Via the Man with black hat.
Peggy Noonan nails down the lid on the coffin for the Republicans. At least for this election.
He was literally surefooted on the rubble that day [9/11] he threw his arm around the retired fireman and said the people who did this will hear from all of us soon.Images like that fix themselves in the heart. They're why Mr. Bush's popularity is at 38%. Without them it wouldn't be so high.
Not exactly a ringing endorsement.
But there's unease in the base too, again for many reasons. One is that it's clear now to everyone in the Republican Party that Mr. Bush has changed the modern governing definition of "conservative."
He did this without asking. He did it even without explaining. He didn't go to the people whose loyalty and support raised him high and say, "This is what I'm doing, this is why I'm changing things, here's my thinking, here are the implications." The cynics around him likely thought this a good thing. To explain is to make things clearer, or at least to try, and they probably didn't want it clear. They had the best of both worlds, a conservative reputation and a liberal reality.
That would be two-faced in my opinion. Or as my wife says, Bush speaks with a forked tongue. He is the master politician. He gets his enemies to hate him (Bush derangement syndrome is in full swing) and says exactly what his supporters want to hear. And most can identify with the theory that anyone so hated by the liberal crowd must be doing something right.
But to me, that is his greatest deception. He has done more for the liberal ideology than Clinton did.
"No Child Left Behind" anyone?
Hillary-care? Signed, sealed and delivered.
Government intrusion into everyone's lives, the un-Patriot Act and wiretapping. These have gotten so bad that died-in-the-wool big government people sound like screaming libertarians. And he has done all this while keeping the "enemy" seething with hatred.
Sounds like Noonan is expecting a bit of pruning for their own good.
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