This is really Rob's territory, but I couldn't help noticing that the Bobbsey Twins of the NYT political staff, Nagourney the Noble and L'il Dick Stevenson, who have between them written almost as many stories flattering Bush as Dan Bartlett told them to write, teamed up today, combining their considerable talents for a) toadying Bush and the GOP, b) dissing the Dems back-handed, and c) devising silly political narratives almost but not quite divorced from recognizable reality. In the new NYT double-bladed soap opera, they have at last, after four years of an arrogance unparalleled in American politics since the days of Hayes, noticed that the Pubs are maybe over-reaching just a tad.

The White House has described the election results as a mandate, and in his Inaugural Address on Thursday, Mr. Bush laid out his vision in sweeping terms.

But some Republicans said they were worried about overconfidence, including Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, who invoked his experience serving alongside Speaker Newt Gingrich when Republicans captured the House in 1994. "Hubris is deadly," Mr. Sanford said.

And to prove it, they quote no less an authority than--wait for it!--Gary Bauer. Now there's an expert witness.

And Gary Bauer, a conservative who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, said that while he applauded Mr. Bush's ambition in pursuing two major domestic goals - overhauling Social Security and the tax code - those issues, if handled incorrectly, could undercut Mr. Bush's long-term goal for the party.

"They could provide the president's opponents with fodder for some of the old canards, that Republicans don't want a social safety net, that they're the party of the rich, all those things," Mr. Bauer said. "It's going to take a very astute effort and massive amounts of presidential involvement to keep that from happening."

Bauer, a far-right crackpot who looks extraordinarily like a cross between an evil Hummel and Phil Gramm on heavy tranqs, is so far out that he's on the fringe of the fringe, along with Alan Keyes, Man-on-Dog Santoro, and what's-his-name from Oklahoma, the one who's so concerned about lesbians in school bathrooms that he ran a campaign based on it. He's just the sort a couple of star reporters from America's top newspaper should be going to for inside information and 'the real scoop' on the future of the Bush Administration, yes, sir.

By their sources shall ye know them.

Note: Edited to eliminate an egregious error as brought to my attention by eRobin. Too bad, tho. It was one of my better moments of scatological snark.