It ain’t us folks - it really IS him:
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. …. 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.
Peggy Noonan once again confirms what many of us have reluctantly concluded about GW Bush: he doesn’t give a rat’s backside what you and I think. Why? Because he, like the Democrats, view us as knuckle-draggers:
And the people in the administration don’t even much like the base. … This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place
Noonan took the same message from Bush as we did a few days back; that is, if we oppose the president on immigration, he says that makes us evil people:
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.”
Yes, we are bad people - downright anti-American - if we do not share Bush’s vision of sacrificing our sovereignty for the benefit of Mexico. And it speaks volumes that Flim Flam Graham is carrying the president’s water.
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.”
Now, in addition to the president questioning our loyalty, we have a corn-pone John McCain wannabe from South Carolina trashing our integrity.
Noonan, a former speechwriter for and biographer of Ronald Reagan, asks the obvious question: Why does this president hate the base so much? She offers her conclusion:
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 president’s contemptuous assault on conservatives is pathetic, but it proves Noonan’s point that this White House seems “to be marshalling not facts but only sentiments,” probably because they haven’t the facts to marshal.
I have said that I think the president is bordering on the delusional. Noonan comes close to saying the same thing when she describes the Bushies’ almost messianic belief that everyone else is wrong and they are right:
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!
Noonan decries the fact that, like his father, this president has squandered a great “political inheritance” (”They throw it away as if they’d earned it and could do with it what they liked”) and argues this is the result of the president’s character defects, not ours:
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.
Noonan says it is now time for us to overcome the president’s betrayal, to win back our party, “to break from those who have already broken from [us].”
As usual, it is up to us anti-American, stupid, bigoted nobodies to fix what he has broken.
39 Responses to “Noonan: Bush destroyed conservative coalition”
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June 1st, 2007 at 9:38 am
And almost every point is correct. Bush must go
June 1st, 2007 at 9:38 am
Amen, brother, amen
June 1st, 2007 at 9:40 am
Viva Meheeco or you’re an un-American traitor!
Viva shoddy construction and depressed wages! Viva unwed mothers and high school dropouts! Viva drug cartels and gangs!
Viva BUSH! Viva El Partido Republicano!
June 1st, 2007 at 9:41 am
If the people of America do not rise up. Fight this immigration bill, and vote out every politician who votes for it we are lost.
12 to 20 illion is a far cry from what we will get hit with. More like 30 to 50 million. America, our economy, our entire culture is at peril of destruction.
And Yes GWB is a driving force behind it. The conservative voter base needs to take back our party and do it before it is beyond salvage.
June 1st, 2007 at 9:44 am
While I voted for the guy twice, and given the same choices I would again, I believe the legacy of President Bush will be that he accomplished something the Democrats never could. He has destroyed the Republican Party.
June 1st, 2007 at 9:57 am
I am become deaf, the destroyer of countries.
—George W Bush
June 1st, 2007 at 9:59 am
We really need to be VERY careful and do massive research on the candidates in future elections including Fred Thompson. Find out who they are tied to, corps, pacs, etc.
Los Gringos is gone.
June 1st, 2007 at 10:00 am
I don’t think is as much Bush himself as it is the people around him (which is still his fault). I think he is so separated from the public that he only knows what his circle tell him. Bush always looks a little surprised when someone in the media comments that most Americans don’t support his policies.
June 1st, 2007 at 10:01 am
This full-on descent into dementia by boosh makes me ill. He obviously wants open borders with Mexico. Something has gotten into his supposed brain that we are somehow responsible for Mexico’s wretched failure of a country.
I wonder - since he obviously has NO FEAR whatsoever of muslims sneaking nukes across the open border, maybe the whole terrorist thing IS all made up. Maybe he KNOWS that no muslim is gonna be sneaking across the border with a nuke because it was all made up in the first place.
I don’t know what to believe anymore. How else do you explain him getting in bed with f’n ted kennedy to destroy our nation?
This is unbelievable.
June 1st, 2007 at 10:03 am
Great job, Rick G.
June 1st, 2007 at 10:10 am
Ring Ring….
http://redinktexas.blogspot.com/2007/05/rnc-phone-is-ringing-are-you-goiing-to.html
June 1st, 2007 at 10:16 am
Is this what your grandchildren will witness, the complete collapse and destruction of what we know as the United States?
