Fair Weather Friends

John Mitchell said "when the going gets tough the tough get going". So where are the "tough Republicans" going these days? As far from George W. Bush as they can get. Many of us have known for six years that the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld cabal is a collection of incompetents. They have made a shambles of everything they have touched. With the Bush administration heading for the bottom as fast as the Titanic and taking the hegemonic ideology of the neocons with them former supporters have decided it's time to find an available lifeboat. One such former Bush administration shill is Peggy Noonan. In Is There Progress Through Loss? she does what she always does, point fingers at every thing and everybody but herself and the failed ideology she supports. But it's not those dreaded "liberals" this time but the Bush administration and it's sycophants in congress.

Republican political veterans go easy on ideology, but they're tough on incompetence. They see Mr. Bush through the eyes of experience and maturity. They hate a lack of care. They see Mr. Bush as careless, and on more than Iraq--careless with old alliances, disrespectful of the opinion of mankind. "He never listens," an elected official who is a Bush supporter said with a shrug some months ago.

Of course it took the reality that their dreams of domestic and world domination are on the rocks before they realized this.

Glenn Greenwald describes the hypocrisy of Ms Noonan's sudden change of heart.

So, in just over two years in Noonan's world, George Bush went from being the responsible, concerned, trustworthy, humble neighbor-Everyman who realized that he was just another regular guy like the rest of us, to an arrogant, hubristic know-it-all tyrant who listens to nobody, stomps out dissent, and is completely irresponsible with his duties. And she now depicts Bush in this way while pretending that she never stumbled all over herself with oozing praise that was the very antithesis of what she is now describing.

The most corrupt and worthless pundits are those who never do anything other than spout the most conventional and recent partisan wisdom -- even if it directly contradicts what they had repeatedly said in the past -- and who always pretend that they possess the superior wisdom even when they have been so plainly wrong about everything. It's that dynamic that explains how hordes of Bush followers in the public sphere (such as Noonan) who spent years loyally defending his every step -- and demonizing those who opposed him ("criticizing the Commander-in-Chief during a time of war") -- are now posturing as hard-nosed critics who, all along, realized that Bush wasn't a "real conservative" and was too flawed for the job.

That of course includes the likes of Bill Kristol who started criticizing Donald Rumsfeld a couple of years ago in the hope that no one would notice that the foreign policy debacle we find ourselves mired in was largely the result of his flawed ideology.