For Whom The Bush Tolls

There's a reason I link to Peggy Noonan, she who came up with the media-friendly term, "a thousand points of light" for Bush the Elder in a famous campaign speech, one which sought to clarify the urgent separation of charity and state and set the political charter back to the 1890s. She came up with the phrase because she was the Elder's best speech-writer. Why do I link to her, or know her in the first place?

It's not for her politics, logic, or lack thereof, or her basic believing-Catholic-girl viewpoint of what-all is sweet and holy. I link to her because she has a way with words, and eloquently represents the mainstream of both American political and religious conservatism. On top of that, she's the Molly Ivins of the money-establishment crowd, only still alive, and her opinion column is one of the most popular sections of the Wall Street Journal. I worked and lived on Wall Street at one time, and have on occasion since been forced to read that chronicle of financial metastacism. I link to Peggy Noonan because she is an excellent source of reliable, quick oppo-research, and because she's capable of speaking the truth and expressing it well.

If Peggy Noonan is publicly breaking with the Bush Administration, and she is, with both Junya's and the Elder's iterations of it, then you can bet the White House has lost the conservative mainstream, big-time. That presumptuous, ignorant Dynasty is now an island, entire of itself, floating away from reality along with the rest of its shipwrecked psychopants, its hydrocarbon sadists, its neo-colonial zealots, its social-engineering entymologists. Watching the White House on its journey is like seeing a great high church fall, where the twisted, hissing gargoyles who perch in judgement on new, unevenly built flying arches are also their proud, unyielding architects. While awed by the spectacle, one's instinct is to scramble for safety while fervently hoping the clearly over-stressed structure falls away from the crowd. Peggy understands this, and has just shot her full complement of torpedoes at the Bushes.

Here's how she ends her hit-piece on them:

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.

While she compares the Bush Administrations to wife-beaters, ones which richly employed and rewarded her and many other betrayed conservatives, one could hope for a little admission of culpability. Maybe even an apology for being a stupid, formerly contented cow...or not. But hey: at least she's "formerly," at least she's angry, and at least she got it published in the most august press of the land. At least the dip-shits riding to work on the wake a new Dow high can read there's reason to doubt their happiness, and their unscalable intelligence.