Bush is wrong with his idealism, and his legacy will not be known because the archives will be destroyed right along with our way of life…we’re the new Apaches.
http://azbiz.com/lionel_waxman/
June 1st, 2007 at 10:25 am
I’ll never understand GW on this issue as these felons are eating this great country up. I look around me here in Houston and its sickening what you see. Hell my wife and I are trying to decide where to go to get away from this mess.
All this aside Bush is great compared to having this socialist nasty woman running the country.
June 1st, 2007 at 10:38 am
That’s an amazing article about Tucson. I visited their twice to go hiking in the desert mountains and to visit Tombstone. Looks like it may be too dangerous to go hiking there anymore.
Looks like it all comes around. We defeat Geronimo and the rest of the Apaches, now the Mexicans are reclaiming the area from us. Fascinating.
June 1st, 2007 at 10:51 am
GWB has never been as conservative as the base. He just pretended to be to get elected. The war and terrorism is the only exception. And I think a lot of the base is probably starting to re-think that one.
All the conservative talk on the social issues and the well-placed God-speak was and is just pandering.
June 1st, 2007 at 11:02 am
He is a traitor who should have been impeached for not securing our borders after 9/11. He is and has been in blatant violation of his Oath of Office and the US Constitution for years.
But like all politicians, he is accountable to no one. Like I’ve said many times, it doesn’t affect him so he could give a shinola about the rest of the country.
June 1st, 2007 at 11:16 am
This was an excellent post, Rick. One of the reasons I offered the suggestion, in OC, about one 6 year term is that I also believe presidents becomes so isolated after 6 years they not only have no clue what the nation is thinking; they no longer know what their base is thinking.
June 1st, 2007 at 11:22 am
Nowadays the only effective political reform would involve a rope and an oak tree. From local dog catcher all the way to the top….
Except for Dan Patrick, because when Dan wants an egg, he cracks open a chicken.
June 1st, 2007 at 11:40 am
From a current washingtonpost.com live chat with David Broder:
“Alexandria, Va.: It seems the talk radio and cultural conservative base of the GOP is strongly against the immigration bill. Yet they likely make up the predominent share of the 30 percent of the people who still support Bush. Now Bush and his surrogates are attacking the anti-immigration bill folks in much the same tone the adminstration has used on their other detractors. Rove never has been accused of being dumb, but this seems politically beyond stupid. What’s your take?
David S. Broder: My take is that President Bush has been a consistent advocate of a liberal immigration policy as long as I have covered him–going back to his days in Texas, and I think Rove is carrrying out the boss’s orders.”
June 1st, 2007 at 11:49 am
#19
Broder nailed it. And for the record, all the Bush men are liberal on immigration policy and always have been. I was just hoping we would get through 8 years without GW doing any serious damage on this issue, but, oh well. Also, this whole ordeal has put to bed any real chances Jeb has for the WH. His position is the same as his brother’s.
June 1st, 2007 at 11:56 am
texpat, Do you really think America would elect a president named Jeb?
June 1st, 2007 at 11:58 am
You may have a point there, but do you think America would elect somebody named Barack Hussein Obama ?
June 1st, 2007 at 12:06 pm
texpat, I think in the current media market “red-neck” names are less palatable than “Muslim” names. If Bush had not tanked the Republican party, that might have been different.
June 1st, 2007 at 12:13 pm
Seems the prez and his cohorts have resorted to a favorite democrat ploy - if they don’t like what WE say, they call us “bigots”
When will they wake up and realize that just because we oppose the - poor excuse of an - immigration bill doesn’t mean we hate all Mexicans? We just want the borders secured and illegals deported? (And don’t tell me it couldn’t be done!)
WE are tired of being lied to, put down, ignored, and in general looked on as a never ending source of revenue!
They may not like what we think, but WE put them in office - and WE can take them out!
June 1st, 2007 at 12:18 pm
In spite of what Shannon says, I am a pretty level-headed guy. However, if I were to meet Lindsey Graham face to face, I can’t guarantee I wouldn’t slap the snot out of that smarmy little condescending panty-waist.
June 1st, 2007 at 12:21 pm
Peggy Noonan has never ever liked the Bush Family
research her articles - she just doesn’t like them
Not to say some of her points are not valid, but she was shut out of both 41 and 43’s administrations
Read into that what you will
June 1st, 2007 at 12:32 pm
Just as a note, after being the main speechwriter for Bush Seniors 1988 campaign, strangely thats a big stepping stone and she dissappeared from the administration shortly after the election
She briefly campaigned in 2004 for the republicans but has been a huge, massive critic of the GOP and Bush
Might want to take that into account, most of what she says is untenable since we never had 60 votes in the Senate to do what she thinks best (which are good ideas but political realities are another)
June 1st, 2007 at 1:05 pm
Source attacking is so…..Clintonian.
