It’s about President Bush and how a tipping point has been reached with the nomination of Harriet Miers.
Bush has, frankly, bungled an awful lot of stuff, and conservatives have been extremely forgiving of this on the promise that Bush would appoint justices in the mold of Scalia and Thomas.
Now that Bush has welshed on that promise, a whole lot of unforgiving is going on. If Bush doesn’t fix matters right quick, he’s in deep trouble.
EXCERPT:
American conservatism is in crisis at the moment because the bizarre Harriet Miers nomination imposed a surreality check on the right, forcing us to consider just how much nonsense we had gone along with for the sake of party discipline.
Where to start? With the LBJ-level spending? The signing of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill, which candidate Bush had denounced as unconstitutional? The race-preferences sellout in the University of Michigan cases?
There was also the cynical use of the federal marriage amendment, which the administration dropped after turning out the social conservative vote in 2004. And grass-roots conservatives cite the president’s intent to liberalize immigration policy with Mexico.
Then there is the Iraq quagmire, which, even if initially a worthy cause, has become a rolling disaster.
On top of this came the Katrina debacle, which further damaged conservatism’s claim to competent governance.
Conservatives, consciously or not, looked the other way for far too long, mostly because we felt it important to back the president in wartime and because nothing was more important to the various tribes of Red State Nation than recapturing the Supreme Court. For the first time in a generation, a conservative Republican president and a Republican majority in the Senate made that dream a real possibility.
Whatever else Mr. Bush might fumble, we trusted him to get that right.
Instead, he gave us a crony pick of no extraordinary constitutional expertise or discernible vision, except for love of Our Lord and George W. Bush, and support for racial preferences. This is what we drank the Rovian Kool-Aid for? The Miers selection was no isolated incident, but the tipping point in a series of betrayals.
I’d like to say that I agree with every word in Rod’s piece, though there are two things I don’t.
I, for one, never drank any Rovian Kool-Aid. I’ve been willing to ignore Mr. Bush’s flaws in order to get good Supreme Court nominees, but that’s not the same thing.
I also have to disagree with a specific word in this statement:
Mr. Bush has
alienated both a significant portion of his base and all of his
opposition, so he cannot hope to triangulate his way out of this one.
With his political blood in the water and toothsome challenges making
ever-tighter circles around his presidency, Mr. Bush should give his
mutinous mates a reason to toss him a life preserver.
This is almost entirely correct, but one word is wrong: toothsome. "Toothsome" means "delicious, agreeable, or attractive" (as in "a toothsome dinner" or "a toothsome wench").
Rod means "toothy." Other than that he’s on target.
One thing I definitely agree with is this:
Conservatism
is in an unhappy place now, but the movement is still bristling with
intellectual ferment and ideological confidence and is beginning to
look past the Bush era to new leadership.Truth to tell, Mr. Bush needs conservatives a lot more than conservatives need him.
Darn, tootin’!
Suck it up and fly right, Mr. President! Swallow your peevish pride, can the Miers nomination, give us what you promised, and get back to business!
