fundamentally change the equation there.” But to do that, we also need elected representatives who will do more than talk about how to “fundamentally change the equation” here.

McCain was responding to a former supporter who managed to artfully wedge into a single query the Arizona senator’s twin vulnerabilities — the public disarray in his campaign and the candidate’s affinity with the unpopular George W. Bush on immigration and the Iraq war. In politics, it is never a good sign when sympathetic voters begin asking questions that include the phrase (admittedly lifted from TV talking heads) “the death throes of your campaign.”

Hospice care might have seemed apt after the stunning resignations this week of campaign manager Terry Nelson (Bush’s 2004 political director) and John Weaver, the political strategist who had long played Sancho Panza to McCain’s Don Quixote. Having blown through $22 million without airing a single television ad and left with only $2 million in the bank, the McCain campaign seemed hard-pressed to pay for its own funeral.

New Hampshire was McCain’s resurrection state in 2000 when the Arizona senator who ran as the modern embodiment of Teddy Roosevelt stunned Bush by romping to victory with a 19-percentage-point margin. Small wonder that McCain came to the state here Friday to demonstrate that his White House ambitions had not flat-lined. As poet Robert Frost, a sometime New Hampshire resident, once said, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

“I can win in New Hampshire as I did in 2000,” McCain declared to applause at Saturday’s town meeting. “I’m not a very good fundraiser. But I can out-campaign any of these guys and I will.” McCain certainly has a strong argument when one takes into account the aloofness of Rudy Giuliani and the legendary languor of Fred Thompson, though Mitt Romney may pose a far more formidable challenge in the traditional handshake and town-meeting politics of the New Hampshire primary.

But bravado alone may not save McCain, even in New Hampshire. “He’s on the wrong glide path. We’ve seen him declining over the last six months,” said pollster Andy Smith, who directs the Survey Center at the University of New Hampshire. “But if there is a silver lining for John McCain it is that a large majority of Republican voters are still undecided. Also, there is the example of John Kerry.” The 2004 Democratic nominee had fired his campaign manager, was so broke that he risked missing payrolls and was sagging badly in the polls just two months before he won the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.

While McCain’s money woes may be permanent (the perception of impending defeat invariably dries up fundraising), he is not yet a one-man band. His longtime aide Mark Salter, who co-authored McCain’s best-selling memoirs, is definitely sticking around. “If it’s just John McCain, me and Volkswagen,”he told me in an interview, “I’ll be working for him.” Back from an earlier staff purge is Mike Dennehy, who ran New Hampshire for McCain in 2000, and who circulated among reporters in Concord Friday handing out what looked like freshly printed McCain business cards that identified him as “senior national advisor” to the campaign.

It is tempting to view McCain’s decline as a morality play in which the hero loses everything because he sold his soul to a president named Bush. Certainly, in a tactical sense, McCain was dangerously naive in believing that his embrace by Bush insiders like Nelson would allow him to corral more than $100 million, a ludicrously inflated goal for a politician who has often battled corporate interests and sleazy lobbyists in his own party.

McCain — who just returned from a trip to the chaos of Baghdad to face the turmoil in his own campaign — has remained an unyielding supporter of the Iraq war. Asked at a press conference Saturday whether he might support the efforts of senior Republican Sens. John Warner and Richard Lugar to call for a redeployment of U.S. troops starting in January, McCain said, “From what I’ve seen, I don’t support it because it sets a timetable for withdrawal. But I’ll take a look at it.” Yet McCain’s adamant — or perhaps foolishly stubborn — support for the troop surge is less a Faustian bargain with the president than it is an extension of his prior beliefs. Back in 2000, McCain was running as a fiscally responsible campaign reformer who also hawkishly prattled about “rogue-state rollback.”

But it is the other I-word — “immigration” — that has cost McCain far more politically than Iraq.

Republican audiences can appreciate McCain saying, as he did in a Friday luncheon speech to the Rotary Club in Concord, “Democratic candidates for president will argue for the course of cutting our losses and withdrawing from the threat in the vain hope that it will not follow us here. I cannot join them in such wishful and very dangerous thinking.”

But McCain’s leadership in the unsuccessful Senate fight to pass a liberalized immigration bill — a goal that Bush shared — may prove responsible for destroying the senator’s White House dreams. As McCain himself said at a Friday press conference, “My position on immigration was obviously not helpful [with] the Republican base.” Smith also points out that the immigration issue was symbolic of McCain’s prior apostasy from GOP gospel on issues like campaign-finance reform, judicial filibusters and opposition to the administration’s anything-goes position on torture. As the pollster put it, “McCain’s immigration position reminded conservatives of why they disliked him.”

But just as the Maverick McCain of 2000 was probably not as independent from the Republican Party as many journalists (myself included) assumed, so too is McCain now something other than Bush Redux. Asked at Saturday’s press conference to differentiate himself from the president, McCain said, “I think that [Attorney General Alberto] Gonzales should not remain in office. I think we should do a far, far better job on climate change … I’m really unhappy about the failure to act in the past when it was clear that climate change was real.”

Outside the American Legion hall in Claremont was a man in a rubber McCain mask wearing a handmade placard that read, “My Campaign Spends Money Like a Drunken Sailor.” Without uttering a word, the man resolutely shook his head “no” when asked about the motivations for his mocking, but silent, protest. Since Claremont is not traditionally a mecca for street theater and performance artists, it is probably safe to assume that this stunt was sponsored by a rival campaign.

When told about the protester, McCain, who boasts an excellent sense of humor, said, “It’s pretty innovative and I admire it.” The prior day in Concord, after he repeated a self-deprecating line from the early days of his 2000 campaign, McCain had said ruefully, “I never have a new joke.”

That admission — more than immigration, more than Iraq, more than a drunken-sailor campaign budget — may prove the epitaph of the McCain campaign. About to turn 71 next month, McCain may need a new act and a new issue to remind New Hampshire voters of his maverick pedigree and his different-drummer appeal. Otherwise, it may simply be the case that John McCain will end up like an aging rock star, replaying his greatest hits to smaller and grayer crowds.