He's done: Bush once brandished September 11 like a weapon against his critics. But in one dramatic recent week, it all caught up with him. The 9-11 era is now over.

THINGS CHANGE FAST, WHEN they finally do. For more than two years, the daily reports of American casualties and car bombs in Iraq, questions about how the White House had led the country into the Iraq War, and the torture memos and "extraordinary renditions"--with their subterranean narrative of an almost wholly undebated U.S.

policy to commit torture--had bounced off the Teflon presidency of George W. Bush. The media had decided after September 11 that Bush was America's Churchill. That was the story line--and for endless and maddening months, there was no dislodging it. ...

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