Instead of shoring up the conservative base, Bush’s bland rhetoric and ticky-tacky domestic initiatives — more switchgrass, less malaria — only confirmed conservatives’ ever-growing concern: Far from an heir to the legacy of Ronald Reagan, the president has become just another free-spending, big-government politician.

The governor who wooed conservatives in 2000 became a president who increased federal education spending, signed a pork-laden 2002 farm bill, and passed the largest new entitlement since the days of Lyndon Johnson, the Medicare prescription drug bill. After becoming a champion of leave-us-alone libertarians, he went on to authorize a vast expansion of executive power with the Patriot Act and warrantless wiretapping of Americans. And after promising to appoint another Supreme Court justice like Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas, he nominated his own ideologically unknown lawyer, Harriet Miers, to the job.

As Viguerie put it, “When there are no microphones around, when it is just us there, people are really, really ticked and frustrated.” With the 2006 elections just over the horizon and the 2008 presidential race already underway, activists like Viguerie are no longer content to just sit by and shake their pompoms.

A day after the speech, conservative pundits George Will, Peggy Noonan and Robert Novak had all panned Bush’s performance in syndicated columns. The Wall Street Journal editorial page compared Bush’s new agenda to — gasp! — “Clintonian ‘triangulation.’” The Web site of the socially conservative Family Research Council criticized the White House’s lack of resolve on moral issues, noting Bush’s passing reference to keywords like “values,” “family” and “life.” “Trust is not unconditional,” Tony Perkins, the group’s leader, warned GOP leaders in a videotaped message posted online. Even Phyllis Schlafly, the grand dame of the right-wing Eagle Forum, penned a biting article on the president’s centrist immigration proposals. “Bush is alienating his political base,” she declared, “and creating what one RNC [Republican National Committee] member calls an ‘enthusiasm deficit.’”

Listen carefully and one can hear the slap of a new gauntlet being thrown down at the feet of the president and the GOP leaders in congress: Change course or face a depleted, if not disastrous, conservative turnout in the 2006 midterm elections. “Winning can be overrated sometimes,” explained Viguerie, who began his career comfortably on the right-wing fringes of the Republican Party. “There have been times when we have advanced the cause in a major way when we lose.”

No one yet knows how many conservatives will follow through with these threats. But the feeling among the grass roots may be more unsettled than at any point since 1998. “There is a sort of universal disquiet,” explains David Keene, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, who will welcome the Conservative Political Action Conference, the largest annual gathering of right-wing activists, to Washington on Thursday. “But it’s unclear whether it’s serious enough to result in the sort of depression that would elect a bunch of Democrats in 2006.”

To counteract the rumblings, activists with the closest ties to the White House have launched a counteroffensive to rally the troops back to the president’s side. In a recent article in the American Spectator, Grover Norquist, a conservative activist close to Bush advisor Karl Rove, argued the Republican Party was beginning to turn a corner after a disastrous end to 2005. “A rational conservative movement would be moderately happy,” Norquist says, pointing to the regular rounds of tax cuts, the 2003 partial birth abortion ban and the two recent appointments to the Supreme Court. “Do I have everything I want? No. But that was a problem that started when I was 2.”

Instead, he blamed the current anger over the president’s weak-kneed agenda on moderate Republicans in Congress. “The response to being 20 votes short of actual control in the House and another five to seven seats in the Senate is to get more conservatives elected,” he said. “Not to whine.”

Until now, conservative Republicans have been Bush’s most loyal acolytes. In the last year, overall voter approval of Bush fell from about 50 percent to 38 percent, according to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Over the same period, however, conservative Republican support dropped only half as many points, from 94 percent to 88 percent. “Bush has less loyalty across the board,” explained Andrew Kohut, the director of the Pew Center. “But I would be more concerned about the moderate Republicans or the non-conservative Republicans.” According to Pew’s estimates, hardcore social and economic conservatives make up about 20 percent of the American voting public and about 40 percent of Bush’s 2004 ballot total.

