LOSING THE NOONAN

UPDATE: Memeorandum has links to the reaction to Miss Peggy.

Pres. Chest Thumper has last almost everyone in GOP, even The Noonan. What's interesting is the sheer number of different actions by Pres. Fredo Noonan thinks have been badly mistaken.

Too Bad
President Bush has torn the conservative coalition asunder.
Friday, June 1, 2007 12:00 a.m. EDT
By Peggy Noonan

(excerpts)

What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition.

This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place.

For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don't like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don't like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad.

But on immigration it has changed from "Too bad" to "You're bad."

The White House and its supporters seem to be marshalling not facts but only sentiments, and self-aggrandizing ones at that. They make a call to emotions--this is, always and on every issue, the administration's default position--but not, I think, to seriously influence the debate.

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.