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| 5/23 |
| 2007/6/1-5 [Politics/Domestic/Election, Politics/Domestic/President/Bush] UID:46830 Activity:moderate |
6/1 Why does Peggy Noonan hate America?
http://urltea.com/oiv (opinionjournal.com)
\_ BECAUSE CONSERVATISM IS ALWAYS GOOD AND IF PEOPLE WHO CALL
THEMSELVES CONSERVATIVES FAIL THEN THATS BECAUSE THEY WERE
NEVER REALLY CONSERVATIVES IN THE FIRST PLACE!!!11!
\_ Nothing more than an attempt by a GOP leader to distance
herself from what has become a very unpopular presidency.
themselves from what has become a very unpopular presidency.
She loved Bush for 6 years, but now his usefulness is over.
The GOP is worried that they are going to lose in 2008, so they
are going to throw Bush under the bus, hoping that this will
improve their chances. They are desperate.
http://www.csua.org/u/itp
\_ Or maybe this whole amnesty thing really does grate on
conservatives?
\_ Here's your real answer: We all knew in 2000 that Bush was
Conservative Light but given the choices (Death before Gore) we
pulled the lever and hoped for the best. Our gut instinct was
correct but overall it was still better than Gore would have been
so we went with it. In 2004 we had even worse choices: more of
the same or Kerry, a man who made Gore look like a great option.
Sitting here in 2007, after everything, he's still a better call
than Gore or Kerry but that doesn't mean we have to be happy about
it. The amnesty bill is of course the final straw but is no
different than we would've had from Gore/Kerry. That leaves all
those people who supported Bush thinking, "Why'd I bother?" which
is why you're heading rumors about the grass roots fund raising
is why you're hearing rumors about the grass roots fund raising
taking a dive on the (R) side. Next time they run a Light(c)
candidate I'll be staying home because, "Why bother?". Sorry to
interupt. Everyone please continue with mindless all-caps posts
and baseless speculation. |
| 5/23 |
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| urltea.com/oiv -> www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110010148 Friday, June 1, 2007 12:00 am EDT 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." 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? You don't like expanding governmental authority and power? 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." Lindsey Graham has said, "We're gonna tell the bigots to shut up." 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. |
| www.csua.org/u/itp -> glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/10/peggy-noonan-and-rotting-pundit-class.html Unclaimed Territory - by Glenn Greenwald About Me Name: Glenn Greenwald For the past 10 years, I was a litigator in NYC specializing in First Amendment challenges, civil rights cases, and corporate and securities fraud matters. Powered by Blogger Friday, October 27, 2006 Peggy Noonan and the rotting pundit class One of the more corrupt pundit phenomena is the way in which the most loyal and worshipful Bush followers, who spent the last five years praising the President and doing everything possible to enable his most radical policies, are now suddenly pretending to be so deeply dissatisfied with his rule. Now that the Bush movement is collapsing, they all want to pretend that they knew all along that things weren't going well and that the President was deeply flawed. Suddenly, they're not a part of any of it and bear no responsibility for it because, all along, they felt the President wasn't doing the right thing and, besides, he was never really loyal to their political beliefs. Journal today, trying to demonstrate how objective and intellectually honest she is by claiming that even well-connected Republicans think that Republicans deserve to lose this election. For this, Noonan blames the President: "They want to fire Congress because they can't fire President Bush." When trying to explain why Republicans are dissatisfied with the President, this is what she says: Republican political veterans go easy on ideology, but they're tough on incompetence. They see Mr Bush through the eyes of experience and maturity. They see Mr Bush as careless, and on more than Iraq--careless with old alliances, disrespectful of the opinion of mankind. "He never listens," an elected official who is a Bush supporter said with a shrug some months ago. Along the way the president's men and women confused the necessary and legitimate disciplining of a coalition with weird and excessive attempts to silence Republican critics. Journal about George Bush (a passage I remember so vividly because it may very well be the most horrifying and cringe-inducing piece of punditry ever): I was asked this week why the president seems so attractive to the heartland, to what used to be called Middle America. Mr Bush is the triumph of the seemingly average American man. He speaks the language of business and sports and politics. But if there's a fire on the block, he'll run out and help. He'll help direct the rig to the right house and count the kids coming out and say, "Where's Sally?" And then when the fire comes they say, "I warned Joe about that furnace." Someone said to me: But how can you call him normal when he came from such privilege? But there's nothing lemonade-on-the-porch-overlooking-the-links-at-the-country-club about Mr Bush. George W Bush didn't grow up at Greenwich Country Day with a car and a driver dropping him off, as his father had. Until he went off to boarding school, he thought he was like everyone else. That's a gift, to think you're just like everyone else in America. So, in just over two years in Noonan's world, George Bush went from being the responsible, concerned, trustworthy, humble neighbor-Everyman who realized that he was just another regular guy like the rest of us, to an arrogant, hubristic know-it-all tyrant who listens to nobody, stomps out dissent, and is completely irresponsible with his duties. And she now depicts Bush in this way while pretending that she never stumbled all over herself with oozing praise that was the very antithesis of what she is now describing. The most corrupt and worthless pundits are those who never do anything other than spout the most conventional and recent partisan wisdom -- even if it directly contradicts what they had repeatedly said in the past -- and who always pretend that they possess the superior wisdom even when they have been so plainly wrong about everything. criticizing the Commander-in-Chief during a time of war") -- are now posturing as hard-nosed critics who, all along, realized that Bush wasn't a "real conservative" and was too flawed for the job. One thing that you can say about Bush is that, by and large, he doesn't change. Any basis for criticizing him has been glaringly apparent for quite some time. All that has changed is the fact that he is now wildly unpopular and that his failures are too glaring for most to deny. Because of that dramatic change -- and for no other reason -- these Bush-worshipping pundits are desperate to shed their Bush-following skin and pretend that they have been open-eyed realists and critics all along. There is nothing wrong with acknowledging one's errors and changing one's mind. When it is genuine, that is a commendable attribute which ought to be encouraged. But that isn't what is happening with the Peggy Noonans of the world (including the serious, moderate Beltway pundits who spent the last five years lecturing all of us on the importance of Supporting the President). To the contrary, they are pretending to be something that they are not -- namely, wise, objective, insightful analysts who all along have long seen the flaws in the President that have caused his presidency to collapse. They are not analysts who have changed their minds or bravely recognized their errors. They are just self-serving, deceitful rats jumping a sinking ship that they long helped to keep afloat. If Bush's popularity skyrocketed tomorrow, their gushing praise would instantaneously return. The only objective they have is to always appear to be omniscient, wise and right, and they will say anything to preserve that appearance. It's important not to allow these always-wrong individuals -- burdened with such horrendous political judgment and willing to follow such a radical political movement with blind loyalty -- to use these inauthentic, last-minute conversions in order to obscure how wrong they have been. The disasters facing our country didn't happen because George Bush, the individual, was flawed. They have happened because the entire movement which propped him up and glorified him for so long is craven, corrupt and radical. It is critical that they not be permitted to jettison Bush (now that he has outlived his purpose) while pretending that he failed to adhere to what they wanted. |
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