The scene outside George W. Bush’s brush-growing ranch in Crawford, Texas is beginning to look like a down-sized, rural version of the Vietnam War protest clashes in some of the country’s big cities and not a bit like the united nation that Bush once championed.

Because he is stubborn, close-minded, egocentric and arrogant, the president sticks with policies that, rather than make people feel more aligned, have defaced the body politic with wide, indelible lines -- in wealth, health, education, justice, religion and, most especially, ideology. In all of those categories, the divide is filled with animus.

Bush is hardly the only American with such dispositional flaws -- his cabinet roster alone proves that -- but no one else can be held responsible for picking an interminable war that is multiplying enemies, broadening the danger of terrorism, killing and maiming military and innocents alike and draining the public treasury.

About the only upside to report from “over there” lately is that a constitution has been crafted in Iraq, but even that is fleeting good news once you consider the document’s oppressive provisions regarding women. The Sunnis are already saying no deal, and whether the draft can win popular approval in October, especially without significant violence, is for time to tell, though many are doubtful.

Poor reports just keep on coming. But, even with no reelection campaign to wage and a pliable Congress at hand, GWB refuses to back off the positions he espoused at the advent of the Iraq campaign, when the administration was bragging about the giant can of whup-ass the U.S. was going to crack open in Baghdad.

If you’d been stuck in a cave for the past two years and emerged only last week, you’d never know just how wrong the war has gone.  Bush has had ample time and occasion to acknowledge mistakes, but he didn’t in April 2004 when asked at a White House news conference, and he hasn’t since.

While not agreeable, it was at least understandable that Bush insisted on “staying the course” in the early months, even the first year, of the war. What is mind-boggling is that he is still saying that, despite increasingly negative polls and other evidence that he’s not able to bamboozle folks like he used to.

Which is the real good news: That whether drowsy, intimidated, naive or just plain doofus, Americans are beginning to wise up. By encamping outside the Crawford ranch to protest the war, Cindy Sheehan, the bereaved mother of a soldier killed in action in Iraq, merely pried open the can of worms that Bush has heretofore kicked to the curb. Now, it’s on -- replete with television ads, an impending cross-country bus tour, railing in the streets, chants, signs and counter protesters.

It’s about time more people admitted the administration’s mistakes, even if the Bushies won’t.

But, alas, there is more bad news -- namely, that this is a president and crew that don’t seem to give a damn, not even when old allies start expressing reservations.

What more and more people are conceding is that the emperor has been naked for a long time. Aside from making this war under false pretenses, he has made countless other mistakes.

He went in with too few troops. He dispatched them with inadequate equipment. He overestimated the hospitality of the Iraqi people, their ability to finance the country’s reconstruction through oil profits, and favorable reaction on the Arab street. He underestimated U.S. casualties, the cost of war and the size and ferocity of the insurgency. And he continues to ignore the public will.

All of which began with one major mistake, for which the American people are only to blame for it was they who elected him.