PEGGY NOONAN EXPLAINS WHAT IT'S LIKE TO SPEND 7 YEARS WITH ONE'S HEAD FIRMLY PLANTED UP ONE'S ASS

pictured right to far right: Barbara Olson, Peggy Noonan, Laura Ingraham and some street whore

In the last few days we covered how badly the GOP has sunk in esteem of ordinary Americans-- and in the eyes of their own voters-- here, here, and here. Now it turns out even right wing ideologues and propagandists are looking at the GOP in disgust.

No one has ever accused reactionary apologist Peggy Noonan of being a liberal. Yet on the front page of today's Wall Street Journal she rips into Bush mercilessly in a piece called Too Bad-- President Bush Has Torn the Conservative Coalition Asunder. Yeah, too bad.

Although GOP mouthpieces like Noonan were never the ones telling us so, many of us have seen over the last seven years exactly what she is saying today: "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."

Suddenly Noonan sees a problem with Bush's-- and the congressional GOP's tax and spend policies? Suddenly she's recognized the authoritarian nature of the Regime and the tendency to grasp for one-party, rubber-stamp government? Suddenly the occupation of Iraq is... wrong??? Where has she, and the GOP mainstream, been or-- less charitably-- what's it like to spend 7 years with your head up your ass, Peg... and piggies?

And the last straw? Wanna guess? Racism and xenophobia, of course. The battle between the Bigotry and Hatred wing of the Republican Party with the Greed and Selfishness wing is what is really tearing the party asunder. Racism vs cheap labor; hatred for poor brown people speaking another language vs hatred for poor working people making a decent living isn't resolving itself when neo-Confederate, right-wing stalwarts like Lindsey Graham and Saxby Chamberpot are hissed and boo-ed... at Republican conventions in their own states. Noonan blames Bush and his odious Regime, rather than what the GOP has evolved into.

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."

I guess Noonan's head being where it was all this time has kept her from meeting ultra nativist GOP lawmakers like Brian Billbray (R-CA), Tom Tancredo (R-CO), Steve King (R-IA), Virgil Goode (R-VA), Jim DeMint (R-SC), Duncan Hunter (R-CA)... and their millions of Republican Hate Talk radio-created followers.

Noonan wonders why "they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of opponents who are concerned citizens?" Did she miss the debate about the occupation of Iraq, about illegal wiretaps, about torture, about the shredding of the U.S. Constitution? I guess the news of how the Bush Regime treated opponents never penetrated the anal cavity all these years.

Not unlike the way Bush and Cheney and crew have retreated into their own supposedly long-term vision of the trumped up dangers of "Islamo-fascism," Noonan says they are laying 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."

Noonan claims she didn't just wake up yesterday with her head free of it's casement but that she started to realizing what the Bush Regime was all about way back in... 2005 (long after all but a few loons had started praying that they'd wake up and find the whole national nightmare that began in 2000 was just... a bad dream).

The beginning of my own sense of separation from the Bush administration came in January 2005, when the president declared that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the world, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation. This was at once so utopian and so aggressive that it shocked me. For others the beginning of distance might have been Katrina and the incompetence it revealed, or the depth of the mishandling and misjudgments of Iraq.

What I came in time to believe is that the great shortcoming of this White House, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom. Just wisdom--a sense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not all there is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that are true of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes a loyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don't need hacks.

I had lunch with my friend Jeff a couple days ago and he hasn't been living with his head up his butt since 2000. But he also mentioned that the Bush Regime has distinguished itself for its profound lack of wisdom which he explained as the ability to grasp outside data-- especially of a scientific nature-- and synthesize it into an expanding worldview. Not a Bush Regime strongpoint.


UPDATE: RAT... SINKING SHIP

Dan Bartlett bids the floundering regime a fond adieu. Expect a lot of that.