The Redhunter

Conservatives put up with it because one, we generally support OEF and OIF, and two the Democrats have been gulping the anti-war coolaid. So despite the abuses, we've supported the president. But now we're essentially told that we're racists because we don't support what amounts to amnesty for illegal aliens.

Why is the administration behaving this way? Noonan has some ideas:

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!

I think she's onto something. Bush has also been pandering to the global-warming alarmists, making noises to the effect that "hey I'm onboard too you know! I want to do the right thing too!"

One has to wonder if it's all sheer political opportunism. But if he thinks that embracing leftist causes like amnesty for illegals and global warming will win him any friends he's dreaming. Those who hate him will at this point continue to hate him anway. And if he's after "legacy" he's dreaming too, because that's wrapped up in the war, whatever name you want to give it.

Some commentators insist that all of President Bush's problems are tied to Iraq. I disagree. Sure, had we destroyed the insurgency early on his troubles would be lessened, I think that the immigration fiasco illustrates that he'd still be in trouble, perhaps more so.

Let's face it, conservatives rally 'round a Republican president over military affairs, and tend to support the mission through thick and thin. Without Iraq though there's just a vague "War on Terror" (terribly misnamed). Given his abysmal performace from a conservative perspective on domestic policies, we'd have deserted him much longer ago. And while without Iraq the left may not hate him with such virulence, they'd still never vote for him.

So even with Iraq as it is, if the president had performed credibly on domestic issues he'd still have a strong conservative base to support him. But even that is gone now.

Noonan ends by comparing reviewing how George H W Bush sqandered the legacy handed to him by Reagan, and how his son is squandering his by throwing away the base that elected him.

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.

What a shame.