Oh beauty, such profound beauty

Were that is was not spent on such a wasteland. Peggy Noonan is eloquent as always, subtly ripping the mask off the pretenders.

Too Bad

...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.
...
Bush the younger came forward, presented himself as a conservative, garnered all the frustrated hopes of his party, turned them into victory, and not nine months later was handed a historical trauma that left his country rallied around him, lifting him, and his party bonded to him. He was disciplined and often daring, but in time he sundered the party that rallied to him, and broke his coalition into pieces. He threw away his inheritance. I do not understand such squandering.
Now conservatives and Republicans are going to have to win back their party. They are going to have to break from those who have already broken from them. This will require courage, serious thinking and an ability to do what psychologists used to call letting go. This will be painful, but it's time. It's more than time.

I won't say "I told you so." but I bet my beloved wife would. We know his political leanings were not conservative, but towards big government. But I still held hope that the man who spoke so openly about faith would rely on it to guide him. Too bad it was his faith in power and politics that soon took over.

Ms. Noonan is dead on with the country rallying around his leadership and a strong bond was formed after 9/11. Between that and the mentally ill fermentation of the extreme left that spewed bile and hatred at him from every shadow; many good people stuck with Bush for way too long.

Seeing how unhinged was the opposition, how could he be wrong? But just as in the Church, as if the scale of Left and Right isn't linear, but rather a broken ring, the two extremes are so far from the truth that they are almost touching.

Let us hope that the good people of this nation are ready to cut bait. The Grand Old Party has become that of drunken raucous teenagers breaking the law. Are we still sober enough to recognize it and get ourselves out before the roof caves in?