Ok Pam, consider this the official “John Bolton for ‘08″ post!

Why not? He kicks butt, takes names, and that mustache, why it’s so Roosevelt!

“Bully!”

 IRAN CLOSE TO WEAPONS GRADE URANIUM

Ambassador John Bolton wrote this letter to the Financial Times today. Once again the great one points out the obvious and just how dangerous the obvious has become. And the world circle jerks.

Iran is now close to weapons-grade enriched uranium By John R Bolton

From Mr John R. Bolton

Sir, Your report, “Iran moves ahead with nuclear programme” (May 24) contained the following sentence: “Iran has also declared that it has enriched uranium to a level of 4.8 per cent - enough to serve as nuclear fuel, but far short of the levels of about 90 per cent needed for atomic weapons.”

The plain implication of the sentence is that Iran has a long way to go before it creates the highly enriched uranium (HEU) it needs for weapons purposes - all the way from roughly 5 per cent (low enriched uranium or LEU) to HEU’s 90 per cent.

This implication is false. Enriching a given quantity of natural uranium by centrifuges to LEU levels of the U235 isotope in fact consumes approximately 70 per cent of the work and time required to reach HEU concentrations of the isotope. Thus, Iran is not “far short” of HEU levels; it is more than two-thirds of the way there for each kilogram of uranium feedstock it enriches. Your readers should not be misled on this point.

John R. Bolton,

American Enterprise Institute,

Washington, DC 20036, US

UPDATE: He just gets better and better hat tip EJO

Ed,

I agree that “battered spouse syndrome” doesn’t accurately reflect how the administration has treated those who “brung ‘em”, but the feeling of betrayal is very real.

More along the lines of a trusted friend stealing your wife.

You can see it not only in the opinion pages of conservative media, but we’re hearing it on the phones in our GOP fun raising. People who worked hard - extremely hard - for George Bush’s election to office - twice - have had it with the “because I said so”.

This will not bode well in the future as we - the base - look closely at the current crop of GOP candidates, and make no mistake we are looking very closely. To quote The Who:

“We won’t get fooled again”.

***If, as I expect, Mitt Romney or Fred Thompson is the 2008 GOP nominee, why would conservatives have to “hold their noses” to vote for them?

***Keeping Hillary! out of the White House next year will probably be impossible no matter who the Republican standard-bearer is.  After that it won’t be too long before the current intra-party spat starts looking pretty silly.

I remember “Read my lips”; I remember how outraged conservatives took a walk on Bush41 in 1992, and the ensuing two years of, shall we say, “unintended consequences.”  This is history being its cyclical self.

***If, as Peggy Noonan argues today, the Bushies and their in-party allies are contemptuous of the GOP base, couldn’t the former’s seemingly irrational attacks on the latter actually be a rather shrewd ploy to goad conservatives into bolting the party, which just happens to be the dream every RINO holds closest to his/her stony heart?  Thus would close the circle opened when Goldwater backers hooted and jeered Nelson Rockefeller at the 1964 Republican convention, the common thread the indiscreet disapprobation of the Right, the key difference that this time, the RINOs would get the last laugh.

***The Constitution Party, like any third party, is like New Coke: looks good on paper, but isn’t going anywhere.  May as well nickname it the “political white flag” party, because any disgruntled conservative who flees there is, in any practical, realistic sense, giving up the fight.

The political winds are already “lefterly” and will remain that way for at least the next several years.  “Staying the course” in the GOP may be the difference between coming back in 2010 or 2012 and being completely out of it for a generation or more.

Others may choose the latter as they will.  I’ll still opt for the former - every time.

I’ve been thinking about this all day — and I was going to wait to post it, but some of your comments to my two previous posts compel me to share this with you sooner rather than later.

It’s a viable solution to this question:

“Am I going to have to hold my nose and vote Republican AGAIN in 2008 to make sure a Hillary or Obama doesn’t get elected President?”

Here’s the answer:

Read the rest at The Radio Patriot

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Andrea, forgive me, but your post sounds as overwrought as the President’s hamhanded groin-stomping immigration bill marketing plan.  Have you thought through some of your rhetoric?

[W]e MUST clean house. We MUST win back our party. We MUST win back our country and our control of it from arrogant, insulated careerists who think it’s their due….

