Peggy Noonan: "At this point in history we don't need hacks."
Peggy Noonan, speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush, voices her discontent with the younger Bush:
What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition. This is sad, and it holds implications not only for one political party but for the American future.Noonan recounts her own alienation from Bush:
The White House doesn't need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base.
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.
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.
posted by Tom Noyes at 9:48 AM
2 Comments:
Peggy Noonan, whatever you think of her having been a Reagan speechwriter, is as articulate as ever. This is a straight-on dead-right indictment of Bush and his rotten regime of governance by cronyism and official competence based purely on personal loyalty oaths to his wretched family dynasty.
I suspect Ms. Noonan, like most thinking people, began having strong doubts about Bush long before she wants to admit she did (Jan. '05). How could anyone not have seen, even before his "re-election", what this infantile bully has wrought of our nation, both domestically and internationally?
If he were not so dangerous the man would be a walking punchline to a really bad joke. History will certainly record his taint as far worse than the immediate and obvious denigrations he has inflicted on this nation. It will be a long slog to mop up the ooze he will certainly leave behind when he evaporates back to Crawford, something that cannot come soon enough.
I've long admired Noonan as a speechwriter, even though I didn't vote for Reagan or the elder Bush.
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