Scratching Bush: Conservatives Get The 7-Year Itch

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.

The first thing I always read in the Saturday Wall Street Journal is Peggy Noonan's column. Noonan is the conservative and former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan who writes so beautifully, even at times when I find her thoughts and conclusions (draped in such a lovely use of language) kind of horrifying.

But we have found a point of agreement in her column yesterday, dubbed "Too Bad."

Noonan, the staunch and predictable conservative, uses extraordinary words in "Too Bad" in which she essentially bitch-slaps President George Bush, slamming Bush in even stronger terms than what Jimmy Carter used a few weeks ago in calling Bush the worst president in history. But she doesn't just stop with W, or Bush the Lesser. She also has to throw in how the President's father -- Bush the Greater -- also was, well, a fuck-up who betrayed conservative principles.

In her column she admits she started growing weary of Bush in January 2005, she writes how "this White House thinks its base is stupid" and compares conservative Bush supporters to battered women:

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!

And what I also think is "too bad" -- tragic, really -- is that it took some conservatives seven years to figure this out.

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