This morning, Republicans of the Liz Cheney-Frank Gaffney mindset, hoping for a credentialed, chest-full-of-medal general to ride to the rescue of the party in 2012, are probably disappointed. Gen. David Petraeus told NBC's David Gregory over the weekend that he wouldn't be running -- there goes the savior of Afghanistan and Iraq! (We know that one's declarations on Meet the Press don't actually always hold -- see Obama, Barack H. -- but Petraeus's was more convincing.)

News item two from POLITICO: Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the terrorist killer, has decided to take a job at -- extend your pinkie -- Yale University as a lecturer, rather than, say, sell out to a contractor or a join a right-leaning defense think tank. So, Republicans are stuck, for now, with the Huckabee-Palin-Romney nexus. Not a bad set of attributes betwixt the three, but no transcendent figure who can salvage the Bush-Cheney worldview, either.