But times may be a-changin’, say several conservative leaders. With three years left of his administration, Bush’s work as a tax-cutter and judge-picker is mostly done. Like the rest of Washington, conservatives are beginning to look beyond Bush to the 2008 election, where the moderate John McCain, the conservative movement’s longtime nemesis, is poised to win the Republican presidential nomination. “The first race is going to be to decide who is going to take on John McCain,” said Keene. “If the first race is decided late, John McCain will be the nominee.” While names pop up — like Virginia Sen. George Allen, Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford — the conservative leaders have yet to find any consensus on a single nominee. “There is certainly a need for a conservative candidate,” explained Schlafly. “And conservatives do not know who that person is.”

According to one theory being circulated, a major GOP defeat in 2006 could actually help McCain’s GOP challenger by forcing the party to shift right as it heads into the 2008 races. As Viguerie stressed, past Republican electoral defeats had repeatedly led to conservative victories. “If Ford had been elected in ’76, no way Ronald Reagan would have been elected president in 1980,” explained Viguerie, who stopped short of endorsing a GOP defeat. “And for sure, if [George H.W.] Bush had been elected in ’92, no way you would have a Republican Congress in 1994.”

In the meantime, conservatives have upped their rhetorical attacks on the White House. Schlafly points to a little-noticed donnybrook that took place on Jan. 19 at the annual meeting of the Republican National Committee in Washington. Behind closed doors, the White House sent in Vice President Dick Cheney and Republican Party chairman Ken Mehlman to prevent a debate over Bush’s guest worker program, a major sore spot for many seal-the-border conservatives. Schlafly says conservatives will not stand for that kind of treatment. “The conservative Republicans are a grass-roots movement,” she said, “and they don’t want to be a Bush party.”

In fact, the conservative pressure on the White House will only intensify in the coming months. At the end of February, Bruce Bartlett, a conservative who worked in the Reagan White House, will release a widely anticipated book, “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.” Bartlett describes Bush’s control of the party as tenuous. “Conservative discontent remains strong and is simmering very slightly below the surface,” he wrote Salon in an e-mail. “At some point, a serious Republican candidate for 2008 is going to recognize that running against Bush may be the ticket to the nomination.”

That is just the thing that the conservative movement’s founding leaders hope will happen. For Viguerie, Schlafly and other supporters of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, Bush is little more than a wobbly steppingstone in the decades-long conservative revolt against the liberal status quo. As a president, Bush long ago betrayed the movement’s core values. “It seems to me that early on Bush and Rove decided on a one-word strategy to govern and for reelection in 2004. That one-word strategy was ‘bribery,’” said Viguerie, whose next book, provisionally titled “The Betrayal of Conservatives,” is due out this summer. “You got the votes, we got the money. Let’s talk.”

“I feel like the conservatives almost have to be like the Jews from the Old Testament, who had to wander 40 years until that generation passed from the scene,” he continued. “We have to have new leaders. Hopefully the Lord won’t make us wait 40 years.”

Blustery rhetoric like this is nothing new for political activists on the left and the right. Ideological purists often find themselves shunted aside once their party is faced with the task of governing. But at a time when the nation is so deeply polarized and so evenly divided, the slightest erosion of the president’s political base could have exponential effects. Democrats in Congress might yet live to see the day when they can thank activists like Viguerie for sticking to their guns.

But while Bachmann may be even crazier than Palin on questions of public policy, she seems to manage to hold things together as a candidate. She can answer questions from the news media. She is putting together a professional campaign rather than relying on amateur advisors. She takes care to point out frequently that she is a former tax lawyer, and she does not engage in Palin’s visceral anti-intellectualism, giving herself the aura of a plausible president, at least in the minds of Republican voters. Bachmann may well combine Palin’s most powerful traits without her crippling organizational failures.

Sometimes she skillfully answers questions from the press, and sometimes she has meltdowns. She can also do anti-intellectualism with the best of them — she got into politics in part in order to attack educational standards and push “Intelligent Design” — and while she is not quite as organizationally challenged as Palin, she has had her problems.

In fact, Andy Barr just wrote about those issues in February, when Bachmann’s spokesman and district director both left their jobs:

But even without any fireworks, the two exits add to a long a long line of recently departed Bachmann aides, as her office has had an extremely high turnover rate since the Minnesota Republican was first elected to Congress in 2006.

Bachmann has had four chiefs of staff leave since coming to Congress — Rich Dunn, Ron Carey, Michelle Marston and Brooks Kochvar. The Minnesota firebrand also had her campaign finance director Zandra Wolcott leave during the middle of her reelection campaign last year.

