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Ingraham on Bush
Now I’ve also listened to Laura Ingraham’s “The gloves are off” talk about President Bush from last Thursday and it is strong stuff, a far better performance than her botched interview of Linda Chavez. There’s nothing like pure indignation to produce eloquence, and one must acknowledge that Ingraham’s sense of her and others’ heart-felt past loyalty to Bush, combined with his unbelievable insult to them now, has made her truly indignant. She gets to the rotten core of the man when she points out that while Bush has always been careful to say that he was not questioning Democrats’ patriotism when they opposed him on important issues like the funding of our forces in Iraq, that’s exactly what he has done to his own Republican supporters on immigration—accused them of a lack of patriotism. “You don’t want to do what’s right for the country,” he said of the amnesty opponents last Tuesday, because, according to him, their bigotry against Mexicans is more important to them than the good of the country. Ok, so Ingraham now understands that Bush is harder on his own Republican loyalists than he is on the Democrats. But I don’t think she yet gets what that really means—that Bush at bottom respects liberals and despises conservatives, because Bush’s own deepest orientation is to the left, not the right. Similarly it is remarkable that Ingraham did not “get” the real meaning of Bush’s innumerable betrayals before now. She goes through the familiar litany of things he did that went against conservatism and yet the conservatives backed him anyway, which makes his turning on the conservatives now now so shocking. But, oddly, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to her that if Bush betrayed conservatives so often, he didn’t had any regard for them or their principles to begin with. Certainly for Ingraham still to believe, after the Harrier Miers nomination in 2005 (Bush’s most amazing slap in the face to his conservative base prior to this), that Bush was basically on the conservatives’ side, suggests something approaching impenetrable cluelessness on her part.
And that has been one of the leading themes of this website over the last several years: conservatives’ mindless, passionate love for Bush, their phalanx-like defense of a non-conservative president which in turn gave him the cover to keep moving the Republican party, the conservative movement, and the country to the left. Email entry |