He's not one of us!

Political hack Peggy Noonan has a commentary today that's important not so much for it's content but it's timing. As the stubborness or perhaps insanity of George W. Bush threatens the survival of the Republican Party those at the highest levels are turning on him. Of course the Republicans are now also the victims of his you are with me or you unpatriotic or a traitor.

The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic--they "don't want to do what's right for America."

Of course Peggy tries to convince us that she soured on George W. Bush a long time ago.

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.

I'm sorry Peggy, but it took you over five disastrous years to figure this out and two more years to say anything about it. I suspect you suddenly realized the mad man in the White House was about to flush the conservative movement and the Republican Party down the toilet of time. So the significance of Noonan's commentary is she is telling Republicans it's OK to break with Bush and not just on immigration but many issues including Iraq.

Now conservatives and Republicans are going to have to win back their party. They are going to have to break from those who have already broken from them. This will require courage, serious thinking and an ability to do what psychologists used to call letting go. This will be painful, but it's time. It's more than time.

Update
My friend The Gun Toting Liberal weighs in and the cultists are outraged.
More at memeorandum.

Updated above