George Bush is still walking, but his Presidency died today from a massive stroke.

Like Bush's soul(less)mate Ariel Sharon, White House doctors can probably keep his Presidency's heart beating, but its brain will never come out of its coma.

I learned Bush's Presidency had suffered a fatal stroke this evening from Bill O'Reilly during his segment with Dick Morris, when they announced the latest FOX poll had Bush's approval rating down to 33%. That was 3% below their previous poll - with the drop coming from a loss of Republicans, only 66% of whom still approve of Bush. When Morris and O'Reilly agreed that Bush's Republican base was hemmorhaging, I knew Bush's Presidency had suffered a fatal loss of blood.

It's hard to specify the time of death. It didn't happen last night, because Bush's Presidency was still somewhat alive when I turned on the TV this morning.

Perhaps it died during Bush's Q&A with Hu Jintao, following the meeting of "the world's two most powerful men," as the press billed it. There was Bush, sitting "Texan" with his legs apart, literally going through the motions of answering press questions. His mouth kept moving, but only because the answers kept coming in through his earpiece; clearly his mind was somewhere else entirely. Perhaps he had just realized the U.S. was no longer the most powerful nation in the world, that China's 1.2 billion hard-working, well-educated people had created a modern industrial economy that was more powerful than anything the U.S. could ever create in the post-Iraq, post-Katrina, post-NAFTA era. Perhaps he quietly realized that his Presidency was a complete and total failure, and that he would go down in history as the President whose corruption and warmongering allowed China to surpass the U.S. as the world's economic - and inevitably military and political - superpower.

Or perhaps Bush's Presidency died earlier in the day when Wenyi Wang, a New York pathologist working as a reporter for a Falung Gong newspaper, interrupted Hu's opening remarks by shouting "President Bush, stop him from killing. President Bush, stop him from persecuting the
Falun Gong." Wang's passionate - and profoundly solitary - protest exposed the whole summit as a monumental farce, a meeting of two violent dictators both pretending to be democrats, paying lip service to dissent while watching a real dissenter gagged and hustled off to jail.

Or perhaps Bush's Presidency died when Jason Leopold silently posted his latest Carl Bernstein-like Plamegate story on Truthout.org:

Grand Jury Hears Evidence Against Rove

Fitzgerald is said to have introduced more evidence Wednesday alleging Rove lied to FBI investigators and the grand jury when he was questioned about how he found out that Valerie Plame Wilson worked for the CIA and whether he shared that information with the media, attorneys close to the case said.

Fitzgerald told the grand jury that Rove lied to investigators and the prosecutor eight out of the nine times he was questioned about the leak and also tried to cover-up his role in disseminating Plame Wilson's CIA status to at least two reporters.

Additionally, an FBI investigator reread to jurors testimony from other witnesses in the case that purportedly implicates Rove in playing a role in the leak and the campaign to discredit Plame Wilson's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, whose criticism of the Bush administration's pre-war Iraq intelligence lead to his wife being unmasked as a covert CIA operative.

This report confirmed exactly what I wrote yesterday: that the significance of Rove's shedding of his policy job was to make him dispensable, so the Bush Presidency could survive his indictment. His temporary preservation of political duties was just a masquerade so his fall from the zenith of power will seem gradual, rather than instantaneous. Of course, the Bush Presidency cannot survive the indictment of Karl Rove, because Rove is literally "Bush's Brain."

Or perhaps Bush's Presidency died when Chris Matthews finally let loose after rightwing talk show host Michael Smerconish smirkingly tried to dismiss the Plame investigation as unimportant. All of a sudden, five years of accumulated anger over an endless stream of Big Lies poured out of Matthews, in a 2-minute breathless monologue that may be the definitive epitaph of the Bush Presidency.

Or perhaps Bush's Presidency died when Senator Harry Reid said publicly what everyone in Washington is saying privately: that military action against Iran is impossible. By stating the obvious, Reid exposed Bush as the Emperor Who Has No Weapons. And since the only policy of the Bush Presidency is Empire - and its only strategy is fear - a weaponless Emperor is a dead Emperor.