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  1. #1
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    TOO BAD. Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal

    This is a link to a great piece by Peggy Noonan written for the Wall Street Journal. For brevity, I won't list the entire article, but will add a link to the web page.

    PEGGY NOONAN
    Too Bad
    President Bush has torn the conservative coalition asunder.
    Friday, June 1, 2007 12:00 a.m. EDT

    What political conservatives and on-the-ground Republicans must understand at this point is that they are not breaking with the White House on immigration. They are not resisting, fighting and thereby setting down a historical marker--"At this point the break became final." That's not what's happening. What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them. 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.

    http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/

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    hI Nouveauxpoor!

    Please post the entire piece along with the link.

    Thanx
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    I came here to post that, but you beat me to it. Another good excerpt.

    But on immigration it has changed from "Too bad" to "You're bad."

    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." His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, "We're gonna tell the bigots to shut up." On Fox last weekend he vowed to "push back." Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want "mass deportation." Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are "anti-immigrant" and suggested they suffer from "rage" and "national chauvinism."

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    SAM

    please post the entire article.
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    I like to copy and paste so here's the article:

    Too Bad
    President Bush has torn the conservative coalition asunder.

    Friday, June 1, 2007 12:00 a.m. EDT

    What political conservatives and on-the-ground Republicans must understand at this point is that they are not breaking with the White House on immigration. They are not resisting, fighting and thereby setting down a historical marker--"At this point the break became final." That's not what's happening. What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them. 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.

    The White House doesn't need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don't even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place.

    For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don't like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don't like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad.

    But on immigration it has changed from "Too bad" to "You're bad."

    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." His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, "We're gonna tell the bigots to shut up." On Fox last weekend he vowed to "push back." Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want "mass deportation." Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are "anti-immigrant" and suggested they suffer from "rage" and "national chauvinism."

    Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of opponents who are concerned citizens? And often, though not exclusively, concerned conservatives? It is odd, but it is of a piece with, or a variation on, the "Too bad" governing style. And it is one that has, day by day for at least the past three years, been tearing apart the conservative movement.
    I suspect the White House and its allies have turned to name calling because they're defensive, and they're defensive because they know they have produced a big and indecipherable mess of a bill--one that is literally bigger than the Bible, though as someone noted last week, at least we actually had a few years to read the Bible. The White House and its supporters seem to be marshalling not facts but only sentiments, and self-aggrandizing ones at that. They make a call to emotions--this is, always and on every issue, the administration's default position--but not, I think, to seriously influence the debate.

    They are trying to lay down markers for history. Having lost the support of most of the country, they are looking to another horizon. The story they would like written in the future is this: Faced with the gathering forces of ethnocentric darkness, a hardy and heroic crew stood firm and held high a candle in the wind. It will make a good chapter. Would that it were true!

    If they'd really wanted to help, as opposed to braying about their own wonderfulness, they would have created not one big bill but a series of smaller bills, each of which would do one big clear thing, the first being to close the border. Once that was done--actually and believably done--the country could relax in the knowledge that the situation was finally not day by day getting worse. They could feel some confidence. And in that confidence real progress could begin.


    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.


    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.

    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.

    Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father" (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Fridays on OpinionJournal.com.

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    Thanx, MAYDAY!
    We have a lot of great new folks on Alipac and they're not quite used to the way we post.

    FYI: Especially our NEWS FORUM, which is used by numerous people including CONGRESS & their Staffs. It's the largest Immigration NEWS ARchive on the net

    Here's the deal guys:
    post an article in it's entirety
    post the link with the article
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    Quote Originally Posted by 2ndamendsis
    Thanx, MAYDAY!
    We have a lot of great new folks on Alipac and they're not quite used to the way we post.

    FYI: Especially our NEWS FORUM, which is used by numerous people including CONGRESS & their Staffs. It's the largest Immigration NEWS ARchive on the net

    Here's the deal guys:
    post an article in it's entirety
    post the link with the article
    Thanks for 'showing me the ropes.' I was a little worried about copyrights if I copied the entire article.

  8. #8
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    Quote Originally Posted by Nouveauxpoor
    Quote Originally Posted by 2ndamendsis
    Thanx, MAYDAY!
    We have a lot of great new folks on Alipac and they're not quite used to the way we post.

    FYI: Especially our NEWS FORUM, which is used by numerous people including CONGRESS & their Staffs. It's the largest Immigration NEWS ARchive on the net

    Here's the deal guys:
    post an article in it's entirety
    post the link with the article
    Thanks for 'showing me the ropes.' I was a little worried about copyrights if I copied the entire article.
    That's why the LINK and Author must be provided {besides being verification}

    Glad to help
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    Quote...........Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are "anti-immigrant" and suggested they suffer from "rage" and "national chauvinism."



    NO Michael, we are not anti-immigrant. WE ARE ANTI-ILLEGAL.
    ye swe suffer from rage... Rage because the federal government ha not done a damn thing to slow or stop illegals. does not enforce laws on the books.
    and as far as having "national chauvinism" yes, we are that, we are DAMN PROUD of our country and dont want to be screwed over by elected officials who have no idea what they are doing cuz they are so out of touch with realiity that they dont know right from wrong anymore
    STUPID MORON

  10. #10
    Senior Member SOSADFORUS's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Nouveauxpoor
    Quote Originally Posted by 2ndamendsis
    Thanx, MAYDAY!
    We have a lot of great new folks on Alipac and they're not quite used to the way we post.

    FYI: Especially our NEWS FORUM, which is used by numerous people including CONGRESS & their Staffs. It's the largest Immigration NEWS ARchive on the net

    Here's the deal guys:
    post an article in it's entirety
    post the link with the article
    Thanks for 'showing me the ropes.' I was a little worried about copyrights if I copied the entire article.
    "Nouveauxpoor" Glad to have you with us!!!
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