Robert Novak’s pummeling of the administration is so brutal, it should have been called in the early rounds. An excerpt:

The I-word (incompetence) is also used by Republicans in describing the Bush administration generally. Several of them I talked to cited a trifecta of incompetence: the Walter Reed hospital scandal, the FBI’s misuse of the USA Patriot Act and the U.S. attorneys firing fiasco. “We always have claimed that we were the party of better management,” one House leader told me. “How can we claim that anymore?”
The reconstruction of the Bush administration after the president’s reelection in 2004, though a year late, clearly improved his team. Yet the addition of extraordinary public servants Josh Bolten, Tony Snow and Rob Portman has not changed the image of incompetence.
A few Republicans blame incessant attacks from the new Democratic majority in Congress for that image. Many more say today’s problems in the administration derive from the continuing impact of yesterday’s mistakes. The answer that is not entertained by the president’s most severe GOP critics, even when not speaking for quotation, is that this is just the governing style of George W. Bush and will not change while he is in the Oval Office.