I think Barr may have left out one of her chiefs of staff or two? As an unnamed “conservative Republican House member” told Politico when Marston quit for unknown reasons in 2009: “When your captain’s crazy, it’s time to find a new ship.” (Her current chief of staff is taking a “leave of absence” in order to work on her presidential campaign.)

So, how seriously should we be taking Bachmann? Isn’t it more or less appropriate to continue treating her as a very popular sideshow? (And if she ran for real would she really want people dragging out stories like the time she claimed lesbians kidnapped her and trapped her in a bathroom?)

The fact that she has managed to convince 50% of suburban voters in a Republican district to send her to Washington does not actually make her more a more credible candidate than Herman Cain, who has at least run a major industry lobbying organization.

I agree Jennifer Rubin on one thing: The similarities between Bachmann and Sarah Palin are mainly superficial; they’re both attractive ultra-conservative women who routinely say stupid, extreme things on television. I am pretty sure Michele Bachmann is smarter than Sarah Palin. I also think she more sincerely believes the sort of rube-pleasing bullshit Palin cranks out primarily for attention. Bachmann is relentless, while Palin is erratic. Palin actually governed for a while, before giving it up for celebrity. Bachmann has never legislatively done anything, at all. Palin seems driven primarily by resentment, paranoia, and profit, whereas I imagine Bachmann probably thinks she’s doing the Lord’s work. She really would like to impose some sort of libertarian theocracy, where the government has no authority to regulate anything beyond the stoning of abortionists and homosexuals.

So I dunno. She might do OK in Iowa but the wheels would come off that campaign very shortly afterward.

When Minneapolis’ City Pages first reported [6] on Bachmann’s relationship with Markell in 2005, the then-state senator denied any knowledge of Olive Tree Ministries. However, Markell tells Mother Jones that she’s known Bachmann off and on for 35 years, and says she spoke about Israel at Bachmann’s church in the late 1970s. “My hunch is that they misquoted her,” Markell says. “She’s been at my conference. Why she would have said [otherwise], I don’t know.”

And boy, according to Olive Tree Ministries, we live in very interesting times:

So Bachmann stands with Israel because she needs the Jews to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem so that Christ can return, rapture the Christians up to Heaven, convince the Jews to worship him during the Tribulations, and then rule over the Earth from Israel for 1,000 years. (This is what these people believe, very, very literally.)

But wait! Before all that happens the antichrist needs to show up and convince everyone he’s the Messiah! But who could that end up being? Some people say Obama, but Bachmann’s church fingered a different suspect.

Before Bachmann was a Tea Party-affiliated Ron Paul fan obsessed with “liberty,” remember, she was a traditional religious right fanatic with a degree from Oral Roberts University, who got into politics through antiabortion activism and who became famous for a school board run during which she and her allies supported teaching creationism in government-funded charter schools. (She is a home-schooling activist, which made a school board run kind of weird, but she was outraged at the idea of state standards forcing her to teach her children about anything other than Austrian economics and eschatology.)

When Bachmann was running for Congress in 2006, her official website bio said she was a member of the Salem Evangelical Lutheran Church of Stillwater, which belongs to the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. WELS is one of the very conservative “confessional” Lutheran denominations that maintains that the “antichrist” is the pope. You know, the leader of the Catholic Church? That pope. WELS confirms that they still “identify this ‘Antichrist’ with the Papacy,” in case you’re curious.

Bachmann has denied that her church believes this, but … it is definitely one of the fundamental doctrines of her church, according to her Synod’s doctrinal statements. I mean, if Bachmann doesn’t believe it, there are some very nice mainline Lutheran denominations to choose from, though they might be a bit squishy on biblical literalism and hatred of homosexuals.

In 2008, as I’m sure you remember, Michele Bachmann repeatedly called Barack Obama “anti-American” because of his “mentor,” the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. And here, via Dumb Bachmann, is Bachmann’s good friend and minister Bradlee Dean calling the pope “that devil disguised as a minister of righteousness.”

