See other Dead Constitution Articles
Title: Too Bad (How Bush destroyed the Rs)
Source:
WSJ
URL Source: http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/
Published: Jun 1, 2007
Author: Peggy Noonan
Post Date: 2007-06-01 07:57:48 by Jethro Tull
Keywords: None
Views: 255
Comments: 21
PEGGY NOONAN What political conservatives and on-the-ground Republicans must understand at this point is that they are not breaking with the White House on immigration. They are not resisting, fighting and thereby setting down a historical marker--"At this point the break became final." That's not what's happening. What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them. What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition. This is sad, and it holds implications not only for one political party but for the American future. The White House doesn't need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don't even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place. For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don't like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don't like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad. But on immigration it has changed from "Too bad" to "You're bad." The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic--they "don't want to do what's right for America." His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, "We're gonna tell the bigots to shut up." On Fox last weekend he vowed to "push back." Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want "mass deportation." Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are "anti-immigrant" and suggested they suffer from "rage" and "national chauvinism." Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of opponents who are concerned citizens? And often, though not exclusively, concerned conservatives? It is odd, but it is of a piece with, or a variation on, the "Too bad" governing style. And it is one that has, day by day for at least the past three years, been tearing apart the conservative movement. I suspect the White House and its allies have turned to name calling because they're defensive, and they're defensive because they know they have produced a big and indecipherable mess of a bill--one that is literally bigger than the Bible, though as someone noted last week, at least we actually had a few years to read the Bible. The White House and its supporters seem to be marshalling not facts but only sentiments, and self-aggrandizing ones at that. They make a call to emotions--this is, always and on every issue, the administration's default position--but not, I think, to seriously influence the debate. They are trying to lay down markers for history. Having lost the support of most of the country, they are looking to another horizon. The story they would like written in the future is this: Faced with the gathering forces of ethnocentric darkness, a hardy and heroic crew stood firm and held high a candle in the wind. It will make a good chapter. Would that it were true! If they'd really wanted to help, as opposed to braying about their own wonderfulness, they would have created not one big bill but a series of smaller bills, each of which would do one big clear thing, the first being to close the border. Once that was done--actually and believably done--the country could relax in the knowledge that the situation was finally not day by day getting worse. They could feel some confidence. And in that confidence real progress could begin. The beginning of my own sense of separation from the Bush administration came in January 2005, when the president declared that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the world, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation. This was at once so utopian and so aggressive that it shocked me. For others the beginning of distance might have been Katrina and the incompetence it revealed, or the depth of the mishandling and misjudgments of Iraq. One of the things I have come to think the past few years is that the Bushes, father and son, though different in many ways, are great wasters of political inheritance. They throw it away as if they'd earned it and could do with it what they liked. Bush senior inherited a vibrant country and a party at peace with itself. He won the leadership of a party that had finally, at great cost, by 1980, fought itself through to unity and come together on shared principles. Mr. Bush won in 1988 by saying he would govern as Reagan had. Yet he did not understand he'd been elected to Reagan's third term. He thought he'd been elected because they liked him. And so he raised taxes, sundered a hard-won coalition, and found himself shocked to lose his party the presidency, and for eight long and consequential years. He had many virtues, but he wasted his inheritance. Bush the younger came forward, presented himself as a conservative, garnered all the frustrated hopes of his party, turned them into victory, and not nine months later was handed a historical trauma that left his country rallied around him, lifting him, and his party bonded to him. He was disciplined and often daring, but in time he sundered the party that rallied to him, and broke his coalition into pieces. He threw away his inheritance. I do not understand such squandering. Now conservatives and Republicans are going to have to win back their party. They are going to have to break from those who have already broken from them. This will require courage, serious thinking and an ability to do what psychologists used to call letting go. This will be painful, but it's time. It's more than time. Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father" (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Fridays on >http://OpinionJournal.com. Poster Comment: I've always enjoyed Peggy Noonan and in this article she expresses what we all know to be true; Jorge Bush is an elitist who posed as a conservative, only to sell them out. I'm glad he has destroyed the GOP along with the lemmings who held their banner.
