It's a new day in America. The sun is up and shining, if a bit stridently in some portions of the union, and the entire stock market is on methamphetamine again.

And somewhere in America, someone else has turned on Bud Selig. As a matter of sheer popularity and trust, he now ranks slightly below having a new prison erected in your neighborhood and just ahead of a cholera epidemic.

	Bud Selig, the former car salesman, has lost his credibility.

At this point, we don't need to ask how, we just need to marvel at the process. In the past week alone, even after the robust stench of the All-Star Game has finally drifted into history, he is now a co-defendant in a lawsuit aimed at the worst of the 30 major-league owners, Fast Jeffy Loria, and two other owners, Cleveland's Larry Dolan and New York's Geo. P. Steinbrenner, have turned on each other in public.

Those would be three of the owners who are solidly united and utterly indivisible.

We have now advanced beyond the point where he had available dupes in the media to express his latest nonsensical assertion. His last attempt, the Great Missed Payroll Catastrophe, resulted in five national baseball writers wearing full Spanish omelets across their kissers, two owners (Tampa Bay's Vince Naimoli and Detroit's Mike "The Red Wing" Ilitch) contradicting Bud directly, and even one of his chief lieutenants, Bob DuPuy, said in so many words that Bud was talking through his hat.

Again.

You see, among Bud's miscalculations since becoming the commissioner of the offices leased by Major League Baseball is the idea that playing the role of nice guy and an earnest if underclubbed operator would make his word golden in the halls of the mighty and the press rooms of the inky.

It worked, too, for the longest time. Hell, even now, more people refer to him as Bud than as Selig.

But he's spent it all, every last cent of it. There is no single figure not on MLB's considerable payroll who is buying what Bud is selling any more. The players union didn't even try to make Selig the issue of these negotiations. Bud did it to himself, harming his position every time he spoke.

Even those people who could overlook the ridiculous conflicts of interest in him taking the job to begin with could not endure his contraction gaffe, his visit to Congress gaffe, his All-Star gaffe (which was not particularly of his making but which in his unerring eye for the worst possible scenario he made his own), and now the payroll gaffe.

His constituencies now are:
1. Those who never liked him;
2. Those who liked him but thought he wasn't up to the job;
3. Those who now are sure he isn't up to the job; 4. Those whose trust he has mislaid with his string of implausible and even unbelievable tales of doom, and; 5. Those who understand that being the commissioner of baseball is like being the king of Albania, for all the effect it has on baseball, or for that matter Albania.

Even this dissertation is another quick sermon for the choir.

That it could have been foreseen months and even years ago is of no consequence now. Every time Bud stood up to help his cause, he harmed it, and now he is the one thing he always wanted to avoid being -- the issue.

And worse for him, he is the issue without an advocate. His skill at portraying himself as Regular Bud is now irrelevant, because he also portrayed himself as Dissembling Bud. He said there'd be 28 teams, and there are 30. He said two teams wouldn't pay their players, and everyone is up to date on their checks. He said baseball needed comprehensive realignment and got the Brewers a few extra dates with the Cubs. He said that the All-Star Game ... well, let's never mind that.

Even the extensive and largely sympathetic profile of him in Sports Illustrated recently lost its potential effect before the next issue hit the stands. He's the man with the Kick-Me sign on his suit coat, and it isn't coming off.

Could he have saved himself without the payroll story and the lawsuit and the Dolan-Steinbrenner spit-fest? Probably not. He had been painted into such a tight corner that the mice were elbowing him out of the way.

This wasn't the plan when he told those writers that two teams might not make payroll. He used them to advance his agenda without providing either advance details or subsequent results -- rather a profound testimonial of his commissionership, when you think of it.

Why, if the job had any importance in the modern-day baseball structure, you'd be more outraged. But it doesn't, and perhaps it never did. Bud played a bad hand badly, and you can decide for yourselves how he should be dealt with for that.

For now, though ... well, we suspect that he'll be laying very low for awhile. DuPuy and Rob Manfred and Sandy Alderson will have to be the front men now, and the owners may have to be re-gagged to avoid more overt truth-telling by both Dolan and Steinbrenner. But this much is true -- baseball's traditional gambit of trying to win the hearts and minds of the fans by decrying the players they promote in less stressful times has failed, and Bud Selig, who in pre-commissioner times was the struggling small-market owner from Central Casting, has nothing left to say, and nobody left to hear it.

Ray Ratto is a columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to ESPN.com