That can mean only one thing. Vote. them. out. Every last one of them. It will be painful, but we MUST break off from those who have already broken away from us.

How many do you imagine this number to be?  We already know who the RINOs are.  But while people like McCain and Lindsay Graham are national figures, they’re not nationally elected.  On the Senate side they’re not all up for re-election in the same cycle.  And while the Democrats may be able to keep communal rage at a high-rolling boil for years on end, I rather doubt that we can.  It just isn’t our nature.

What about the once-dependable Jon Kyl?  He was just re-elected last November, which I’ll betcha dollars to doughnuts is why he was designated to shephard this misbegotten legislation through its cabalistic backroom negotiations.

The most recent case-in-point is Linc Chafee.  Was he taken out last year?  No, he wasn’t, even though he had a strong primary challenger.  And what was the outcome?  A Democrat replaced him who is, at best, no improvement. 

One other thought: Remember the aforementioned Senator Graham?  He wasn’t a RINO when he stepped up to the Senate in 2002.  But he became one under Darth Queeg’s insidious tutelege.  As long as a handful of “mavericks” remain - and we’d NEVER get rid of ALL of them - and even if this party deconstruction was conducive to majority-building, the fresh-faced conservatives who went to Washington would simply be subjected to the same corrupting influences, and a new litter of RINOs would emerge.  Just like Lindsay Graham did two years ago during the “memo of understanding” debacle.

That’s not a defense any member of the “perfidious devilspawn” wing of the GOP (far from it!), but simply a dash of cold, dripping reality that “Vote.  Them.  Out.” is good catharsis but is much easier bellowed than accomplished.  And even then it wouldn’t be a permanent housecleaning.

It may take a purge that will last two or three election cycles — four, eight, twelve years. But in the grand scheme of things, over the course of the 231 years of this country’s history, it’s a brief moment in time. And as a friend put it, “Sometimes the cure comes close to killing the patient. But if you don’t apply the cure, the patient is sure to die anyway.”

Be careful what you wish for.  Would you want to live in the America that would exist after two terms of Hillary Clinton?  And another one or two of Barack Obama?  I’ll guarantee you that after a single Hillary! term we’d be slobbering for anybody who could unseat her, no matter what their immigration views.  How do I know that?  Because that’s what happened in 2000.

Besides, in the age of Islamist terror and WMD proliferation, the old Nixon adage that “Nobody can completely screw up the country in only four years” is functionally obsolete.  Or, in other words, the patient is less likely to die than is the country itself as we have known it if the former lets anger push him (or her) into foolish, ill-considered decisions.

Might history be repeating itself? Should it? Is there a party worth defecting to?

Ronald Reagan was confronted with that question in 1976 during another time of intra-party dissention.  I’d say his answer, and subsequent actions, are timeless.

Capt Ed:

“Welcome to the hardball of the Bush administration. We loved it when they used it on Democrats and the war, and it seems just a little hypocritical to start whining about it now that we’re getting a taste of it ourselves.”

Not the same at all. While the war on terror and the question of illegal (let’s not loose the definition) immigration - and national security are one and the same. However, Bush telling cut and run democrats to “get bent” and then telling his constituents who are concerned on how the current bill lessens our national security “get bent” is ludicrous.

The problem we are seeing is basically one of arrogance and of forgetting who brung you to the dance. As a leader in the local GOP of South Florida let me tell you this IS the break point for our future support for Bush as well as all those who support the bill.

Had it not been for the core of the Party - who are against this bill Bush wouldn’t be President today and that other (ugh) guy would be Presi…..

**********holy crud, wheres my Pepto again!!

Fact is that when you are seeing more and more the core in outrage (Noonan and Will are just a few of the big names), the issue because “Who is George working for”?, and right now it’s not us.

As everyone knows from the Macranger Show with my pal Harold Hutchinson, I support immigration reform. But anyone who has actually read the drafts and not had their hair stand on end wondering, “What in the &#^@ are they thinking”, knows how valid the concerns on this present bill are.

It IS an amnesty bill, and all the “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” talk won’t change it.

Bush is on a mission as detailed here. He truly believes in this cause and I can appreciate that. But he is also the present leader of our Party and as such he was elected by US to promote the agendas and concerns that are important to us.