‘Yawn’
June 1st, 2007 at 1:17 pm
YOU DON’T SPEAK FOR ME!
What incredible arrogance!
How haughty they are!
The economic bloodsuckers in D.C.!
They parade around
“On my behalf,”
But YOU DON’T SPEAK FOR ME!
My blood just boils every time
They say “the people want to know”!
This pile of human debris!
They smile and snicker
While they attack my beliefs –
But YOU DON’T SPEAK FOR ME!
They spend like drunken sailors
With no thought of future bills,
They spend my future by decree!
Exempt from their decisions
Which are binding on all else –
But YOU DON’T SPEAK FOR ME!
Immigration, entitlements,
All terms for “buying votes,”
Each comes with its own fee.
They tell me each and every day
What it is I should believe,
But YOU DON’T SPEAK FOR ME!
Mind this carefully
As you ponder our fate
And each day make us less free!
With each lousy decision
You become more irrelevant,
Because YOU DON’T SPEAK FOR ME!
June 1st, 2007 at 1:34 pm
Shannon
Hey, it is what it is….
June 1st, 2007 at 2:12 pm
The last two Presidents of the United States should be in JAIL for treason, perjury, bribery, incompatent military strategery, and looking like a chimp when speaking!
I think years ago when boosh choked on a pretzel he actually passed and he was replaced with a drone.
June 1st, 2007 at 3:40 pm
Let’s face reality folks. This immigration bill is part and parcel with the looming North American Union (coming soon to a neighborhood near you!). The political elite know that the US economy is going to tank in the near future. The rulers want to salvage as much as they can, so they are going to merge the US, Canada and Mexico into one neo-feudalistic entity: US military + Canadian natural resources + cheap Mexican labor. What more could our mattoid elite wish? You, on the other hand, may or may not be able to get a job as a Wal-Mart greeter. Perhaps you’ll be dragooned into the military to serve as canon fodder in some worthless war in South America. Have a nice friggin life!
June 1st, 2007 at 4:20 pm
Does W think he’s the new Jim Jones? Are we going to get mailed a packet of “special” Kool-Aid from the GOP?
http://www.lff.org.uk/image_library/14/58/3098.jpg
June 1st, 2007 at 5:19 pm
RNC is already feeling the HEAT…contibutions are down to the point they’ve begun laying off phone solicitors. GOP presidential hopefuls had best distance themselves from W both literally and politically. If one apple can spoil the barrel, throw out the bad apple. Let W stew alone. Here’s hoping a truthful conservative will emerge.
June 1st, 2007 at 6:31 pm
#9 T Hawk
That has always been my argument. If we are sooo afraid of terrorists why are the borders not secure and why do we import 100’s of thousands muslims legally? 26% polled said they see no problem using violence to push their cause?
This gov wants bad things to happebn to us. Then they will use that lame asss excuse…we did not connect the dots.
Bush should be charged tried and jailed!
June 1st, 2007 at 6:34 pm
32.
Well, that brightened my day.
June 1st, 2007 at 7:11 pm
The solution is Impeachment.
Plan on going to your Republican Precinct Caucus next March and take over from perverts, traitors, RINOS, abortionists, and Bush pimps
June 2nd, 2007 at 3:01 pm
I come from Republican roots. My first vote was for Ronald Reagan. But I can’t support Bush. He isn’t a leader and it shows in the actions of those he was sworn in to lead. There are many examples, but just yesterday I was reading about Pat Tillman and how immediately after his death by friendly fire the military from the git go was lying and destroying evidence (burning his uniform and diary) to make him look like a “hero” - which in my book he already was. Anyways, I don’t have much interest in what Bush says or does anymore - I am just waiting for him to say adios and hoping that all of us do a better job of picking our next leader.
June 2nd, 2007 at 6:55 pm
FYI , Re: Noonan — according to Wikipedia:
while working for then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, Noonan coined the phrase “a kinder, gentler nation” and also popularized “a thousand points of light”, two memorable catchphrases used by Bush. Noonan also wrote the speech in which Bush pledged: “Read my lips: no new taxes” during his 1988 presidential nomination acceptance speech in New Orleans.
In mid-August 2004, Noonan took a brief, unpaid leave from the Wall Street Journal to campaign for George W. Bush’s reelection.
That doesn’t sound like someone who “never ever liked the Bush family” to me.