It seems more than fair to ask whether Michele Bachmann is anti-Catholic, and whether, should she be elected president, she’d purposefully sabotage a Middle East peace deal in order to bring about the Second Coming. Or whether she’d launch some sort of tactical strike against Vatican City. I think she would. Look who she pals around with!

Trump’s is not the first, and will not be the last political book that was rendered ridiculous or blatantly incorrect before or very shortly after its release. It’s not even the only one released this year! Here are some of our favorite sad, wrong books:

“Where’s the Birth Certificate?” by Jerome Corsi, 2011

Oh, there it is! Sorry, Jerome Corsi, but you couldn’t have realized that your entirely pointless search for the “long-form” birth certificate would end nearly a month before your book’s publication.

Corsi has a lot of other arguments against the president’s constitutional eligibility (he’s British!), but there’s no getting around the fact that the title of the book has been rather definitively answered.

“Condi vs. Hillary” by Dick Morris, 2005

Shameless Republican P.R. guru Jim Wilkinson, inventor of the entirely false Jessica Lynch story, went to work for Condoleezza Rice when Rice took over at the State Department. He did his usual effective if slightly heavy-handed image management. The lowlight was probably when he literally slipped a note to Washington Times editorial page editor Tony Blankley asking if Rice planned to run for president, a thought that had not yet occurred to anyone, because Rice had never run for anything.

While the Beltway press entertained the notion, because it was fun to play pretend, only one man wrote a book about how Condi must run for president, because she and only she could beat Hillary Clinton, who was a 100 percent lock to win the Democratic nomination. That man: Dick Morris, who is wrong so often about so many things that it’s hardly worth pointing it out anymore, except for the fact that this book is such an amazing time capsule of a bizarre time in American politics.

Rice never expressed any interest whatsoever in running, making this book irrelevant before it was ever written.

“The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008,” by Mark Halperin and John F. Harris, 2006

Just go back and read this fawning tribute to the influence and genius of Matt Drudge that ABC News published to promote this book upon its publication. “The Way to Win” posited that a campaign based around sucking up to Drudge and emulating Karl Rove in every way was the key to victory in 2008. A month after this lengthy tribute to his infallible genius came out, Rove suffered the humiliation of the 2006 midterms.

“The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again,” by Peter Beinart, 2006

Peter Beinart is the former editor of the New Republic, and under his leadership, that magazine really, really loved war, a lot. (He is also responsible for the New Republic endorsing Joe Lieberman in 2004, which even sometime owner and all-time nutjob Marty Peretz thought was a bit odd.) Beinart went all-in on the Iraq War, and his magazine spent much more time and energy berating antiwar liberals than it did questioning the Bush administration’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. After John Kerry lost in 2004, Beinart was pretty sure it was the fault of squishy antiwar Democrats, and Michael Moore.

And so he expanded his essay on the subject of how antiwar liberals are as bad as Communists, plus they love terrorism, into a book, about how Democrats must once again embrace complete and total war, everywhere, like they did in the good old days of the Cold War.

Of course, on the way to filling out his Very Important Foreign Policy book, the Iraq War got worse and worse, and the extent of the Bush administration’s malfeasance became clearer and clearer, so Beinart is a bit apologetic about having been dead wrong about the defining foreign policy issue of his time as a serious and respected political thinker. (He is currently a “senior fellow” at the Council on Foreign Relations.)

Being antiwar helped the Democrats generally in the 2006 elections and a candidate who spoke out against Iraq from the very beginning ended up actually winning the presidency in 2008. (Whereupon he began acting a bit Beinartian, so maybe Peter got the last laugh, as the Democrats who take “tough stands” against pinkos usually do.)

Honorable Mention, Finance and Economics division:

“Dow 36,000,” by James K. Glassman and Kevin A. Hassett, 2000.

“The Bush Boom: How a Misunderestimated President Fixed a Broken Economy,” by Jerry Bowyer (foreword by Larry Kudlow), 2003.

“America has won the war on terror,” Bush shouts. “Tonight, I am proud to say, Osama bin Laden is in hell.” The president explains that the terrorist mastermind was “taken out” by American forces in Afghanistan, along with the entire senior leadership of al-Qaida. Crowds spontaneously gather in celebration outside the White House, with handmade signs (“THESE COLORS DON’T RUN,” “LET’S ROLL”) in plain view of cable news cameras set up beforehand according to a White House communications office suggestion. A professional-quality sound system blares Lee Greenwood. Then, fireworks.

