Are the wheels coming off?

What the hell is going on? First, Bush gets hammered at the debate. Then, over the weekend, the administration gets sandbagged when the NY Times publishes an expose on the fuel rods and Condi's all over the sunday talk shows spinning like mad. Colin once again regrets his using bad intelligence. Rumsfeld comes out yesterday and admits that not only was the WMD evidence faulty, but there was apparently no connection between Saddam and 9-11 (he later said he was "misinterpreted," even though he was quoted word-for-word). Paul Bremer then says we didn't have enough troops in Iraq from the start, and that it's one of the reasons things have not gone as well as everyone thought they would.

Wow. Where is the famous "message discipline" of the Bush administration?

Now if that's not enough, some very important economic data is coming out this week and what's been released so far has not been pretty for the GOP. MSNBC reports that job lay-offs were at an eight-month high for September, and only 16,000 new job openings were announced last month, compared to 132,000 for August. This data suggests that the jobs report, slated to come out Friday, may be far below the predicted number of 148,000 (August saw 144,000 jobs added). If so, Bush will be cut off at the knees heading into the town-hall debate that night in St. Louis.

Oh, and the price of oil continues to climb - $51 per barrell and rising. Growth in the service sector of the economy declined.

October is quickly becoming a very scary month for the Bush campaign.