Category: The Dish

A reader writes:

The reader you posted stated that Noonan and others who are late to the party have no credibility to criticize Bush. Hogwash. Have you and this reader never heard of the expression "the straw that breaks the camel’s back?" You maintain loyalty in politics even when you are in disagreement with a party or a President. If you are part of a political movement you realize that no politician is ideologically pure or completely without fault.  However, you do expect that your loyalty will be rewarded with more than mere lip service to one’s ideological beliefs and you expect more than comically bad incompetence.

A lot of intellectual conservatives are now asking themselves at which moment did they lose faith in Bush.  For some, such as yourself, it was Abu Ghraib.  For others, it was the chaos that unfolded in late 2003-04 and the intransigent refusal of Rumsfeld and Bush to respond to it.

For another group, it was the President’s use of warrantless wiretaps and vast expansions of federal power.  For many it was the realization that two of the three biggest domestic accomplishments for Bush (outside of the tax cuts) were Ted Kennedy sponsored pieces of legislation.  For a huge number it was the culture of profligate spending.

For myself, the seminal moment at which I lost real faith in this President was in the aftermath of Katrina.  He could no longer profess to hold the mantle of competence and indeed, he was the poster child of cronyism and ineffectiveness.  He proved himself to be dilatory and disinterested, all in the face of the worst natural disaster in this country’s history.  Granted the local politicians screwed up royally (and are still doing so in NOLA), but he is the POTUS and is expected, at the least to focus our efforts to recover, and to lead.  He held that mantle after 9/11, he pissed it down the drain after Katrina.

The last straws for conservatives are the White House’s arrogant refusal to contenance any criticism of what it is doing in Iraq coupled with its arrogant and condescending ramroding of a disastrous immigration boondoggle, all the while telling the people "who have carried his water for years" that they are a bunch of bigots and ignoramuses. 

Don’t forget Andrew that the scales had to fall from your eyes as well.  It has come at different times and in different ways for all of us, but it does not make Noonan’s critique of Bush any less credible that it has come later than your own.  It just means that you were more foresighted than she was.   

Rod Dreher is unimpressed by recent epiphanies:

So yes, by all means let’s turn our backs on this failed presidency, and save what we can, while we can. But let’s not kid ourselves: Bush has failed conservatives, yes, but we have also failed ourselves. It doesn’t take much courage to stand up for conservative principle to a president as weak as this one has become. It would have taken real courage to stand up for conservative principle in 2002, 2003, 2004, even early 2005. How many did? I know I didn’t — not until Katrina and Miers, which came late in 2005.

If we’re looking to blame someone for the failure of Republican government and the conservative crack-up, look to the White House, yes, and look to the late, unlamented Republican Congress. But also look to the conservative talk show hosts, the conservative columnists, and finally, in the mirror. The only way we’re going to rebuild after the present and coming political shattering is through honest reckoning, and taking responsibility for what we’ve done. It is tempting to blame Bush for everything. But it’s not fair, and it’s not honest. Bush is today who he always was. The difference is we conservatives pretty much loved the guy – when he was a winner."

"We’re in an extraordinary situation when gas is $3.50 a gallon and it is the voters’ third-ranking concern," – Byron York, NRO.

Eventually, everything will be neuroscience, it seems. Even Harry Potter.

Every day in America is a special day. No, this isn’t an excerpt from a Romney speech. That would be:

"Fabulous. America. Faith. Faith. Faith. America. God. Faith. Gosh. God. Fabulous. America. Great. America. Strong. Strong. Faith. Strong. Family. God. Faith. America. Strong. Fabulous. Tagg!"

It’s a statement of fact, as Melissa Lafsky notes. Today, June 1, is, for example, Pen Pal Day, Kentucky Statehood Day and Leave The Office Early Day. Hey, where do you think you’re going?

"For the record, I personally don’t have strong views on immigration. I just find it amazing that the response to grassroots opposition is to fire the telephone solicitors!" – Todd Zywicki. I guess Zywicki just doesn’t want to do what’s right for America.

Is the MSM back to its old tricks with respect to covering Gore? Paul McLeary thinks so:

[Dana] Milbank gives us an account of a recent speech by Gore that reads almost like a parody of everything we read about the candidate back in ’00.

Milbank said that during the speech, Gore "waxed esoteric," "waxed erudite," and "waxed informed," as if these might be bad things to have happen during a speech. Milbank then quotes several audience members who gush over how smart Gore is, concluding that "therein lies a problem for the Gore ’08 bubble." Can’t be too smart, now, or else you’ll look like an egghead, right?

… Making this point in his own way, Milbank says that "the crowd loved it. But would the ‘average American?’"

When reporters at places like the Post start acting like they know what’s up with the "average American," we’re headed for trouble. Milbank is trafficking in a portrayal of Gore that was almost entirely invented by the press, and, given that seven years later the press appears unable to move beyond that caricature, perhaps we’ll all be better off if Gore doesn’t run.

A couple of thoughts. I’m not unsympathetic to many of Gore’s points in his new book. But have you read it? It’s a multiple-page-sigh at the idiocy of his fellow humans. He comes off as a total jerk, when he’s not being a monumental bore. And if you’re a grown-up politician trying to get better press, it might not be the best idea to blame the media for everything that’s wrong in American democracy. It’s also a stupid argument. The notion that Americans became collectively unhinged after the O.J. Simpson trial, that it’s only been in the last decade or so that news has been chased out of American consciousness by celebrity, Hollywod and scandal, is so loopy and ahistorical it reads like a college thesis – which, of course, it once was. Really, I try and give the guy a chance. He’s not wrong about everything. He’s right about the Bush administration’s constitutional excesses, torture, war-bungling and the dreck that passes for news on a lot of cable channels. He deserves mad props on climate change. But there really is something about Al Gore. It took real talent to throw the 2000 election away. He’s still got it. 

Ross makes an essential point:

There are two strains of secularism, I would argue, which are usually intertwined but philosophically distinct: A soft secularism that argues for a legal separation of church and politics – no school prayer, no federal funds for churches, etc – and a hard secularism that militates for a complete separation of religion and politics, and shades easily into hostility toward organized religion in a general. But neither form precludes private belief in the supernatural. A perfectly "secular" society would be defined not by universal atheism, but by a religion-free politics in the short run, and probably a long-run "decoupling," as Razib puts it, of supernatural beliefs from religious institutions.

The conflation of secularism with atheism in the popular vernacular is one of the more corrosive abuses of the English language today. It is perfectly possible to be devoutly religious and aggressively secular. Yes, that combo is rarer than it was, but its possibility is a lynchpin of liberal democracy.

They start in Kindergarten.

Peggy Noonan after Bush’s re-election.