THE WHITE HOUSE THINKS WE’RE STUPID
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
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June 1st, 2007 at 12:07 pm
I have a semi-long rant riffing on sweet Peggy’s demure piece entitled “PN sees Bush Deranged” which exaggerates her ire:
“Peggy is being too kind. GWB has the lack of depth and perspective a C-student at Yale who never cracked a book might be expected to have. Although his reasons for invading Iraq were not ironclad, we gave him the benefit of the doubt. But he devolved the peace after the war into the hands of a total arrogant incompetant named Rumsfeld, who grabbed the development of democracy from seasoned “professionals like Jay Garner and his team, and gave it to a loyalist hack named Bremer. And GWB was somnambulent as Ken Lay was at Enron, allowing “experts” like Cheney and Rumsfeld to overrule Shinseki and do a peace on the cheap. Of course, it was new wine into old wineskins and the seams broke.”
“Peggy does a somber sum-up that reflects my own misgivings—especially about Poppy Bush and his singular insouciance about taxes and the economy that led to Perot. Then his son squandered trillions with a Republican Senate resembling Ali Baba and his forty thieves. GWB is now realizing that the Dems write the history books and is trying to salvage his reputation by serving as Teddy Kennedy’s tea-boy, the same Kennedy who in ‘65 promised that that Immigration Law would “not allow a million immigrants a year nor change the ethnic composition of the country.” both of which it eventually did. [ditto ‘86]”
“Now REAL conservatives will have to latch onto a real Republican of the Reagan/Goldwater stripe—not transplanted Rockefeller Easterners affecting drawls and down-home cowboy charm. Like Fred Thompson or Romney. Peggy continues with a sad summary of the Bush Betrayal Family Tradition, both father and son wobbly and spineless…”
But to keep the SCOTUS from turning us into a Eurabian dystopia, I’ll hold my nose and vote for Giuliani, as long as he has Fred or Mitt on the ticket.
June 1st, 2007 at 2:52 pm
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