Thrilling night-vision footage of a daring firefight in a labyrinthine cave is immediately provided to news channels. All of them air it, without noting that the video was edited by the Pentagon prior to release, and its contents unconfirmed.

In background briefings to national security journalists, the Pentagon credits the kill to one lone unnamed but slightly Schwarzeneggerian special forces officer acting on intelligence procured by one lone unnamed but remarkably Jack Bauer-like CIA officer who personally “interrogated” the al-Qaida courier until he revealed bin Laden’s whereabouts.

One senior administration official speaking on deep background reveals the courier was interrogated instead of monitored and trailed because of credible intelligence indicating an imminent attack — possibly biological or nuclear — on an unknown American landmark.

Files on bin Laden’s captured cellphone reveal him to have been in constant communication with al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to a Pentagon source.

Editorial writers at most major U.S. newspaper proclaim a second moment of harmony to rival the first one directly after 9/11. Once again, there are no Republicans and Democrats, just Americans.

The following day, the president flies to New York where he gleefully models a profane anti-Osama T-shirt sold by a ground zero-area vendor. The photo makes the front page of the New York Post under the headline “LAST LAUGH.” Bush proclaims a “National Day of Celebration” and gives everyone the following Monday off from work.

The Guardian notes that British Ministry of Defense officials cannot confirm any details of the Pentagon’s story.

Newsweek magazine puts Donald Rumsfeld on the cover, naming him “Washington’s King of the Comeback.” (Time goes with a write-around feature on the American Commando.) To combat Rumsfeld’s sudden popular resurgence, Condoleezza Rice aide Jim Wilkinson instructs Washington Times editorial page editor Tony Blankley to ask Secretary Rice whether the death of bin Laden makes her more likely to mount a presidential run in 2008. Rice’s demurrals do nothing to end gleeful cable news speculation that she’ll run against Hillary (and win) in 2008. Chris Matthews can barely contain himself.

Mainstream journalists join a chorus of Republicans and right-wing commentators in jeering and mocking liberals casting doubt on the official story of bin Laden’s death. Those with reservations, based on actual evidence, about the official story are compared to Truthers by Richard Cohen, Joe Klein, Michelle Malkin, Andrew Sullivan, Mickey Kaus and just about everyone else.

A month later, a BBC investigation reveals that bin Laden’s death cannot be confirmed and the entire story as presented to the American media was most likely false. The American press, reluctant to “politicize” the death of bin Laden in the face of overwhelming national support for the president, is very cautious in reporting “new information” out of Afghanistan.

Well after the 2006 midterm elections, leaked memos prove that high-ranking U.S. military commanders warned the White House that the story that OBL had died in a U.S. raid was false and the rumors of his death elsewhere were still unconfirmable.

The next year, a book reveals that the crowd outside the White House the day of the announcement was made up mostly of off-duty Republican congressional aides, lobbyists and political consultants. (None of the firefighters present were from New York.)

In 2007, the Washington Post’s ombudsman and managing editor agree that printing the inaccurate story provided to them by administration officials was the right thing to do. “Each piece had multiple, credible sources,” the M.E. explains, naming none of them.

“We may never know the full truth about the ‘death’ of Osama bin Laden,” Time magazine writes shortly after a Senate committee investigation into the administration’s exaggerations and falsehoods is unable to issue a final report due to a partisan split. While “it seems certain that media accounts of the mission were distorted,” the liberal bloggers and foreign news outlets that exposed the distortions are almost certainly “guilty of exaggeration themselves,” with their claims that the Pentagon “manipulated information.”

President Bush wins a third term.

While working for Mr. DeLay, Loper took a trip to the Marianas Islands with Michael Scanlon, super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s co-conspirator. They went to the Marianas Islands to deliver favor money to two legislators in order to bribe them into switching their votes to support an Abramoff ally in his campaign to become speaker of the House. They switched their votes, Abramoff’s buddy got the job, and Abramoff was rehired and “resumed lobbying for the continuation of abusive labor practices in the islands.”

This guy, a bagman for a corrupt lobbyist before he became a corrupt lobbyist himself, is now in charge of policy, for the speaker.