Too Bad
President Bush has torn the conservative coalition asunder.
Friday, June 1, 2007 12:00 a.m. EDT 
What I came in time to believe is that the great shortcoming of this White House, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom. Just wisdom--a sense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not all there is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that are true of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes a loyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don't need hacks.
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 20.
#11. To: Jethro Tull (#0)
Must suck to be you, Peggy. Gee, Bush is calling you a traitor? Did you ever say one word in defense of those who opposed the war from the beginning and were called traitors? I'll answer that for you, Peggy. No, you didn't. How about those who opposed eavesdropping on citizens without a warrant? Crickets chirping. How about stupid taunting of fairly dangerous regimes for no benefit? Nope. Nada. I'm in the middle of slogging through The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich again (first time since college) and I've been highlighting all the little tricks the Bushies picked up from the Mad Genius. Lotta highlighting going on. But because he was on your team, Peggy, you overlooked everything. Is this classic "first they came for the Jews, but I wasn't Jewish, then they came for the Socialists but I wasn't a Socialist" mindset or WHAT? PS - If you have a few days available, Shirer's book takes on a whole new level of meaning, if you last read it a couple of decades ago. The Bushies look at conservatives and moderate Republicans the same way Hitler looked at Social Democrats and the Nationalist Party, as useful idiots. And they look at the Democrats the same way Hitler looked at the Communists and Socialists, as candidates for liquidation. Bush's stand on immigration is much like Hitler's change of mind from nationalizing key heavy industries to providing them with slave labor -- Bush, like Hitler did, gets all his funding from big business. And his curious rant yesterday about the environment and global warming is exactly what his big business donors ordered -- cut off any international treaty by preempting it with a program we can control to our benefit. It's hilarious that a guy who a year ago was denying global warming existed and who let oil industry lobbyists censor scientific papers from the EPA is suddenly going all Al Gore on us. He smells MONEY.
John Lukacs, in his book on the Hitler of history, expressed the fear that, if Western civilization ever reached a period of crisis, Hitler would be regarded as the sort of hard man the circumstances required. Obviously, our rulers have not gone public with any such view, but their methods so much recall his that one wonders if that isn't what they secretly believe.
The Germans looked at Hitler exactly that way. And Hitler had an ORGASM when the great depression hit in 1929. It was even worse than in the U.S., and he told his buddies, this is the best thing that could have happened to us. I said early on, when Bush got elected, that his goal was to set the economy on fire and then put himself forward as the savior. He's done it a bit more subtly than I expected, mainly because he got 911 as an even more attractive strategy for fear-mongering. But he's definitely hammered the middle class, to the benefit of his donors. Corporate America was in a panic during the 90s that their middle managers had too much personal power, could find a better job in 20 seconds, and therefore were squeezing profits. The Bush administration ended all of that. It's interesting that Hitler spent so much time making sure everything he did was "constitutional," and Germany had a very strong constitution, at least on paper. He just found ways to destroy the spirit of the constitution while sticking to the letter of it. You have to give him credit. He was a very clever guy. And so are Rove, Cheney, et al.
Hitler may have seized power in a way that seemed constitutional (things like the intimidation used to get the Reichstag to adopt the Enabling Law and the revolutionary force used to overthrow Land governments like that of Bavaria make that constitutionality very doubtful,) but a great deal of the actions of him and his government were nevertheless illegal under German law, such as it was under his rule. As Archbishop Galen pointed out in his sermon against the euthanasia program, that program was illegal, because the law against murder remained in force.
#21. To: aristeides (#20)
Sort of puts the whole Bush administration into a two-word phrase.
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#14. To: Mekons4 (#11)
#17. To: aristeides (#14)
John Lukacs, in his book on the Hitler of history, expressed the fear that, if Western civilization ever reached a period of crisis, Hitler would be regarded as the sort of hard man the circumstances required. Obviously, our rulers have not gone public with any such view, but their methods so much recall his that one wonders if that isn't what they secretly believe.
#20. To: Mekons4 (#17)
Replies to Comment # 20. "constitutionally questionable"
End Trace Mode for Comment # 20.