By Scott Wright

I am reminded almost every night during the week, sometime around 5:45 p.m., of what an idiot Fred Barnes is.

Don't recognize the name? Please allow me to introduce him. Barnes is the executive editor of The Weekly Standard, a real GOP butt-smoocher of a publication that fills pages and pages with spun facts and distorted truths in an effort to hide the gross ineptitude of the Bush administration.

These days, that takes an awful lot of paper.

Anyway, most every week night during the fake news show that is the Faux News Channel's “Special Report with Brit Hume,” Barnes also participates in a panel discussion with a couple of other conservative kooks who spend the show's final 15 minutes fielding liberal-bashing softball pop-ups from Hume, who looks and sounds more like a clean-shaven St. Bernard than a TV host.

Lately, though, with the president working so hard to counter their efforts in both print and broadcast media, the job of defending this hapless administration has turned into a full-time affair for Barnes and his boys. Let's face it, every time Bush opens his mouth he costs them a week's worth of jaw-flapping.

Over the past few weeks, the Barnes Stormers have spent a lot of late nights in their offices, sucking down coffee, fingers hovering over their keyboards, waiting for the next verbal mistake to come trickling out while praying to the Good Lord (i.e., Karl Rove) for a laryngitis epidemic to sweep through the Oval Office.

Keep talking, Dubya. You're doing the Democrats' work for them. And thank goodness, because they're too clueless to do it themselves.

I already knew Barnes' magazine made for entertaining bathroom reading, provided you plan to peruse it purely for comedic value, have a good chuckle at the drivel those knuckle-brained neo-cons spew out, then use the pages as toilet paper after you're, ah-hem … finished. His recent book, “Rebel in Chief,” which practically demands that craftsmen immediately coalesce in South Dakota and get the carving started, is a purchase I highly recommend, but only it you have a door you'd like to prop open or a wobbly table to level.

And then last week, just to show us he's still not giving up on this president despite the clear evidence that most everyone else in the country finally has, Barnes wrote and submitted a column to the Wall Street Journal, which that Republican rag gladly printed on March 19 and Barnes touted on Faux the next evening. The points he posited weren't quite as crazy as the title suggests, but “A 'Third Term' for Bush” is a load of laughs, nonetheless.

Basically, Barnes is convinced that President Bush needs to "think about a third term," which Barnes clarified as a shifting of top-level management, deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic style.

Forget bringing in some new people who haven't repeatedly perjured themselves on national television about the reasons for invading Iraq, or how American troops would be received in Baghdad, or whether or not our brave soldiers are caught in the midst of an ever-enlarging civil war. No sir, Barnes wrote, all Bush needs to do is ask Vice President Cheney to resign and take over for Don Rumsfeld as sec. of defense. Condi Rice, should become VP, Barnes believes, and Rummy should take over as chief of staff. Condi would be replaced by Joe Lieberman. Barnes also rattled off a half-dozen other changes he believes could reinvigorate the president for his final 34 months in office.

"New faces and personnel shifts are necessary," Barnes wrote. "Major policy initiatives are, too. This new but still conservative look ... and its new policy emphasis would thrill the base and perhaps independents, as well." On the other hand, Barnes admits, moves like these could make Bush look "weak and desperate."

Fred, I think the appearance of weakness and desperation became predominant for this president at least one hurricane ago, not to mention "incompetent." And your moronic idea for moving around the folks who helped him earn those monikers can't magically erase the ill will and cynicism they've all created among a majority of Americans.

Hear that, Fred? It's a toilet flushing. Someone else just finished reading your latest column.

Scott Wright is a member of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists and an award-winning member of the Society of Professional Journalists. He is a native of Cherokee County.