So now they tell us. With the Bush administration spiraling into political free fall, conservative elder statesmen have suddenly begun speaking publicly about the regime's manifest failures. Meanwhile, aides whisper to reporters that the president's losing it, pitching temper tantrums, lashing out at junior staffers, and blaming everybody in the White House for his problems except himself.

"This is not some manager at McDonald's chewing out the help," a source close to Bush told the New York Daily News. "This is the President of the United States, and it's not a pleasant sight."

No, I don't reckon it is. Naturally Bush, like Nixon before him, also gives the press a "big share" of the blame.

Backstairs gossip aside, however, the most powerful indictment of the administration's malign incompetence is coming from former insiders. Col. Larry Wilkerson was Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff throughout Bush's first term. A career soldier, he has also served as director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College. In short, he's anything but a fuzzy-minded pacifist.

Last week, Wilkerson gave a speech at the New American Foundation in Washington blaming a secretive "cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld" for seizing power from an ignorant, intellectually lazy president. They were aided by "an extremely weak national security adviser" (Condoleezza Rice), who told Bush whatever he wanted to hear to build "her intimacy with the president" and bolster her career.

It sounds like a comic strip: President Dilbert.

Except it ain't funny. To Wilkerson, the results have been catastrophic, dragging the United States into an ill-conceived war in Iraq, and making policy in so secretive and slapdash a manner that those charged with executing it had no clear idea what they were supposed to do, much less how. He calls it the kind of "decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy," hence a military and political failure.

Wilkerson stressed that his former boss, Gen. Colin Powell, evidently clinging to the shards of his own reputation, disagreed with his going public. "If something comes along that is truly serious ... like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic," he warned "you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence. ... Read in there what [the Founders] say about the necessity of the people to throw off tyranny or to throw off ineptitude."

Less stark, but even more telling were the words of Gen. Brent Scowcroft, the first president Bush's national security adviser. In an extended interview with the New Yorker, Scowcroft basically described George W. Bush's foreign policy as a bellicose, bloody failure. As one of former president George H.W. Bush's closest personal friends and long-time political allies, Scowcroft finds himself completely on the outs with his son's administration.

Apparently because of a strongly worded Wall Street Journal column Scowcroft wrote back in August 2002 warning that "an attack on Iraq at this time would seriously jeopardize, if not destroy, the global counterterrorist campaign we have undertaken," long-term friends Rumsfeld and Cheney literally quit talking to him. His one-time personal protege Condi Rice also stopped seeking his counsel.

Scowcroft sees in Iraq the realization of his worst fears. Now as then he's assumed to be speaking with the elder President Bush's tacit consent. He reiterated to the New Yorker's Jeffrey Goldberg why they decided not to invade Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War: "It would have been easy to reach Baghdad, Scowcroft said, but what then? 'At the minimum, we'd be an occupier in a hostile land. Our forces would be sniped at by guerrillas, and once we were there, how would we get out? What would be the rationale for leaving? I don't like the term 'exit strategy'-- but what do you do with Iraq once you own it? ... This is exactly where we are now. We own it. And we can't let go. We're getting sniped at. Now, will we win? I think there's a fair chance we'll win. But look at the cost.'"

Above all, Scowcroft emphasizes, the current administration's policies are anything but "conservative," in the classical sense of the term. Instead, White House neo-cons are devotees of a particularly heedless brand of radical utopianism. "This was said to be part of the war on terror, but Iraq feeds terrorism," he said.

So now what? In part because both men, like many genuine conservatives, chose not to speak plainly in October 2004 when it might have made a difference, we're stuck with these foolhardy incompetents for the foreseeable future. Except that, as Col. Wilkerson implies, functioning democracies usually find ways to change policies and rid themselves of politicians they no longer trust.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a national magazine award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at genelyons@sbcglobal.net.