On this issue however he has talken a Marie Antoinette approach to us and subsequently he’s gotten his head chopped off.

Peggy Noonan has an opinion piece today at the Wall Street Journal. And it’s a whopper. She says the President has ripped the Conservative coalition to pieces.”This is sad, and it holds implications not only for one political party but for the American future”.

Michelle Malkin characterizes it this way:

“The Republican Party’s condescension and contempt for the base rots from the head down. Brilliant strategery there, GOP. Brilliant.”

Noonan assures that it’s not political conservatives and on-the-ground Republicans who have broken with the White House. The White House that has broken with them.

She thinks 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 much like the base. The White House thinks its base is stupid.

Noonan’s observations are dead on, in my estimation. She is articulating a conclusion that many of us are reaching. And it’s this — we MUST clean house. We MUST win back our party. We MUST win back our country and our control of it from arrogant, insulated careerists who think it’s their due.

“This will require courage, serious thinking and an ability to do what psychologists used to call ‘letting go’.

That can mean only one thing. Vote. them. out. Every last one of them. It will be painful, but we MUST break off from those who have already broken away from us.

The movement has begun. Contributions to the RNC are down a startling 40 percent! And dropping.

It may take a purge that will last two or three election cycles — four, eight, twelve years. But in the grand scheme of things, over the course of the 231 years of this country’s history, it’s a brief moment in time. And as a friend put it, “Sometimes the cure comes close to killing the patient. But if you don’t apply the cure, the patient is sure to die anyway.”

Some think the Republican party has evolved into something indistinguishable from the Democrat Party. And as such, it is doomed to irrelevance by true conservatives and traditionalists. Could be. Do you remember the Whig party?

Abe Lincoln broke away from the Whigs in 1859 over fundamental differences to become a member of the newly forming Republican party.

The Whig party was ultimately destroyed by the question of whether to allow the expansion of slavery to the territories, and never elected another President after 1852. Its leaders either quit politics (as Lincoln did temporarily) or changed parties. The voter base defected to the Republican Party, various coalition parties in some states, and to the Democratic Party.

Might history be repeating itself? Should it? Is there a party worth defecting to?

Cross posted at

The Radio Patriot

*****

That’s what I took a stab at last night.  And rest assured, it is everywhere on the right side of the aisle.  Conservative pundits, bloggers, emailers - the “prairie fire” this (not first, but second) attempt at border erasure has ignited isn’t some small, isolated blaze, but a horizon-to-horizon conflagration.

Having said that, there is a part of me that wants to ask why everybody appears to be surprised at the course the White House has taken.  Maybe a lot of us have forgotten, but George W. Bush was never coy about what he believed in.  We knew back in 2000 that he wasn’t a “movement” (i.e. ideological) conservative.  He certainly wasn’t an admirer of the government-shrinking philosophy that inspired Newt and his “revolutionaries.”  He knew well enough to learn from his father’s biggest mistake and push tax cuts rather than leave any doubt that he might raise taxes.  But apart from taxes and judges, he was a big government guy.  No Child Left Behind, the prescription drug entitlement, profligate spending - and, yes, open borders - he set it all out there in the 2000 campaign.  He was a “different kind of conservative”; he was a “compassionate conservative”; he was Clinton with a zipped fly.  And we bought into him anyway because after eight years of Mr. Bill we (does this sound familiar?) wanted to win.  The post-election Florida uprising only reinforced that pragmatic loyalty until we couldn’t distinguish between that sort and the genuine article.  9/11 cast it in cement.

That’s why the President’s war against his only remaining base of support this week seems so jarring.  When you take a sledghammer to a cinder block, it shatters abruptly and violently.  But we willingly stuck our feet in those “overshoes,” and this is, what, the fourth time (Harriet Miers, Dubai Ports World, last year’s immigration bill) he’s declared war on us and still we’ve stuck with him, so how much can we reasonably complain?

Mark Levin captured this estranged bewilderment yesterday:

You expanded the federal role in education, and we held our nose because of the war. You signed McCain-Feingold in the dead of night, and we held our nose because of the war. You expanded Medicare by adding prescription drugs, and we held our nose because of the war. You increased farm subsidies, and we held our nose because of the war.

