So Sad... Too Bad

June 1, 2007 marks the day the President lost me. I have absolutely no clue what George Bush is up to any more. He left my party, we are still here..... yet like a bad influence that you will not allow near your family, the support for this President is gone. Finito.....

Details? Go read Peggy Noonan. She is much more eloquent than a simple Rumbear...

Ms. Noonan says President Bush "has torn the conservative coalition asunder." She even suggests that conservatives for some time "have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome."

One of the things I have come to think the past few years is that the Bushes, father and son, though different in many ways, are great wasters of political inheritance. They throw it away as if they'd earned it and could do with it what they liked. Bush senior inherited a vibrant country and a party at peace with itself. He won the leadership of a party that had finally, at great cost, by 1980, fought itself through to unity and come together on shared principles. Mr. Bush won in 1988 by saying he would govern as Reagan had. Yet he did not understand he'd been elected to Reagan's third term. He thought he'd been elected because they liked him. And so he raised taxes, sundered a hard-won coalition, and found himself shocked to lose his party the presidency, and for eight long and consequential years. He had many virtues, but he wasted his inheritance.

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.

The whole article is worthy of a few moments of your time. Many virtues squandered, indeed........

The boys over at Powerline chime in

Now, it seems that much of the Republican base is irate about the Bush administration's deviations and is looking for a dyed-in-the-wool conservative for 2008. For many, Fred Thompson is that candidate; whether he really is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative remains to be seen.

Yes, we shall see......