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.

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