Today you disparage us for opposing a massive amnesty program that endangers our economy and national security. Today you even embrace the religion of global warming, a stunning shift from prior policy (your Administration even went to the Supreme Court and argued correctly that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant).

What’s a conservative to do?

I think we already have our answer.

As for my take?:

What do I think of George W. Bush? Does it matter? I don’t have to leave the Republican Party when it’s already fragmenting all around me.

And to think that this is the same President whom National Review once referred to worshipfully as “the Conqueror,” and the same party that ruled Congress for a dozen years.

A riven party and a demographically doomed country. Let’s see Bill Clinton top THAT legacy.

UPDATE: Brother Meringoff concurs, and Ed adds the need for a positive conservative agenda for 2008 as the best reaction to the Bush years.

That would, of course, argue for Fred Thompson or Mitt Romney, not Giuliani or McCain.  Something the polls will have to catch up with if we don’t want to end up in the very same pickle a few years from now (if we’re lucky).

I had similar thoughts this morning, Mac.

And let me tell you something folks. When Bush and the GOP lose people like Mac, you have to wonder whether some kind of cataclysm isn’t in the offing in 2008. Here’s what I wrote this morning:

In fact, given all that has transpired since the 2004 election (which coincided with the last time the Bushies even paid lip service to the base) one could say that this President has seemed most determined to destroy the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Reagan leaving behind only a charred husk for the rest of us to live with. They have decided that Götterdämmerung is in order; if they can’t prevail, then they will destroy what is left of the grand coalition that changed the face of America and the world in the 1980’s and in a fit of either pique or ignorance, leave it for the next crew to cobble together something else.

I will say that it didn’t take much to destroy what was left of that coalition. Since the end of the cold war – the single uniting expedient of the Republican party for more than 30 years – the GOP has been adrift. Uniting against Clinton was fairly easy although that unity was a mile wide and an inch deep. It was based on the absolute worst of political bargains; the cold, calculus of how to get power and keep it. So for ten years Republicans played the special interest game, feeding the lobbyists a steady diet of earmarks and favors, reaping huge amounts of campaign contributions in return, while selling out their basic principles of smaller, less intrusive government and fiscal discipline.

And now, there’s precious little left. No ideology. Little loyalty. Less desire to help this gang of cynical galoots maintain what power and position they have remaining.

While this won’t necessarily mean the death of the GOP, it could mean a long period of being in the wilderness trying to regain some equilibrium. I’ve been there and done that. No fun, I can tell you.

Cue the death march….

Peggy Noonan:

“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.”

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.”

Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of opponents who are concerned citizens? And often, though not exclusively, concerned conservatives? It is odd, but it is of a piece with, or a variation on, the “Too bad” governing style. And it is one that has, day by day for at least the past three years, been tearing apart the conservative movement.

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.”

Haven’t felt this bad since Star Trek (the original) went off the air.

Those who know my writing on this at Macsmind know that at first I was for the “let’s debate the thing” crowd, but quite frankly I’m really starting to get the case of the ass at Bush.

After actually reading a great portion of the bill I’m moving more for the “can it” idea. This bill is bad folks. To use the over-used cliche, “It’s bad for America”.

For the better part of six years we - bloggers/pundits - and workers for the GOP have slugged it out with the left over their attacks on the President. This even though the White House offered nary a defense of it’s own, leaving us feeling as though we were left out to dry many times.

But no more George - I’m filing for a divorce along with the majority of the GOP. On the war on terror I will still stand with the ideas you foster, but with a bit of suspicion that I never had before.

Could it be that we have been had? Could it be that GW Bush is simply just a bad example of his father - who was ulimately a RINO coverted to pure conservatism in 1980 to ride into history with Ronald Reagan?

Perhaps. But I’ve got this real sick feeling in my stomach and it’s something Pepto can’t help.

There’s been a lot of attention paid to Fred Thompson these past weeks, and the spotlight is growing hotter and brighter on the actor-who-would-be-president. Heck, I’ve even put the kleig light on him a few times on this site — here, and here, and here.

But I’m taking a second, closer look at the former Tennessee senator. A hard one. Casting a skeptical eye. Something’s nagging at me that our man Fred might not be “all that and a red pick-up truck…”

Here’s what’s got my eyebrows raised:

Read the rest at The Radio Patriot.

*****