Posted on 01/25/2008 7:58:07 AM PST by jdm
Peggy Noonan aims her considerable cannon at George Bush this morning in the Wall Street Journal in the middle of her analysis of the primaries. She fingers him as the main culprit in the destruction of the Republican Party, discounting other and perhaps better causes and engaging in just a little hyperbole:
On the pundit civil wars, Rush Limbaugh declared on the radio this week, "I'm here to tell you, if either of these two guys [Mr. McCain or Mike Huckabee] get the nomination, it's going to destroy the Republican Party. It's going to change it forever, be the end of it!"This is absurd. George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues.
Were there other causes? Yes, of course. But there was an immediate and essential cause.
And this needs saying, because if you don't know what broke the elephant you can't put it together again. The party cannot re-find itself if it can't trace back the moment at which it became lost. It cannot heal an illness whose origin is kept obscure.
I love Peggy Noonan's commentary, but this is a little over the top. The party has lost exactly one national cycle in the last four. I don't consider them dead after a single setback, and anyone who does appears more interested in garnering attention than in providing trenchant analysis.
It doesn't mean we don't have trouble, but Noonan's wrong to lay the whole thing on Bush. While it's true that he hasn't provided much in the way of fiscal discipline, he didn't run for office as a Steve Forbes conservative, either. He spoke of compassionate conservatism, a code for big-government approaches for center-right policies, and he delivered. Bush talked about working on bipartisan solutions to national issues, and he pretty much did that before the Iraq war turned sour. Republicans elected Bush knowing what they were going to get, and Noonan can't seriously claim shock over the result.
The seeds of Republican discontent took root in Congress, not the executive. It was the succession of Republican Congresses that refused to cut spending, and instead blew wads of cash on non-defense discretionary spending. Bush led in some of these efforts, but he didn't multiply pork exponentially; that came from House and Senate Republicans. He didn't climb into bed with K Street, either -- that project started before Bush ever arrived at the White House with Tom DeLay and others.
It may be fashionable for Republicans to cast all blame on the President, but that falsely absolves those who created the problems that plague us at the moment. It may also sound rhetorically spectacular to declare the party "destroyed" by having its constituent coalitions debate about its direction, but it's both inaccurate and hyperbolic. It's not unusual for parties to have these debates -- and maybe if we'd had it in 2000, we would have elevated leaders more supportive of traditional Republican fiscal discipline rather than just blindly supported the people who threw that legacy in the wastebin.
Bush didn’t do it himself. The problem is in the party itself & we all know what that problem is.
Oh yeah, teaming with Gonzalez to convince Ted Olson to moderate his position on affirmative action in the U. of Michigan case.
This is like playing “Scattergories.” The category is “Bush Administration Trainwrecks.”
“DURING A TIME OF WAR, AND AFTER 9/11. HE ORDERED OUR BOYS TO LET OBL GO.”
I haven’t see proof of that.
I know we needed more troops in that engagement but I don’t know if we could have deployed then in time or if they were stopped.
In the beginning of the war we were still learning how to fight the AQ.
We need to remember that our troops have not been engaged in real combat like this in 30 years.
They have learned much and many will be the leaders of the 21 century, unlike Keary.
“Bush43 has failed to veto ANY spending bill.”
Not true, I believe he vetoed a spending bill this year because it didn’t include the provisions he asked for for Iraq. However, he never saw a spending bill that was too bloated, so in that you are correct.
I don't agree at all with the 2nd sentence. What is obvious to most of us is that the GOP did not learn a damned thing from that single loss. Spend like a dumbocrap, protect the border like a dumbocrap, play PC footsie with mud-slimes like a dumbocrap (R.O.P. bs not the WOT which is where the GOP excels), amnesty for 12-20 million trespassers like a dumbocrap,.... Eventually, we get the impression that the sole reason to vote GOP is for the war on terror and while that alone is a good enough reason for many of us it is a hard sell for those who believe in the Constitution and a LIMITED Federal Government.
Reality is not Bush's fault anymore than a forest fire. The real guilty ones are the party leaders in the various local party organizations who systematically attacked president Bush while he was engaged in the countries business, a war on two fronts and various domestic concerns and he could not give them what they wanted which made them even more divisive.
I suppose all this would not have happened if we were not in control. Had we not ascended to leadership of all three branches, we would not have been attacking each other. We got hubristic and lazy. We still are, but the worm is turning.
Have a nice day.
Steve Forbes has lost a lot of crebility this year. He has the hots for Rudy.
NO.
The GOP will do okay this fall. Better than in 2006.
Rockenfelters. Buildaburgers. I highly doubt any one group is driving this crap. No more so than Germany’s slide in national socialism, Rome’s decline, or Russia’s Bolshevik revolution at least.
There is no such thing as the Conservative Party. The conservatives are a general group that is formed from three basic factions and it is aligned or WAS ALIGNED with some other factions that makeup the Republican Party.
Two of the three factions within the conservative wing of the party began attacking the others. The Others responded in kind and that is where we remain today.
When and if we all hate democrats more than we hate each other,we will once again be a intact political force, but not until then.
No, but he's still working at it.
That is not going to happen until Bush is out of office and stops interfering with congressional elections. Bush has left good Conservatives hanging after his Rockefeller Buddies didn't get the primary nod. That is he abandoned the Conservatives who managed to even make it that far. Bush seemed to have a Long Time Family Friend picked out for each office to back instead of supporting a conservative. Those friends as he called them were Liberals like him and his Poppy. Bush is no friend to the Constitution or a supporter of Conservatism.
No, but the media sure tried.
You’re missing a few things.
Put a member of La Raza as AG
His DoJ is backing the anti-gun position
Said he’d sign any AWB extension that made it to his desk.
Put Rice in the State Department
Sold out Israel to the PA
Blinked against China with the Orion Incident
I agree with you.
No he didn’t!
He said he would sign to renew it ONLY if nothing was added or changed.
By that time the courts had gutted the AWB to the point that it banned almost nothing.
He then met with the NRA and Bill Frist and got Frist to allow the RATS to add so much garbage to it that it died in committee and never got a vote.
The NRA wrote a great article on it that explained it all.
President Bush played the RATS like a banjo on that one.
It doesn’t matter to me whether destroyed is the right word or not. As far as I am concerned, Bush has done more damage to the GOP than any figure since Richard Nixon.
Bush walked away because he got smart enough to do so while there was still time. He had his foot inches from the third rail and was smart enough not to touch it.
If he had persisted, he would have flat out ruined whatever was left of his second term early on.
Fearless prediction: any politician, especially a REPUBLICAN politician, who runs on the promise that he will "reform", "fix", "restructure", or do ANYthing else with Social Security (until the system actually begins to fail and EVERYone, including the 'rats, can no longer deny that), ain't gonna last long.
That's the reality of politics. It might be wrong - but it's definitely real.
Dubya, regarding all his other faults, got wise to sense that one!
- John
The president does not control the purse strings, he only has the veto. The Repubs in congress are more to blame for the demise of the Repub majority; they want to be DemocRATs and give my money away.
The DemocRATs took over congress in 2006, less than two years later we are once again in a financial crisis.
See how good they are!
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