The Bush presidency began with a Supreme Court decision disavowed by the very judges who made it, and has only gotten stranger. Now, six years in, the leader of the free world — the man who has claimed dictatorial powers unto himself, the war president, the decider — is the object of a very public salvage operation conducted by his family’s friends and retainers because they think he’s incompetent and delusional.

That’s really, truly bizarre. And so is the press response to it.

This is a man who is closing in on Saddam’s record for slaughtering Iraqis, has killed more American troops than any post-Vietnam president, has shredded the constitution and turned the treasury over to millionnaires and billionnaires and multinationals and whose combination of dull malevolence, brutal incompetency and intellectual shallowness may have led Hunter S. Thompson to blow his own head off in mourning for the incomparably more interesting, if less dangerous, Richard Nixon.

Yet the press, most of whom quiescently observed or actively enabled the president’s journey into his extraordinarily bloody parallel universe, are taking the situation about as seriously as a celebrity divorce. “Whitney’s friends beg her to dump bad boy Bobby!” “First Dad to Boy George: ‘You’re breaking my heart (and maybe the country)!’ ” The most powerful man in the world is in a free fall, hardly anyone in the country thinks he’s he’s competent to run it and yet no one even hints at the notion that we all might be better off if he did the rest of his stint in rehab rather than doing us yet more damage while we wait around for the outcome of this family drama. To the press, this is all about George Bush and not at all about the fate of the US. Iraq is all about George Bush.

Andrew Sullivan said before the mid-terms that “this is not an election anymore, it’s an intervention.” He was responding to Bush’s insistence that Rumsfeld was doing a fantastic job and would remain in office for the rest of Bush’s term, a stance we now know to have been somewhat disingenuous.

Ironically, Bush viewed the elections in the same light, only from the opposite perspective: he regarded them as an intervention by himself on behalf of voters, telling reporters afterward that “I thought when it was all said and done, the American people would understand the importance of taxes and the importance of security. But the people have spoken, and now it’s time for us to move on.” The intervention failed, one mourns, life goes on; Bush has no intention of spending his remaining years in office enabling the electorate’s infirmities, while the electorate has no remaining recourse to rein in his.

Meanwhile, we’re subjected to breathless biographies of Poppy’s fixers. Did you know that James Baker hunts wild turkeys, and his ability to remain motionless in the bushes for hours at time helped him wait for just the right moment to spring the Iraq Study Group on the younger Bush? Seriously.

Baker says he drops in on President Bush from time to time to “chew the fat.” But he insists he has not discussed the work of the Iraq Study Group. “Timing is everything for Baker,” says [a] former aide, and the timing was not right until Bush could see the public registering its dissatisfaction at the polls. Baker is an avid hunter of wild turkeys, a sport that requires endless patience. “You can wait all day and you only get one shot,” says the former aide, who marvels at Baker’s ability to sit for hours in the cold or heat, silent but watchful. “When the time comes, and it’s only a split second, he doesn’t hesitate to pull the trigger,” says this aide.

Holy crap. No doubt we’re all united in hoping Baker succeeds at bagging the biggest turkey of his career — at least this one isn’t going anywhere fast — but is it possible to trivialize the situation any more than that? You couldn’t ask for a better illustration of a press in desperate need of an intervention themselves, but a world in which Keith Olbermann is the lone stentorian voice of reason is clear enough evidence that that ain’t gonna happen before the revolution comes.

It’s a shame Thompson didn’t hang on a bit longer. He might have enjoyed these contrasting magazine covers from June 4, 1973 and November 20, 2006, respectively.

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