Better Late Than Never

It's hard to tell at this point who has more contempt for the Bush Administration, liberals or conservatives.

That's kinda interesting -- don't you think?

Judging by Peggy Noonan's latest column, it might be a toss-up.

What I find so fascinating about Noonan's column is that it shows conservatives saying about Bush exactly what liberals have been saying since 2001. It's like the boys and girls on the right may be a little slow, but they've finally caught on to what this administration is all about: we want our way, and fuck you if you don't like it.

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.

Isn't it ironic? as Alanis Morissette might say. The conservatives have been totally had by this president, and they're only just now figuring it out. Priceless.

Then Noonan complains about the tactics that the administration is using to stifle dissent on the right about the immigration bill:

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."

Gee -- if you don't agree with their policies you're unpatriotic. I wonder where we might have heard this before? I didn't notice Peggy Noonan (or any other highly-placed and highly-paid conservative pundit, for that matter) complaining when the administration used exactly these same tactics to stifle dissent from the left on the war, by insinuating that anyone who wasn't eager for young Americans to get their balls blown off in a hopeless cause were practically in the pay of Al-Qaeda.

In a New Yorker piece by Jeffrey Goldberg, Republican discontent with this group of thugs and criminals currently in power is stated about as strongly as it can be stated:

Disillusionment with the Administration has become widespread among the conservatives who once were Bush’s strongest supporters. Mickey Edwards, a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma, said recently, “The Republican Administration has shown itself to be completely incompetent to the point that, of Republicans in Iowa, fifty-two per cent thought we should be out of Iraq in six months.” Edwards, who left Congress in 1993 and now teaches at Princeton, is helping to lead an effort among some conservatives to curtail the President’s power in such areas as warrantless wiretapping. “This Administration is beyond the pale in terms of arrogance and incompetence,” he said. “This guy thinks he’s a monarch, and that’s scary as hell.”

Did you get the most revealing part of that paragraph? If not, let me underline it for you, because it's worth emphasizing: "of Republicans in Iowa, fifty-two per cent thought we should be out of Iraq in six months."

Of Republicans. In Iowa. The people who to a large extent will help choose the next Republican nominee. If this is true, then John McCain's strategy of sucking up to Bush and his policies on the war has been a gigantic miscalculation that will cost him his party's nomination and, given his age, whatever chance he might have had of ever being elected president.

If you had told me as recently as a year ago that the GOP rank and file would loathe this administration to this extent, I would have thought you were crazy. But I guess I didn't give them enough credit. What some of us knew from the very early days of this administration is now apparent to almost everyone -- everyone, that is, except the craziest of the evangelical zealots -- that this administration is the most arrogant and incompetent in our history and might have doomed the Republican party to minority status for a generation. This after idiots like Tom DeLay and Karl Rove boasted not long ago that they would forge a permanent Republican majority that would allow them and others like them to hold onto power indefinitely.

Not bloody likely, as the British would say. The Bush administration and the neocons who have been its driving engine have failed as badly as any administration in American history. And now it will be up to the Democrats to pick up the pieces and clean up the mess these incompetent criminals will leave behind on January 20, 2009.

Tom Moran