THE DAILY BLADE: Bush Fears For Nation's Soul; Peggy Noonan Fears For Bush's Soul
In an interview aboard Air Force One last week with Ron Hutcheson of McClatchy Newspapers, President Bush said:
"I'm deeply concerned about America losing its soul. Immigration has been the lifeblood of a lot of our country's history. And I am worried that a backlash to newcomers would cause our country to lose its great capacity to assimilate newcomers. And I believe that a newly arrived adds to the vigor and the entrepreneurial spirit, and enhances the American Dream.”
These sentiments, coupled with Bush's suggestion that opponents of his compromised immigration compromise "don't want to do what's right for America," are driving conservatives to apoplexy. The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan contends that Bush broke faith with conservatives, not the other way around:
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. …
You don't like endless gushing spending … 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."
Noonan makes the case that it's déjà vu all over again:
[T]he Bushes, father and son … 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. … Mr. Bush won in 1988 by saying he would govern as Reagan had. … [H]e raised taxes, sundered a hard-won coalition, and found himself shocked to lose his party the presidency, and for eight long and consequential years. ….
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. …
There's only one thing conservatives and Republicans can do now, says Noonan: “[W]in back their party.” She adds that “breaking from those who have already broken from [you]” and “letting go … will be painful, but it's time. It's more than time.”
The question is, how?
Deep down - maybe not so deep down - conservatives always knew Bush was a pretender, mouthing the right words and making the right gestures. But conservatives voted for him anyway, the first time to pre-empt "a third Clinton term" and the second time because the thought of John Kerry as a post-9/11 Commander in Chief was nightmare-inducing.
This was a shot-gun wedding and after eight years of Bush, conservatives are understandably gun-shy. But holding out for an imaginary ideal of ideological purity is not the answer. And allowing Hillary Clinton to capture the White House by staying home on Election Day is not an option.
There may be a third way: A new conservative coalition that crosses party lines to include anyone who considers himself center-right. Such a coalition could as easily support a conservative Republican as a “Blue Dog” Democrat. Since neither party would be able to count on the bipartisan bloc’s vote, both will court these voters and neither will take them for granted. As an added benefit, the sheer size of this bipartisan bloc may be an equal and opposing force against the inexorable leftward pull the moonbats are exerting on the Dem party platform.
Of the 19 declared presidential candidates as of this writing, Rudy Giuliani is the most logical choice to forge this new coalition of conservatives. He is enough of a social liberal to attract Reagan Democrats, and tough enough on crime and terrorism - with the added bonus of being fiscally conservative - to attract conservatives who are putting social issue on the back burner this time around.
Over the next 18 months, several home-grown Muslim terror plots are likely to come to light - such as the thwarted plan to blow up aviation fuel tanks and feeder lines running underground from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport through surrounding residential neighborhoods in Queens. Each time, more social conservatives will conclude that preventing the aborting of the lives of the already born in acts of terrorism is at least as important as preventing the aborting of babies yet unborn.
Clarification: This item was cross-posted on Free Republic. Some readers who just skimmed it or did not click on the supporting links were unclear as to whether Peggy Noonan is supporting Rudy Giuliani's candidacy. As The Stiletto has not put the question to Noonan, she cannot say one way or the other. In her article, Noonan stated that it's time conservatives took back the Republican Party. The Stiletto offered an alternative scenario: Conservatives who are taken for granted by the Republican party and completely marginalized by the Democrat party should join forces to form a new center-right voting bloc that may support a conservative Republican in one election cycle, then a "Blue Dog" Dem in the next. Some FReepers got the concept of a conservative coalition that is divorced from the Republican party and were willing to entertain the proposal - though just about no one agreed with The Stiletto’s choice of Rudy Giuliani to create the bridge to conservative Dems in the 2008 election, solely because he is pro-abortion. Like Peter King, Steve Forbes and other pro-life conservatives, The Stiletto has made the carefully thought-out decision to emphasize national security over social issues this election cycle. Since abortion, gun control and other issues that get social conservatives all in an uproar are not even within the purview of the executive branch, The Stiletto feels she would be throwing her vote away if she ruled any candidate in or out based on one of these issues, instead of which one would make the toughest Commander in Chief in these perilous times. Take abortion, for instance. Even if the Supreme Court were to overturn Roe v. Wade, each state legislature would get the chance to pass laws banning or allowing it. Nowhere in this scenario does the president - any president - figure in. That’s why some pro-life conservatives can entertain the idea of supporting Rudy, at least this time around. Of course, if Fred Thompson gets in the race and proves that he is not just an empty suit, or Newt Gingrich gets in the race and proves he is not just an egghead, then The Stiletto will reassess her current inclination to support Rudy.
When Is A Church Not A Church?
International man of mystery and Hudson Institute fellow Richard Miniter visits the island of Akhtamar in Lake Van, Turkey, to see the newly restored Church of the Holy Cross - one of the holiest sites for Armenian Christians - for himself at the opening ceremonies: Our story starts with a small sandstone 10th-century Armenian church, on an uninhabited rock less than 500 yards wide, in a remote Turkish lake that changes colors like moods and sometimes bubbles like soda. If you had seen the ruins of it, as I did in 2000, you might cry. Its roof was gone. Its bas-reliefs, chiseled by master carvers a millennium ago, of Adam and Eve, of saints and kings, were wearing away in the wind. It was an empty husk that had not heard a Mass in more than 90 years. In March, after years of painstaking restoration, Turkey reopened the church as a museum. Among the ambassadors and visitors at the opening ceremonies, I roamed the grounds. The building is now magnificent. Its roof is restored and its reliefs cleaned. After noting that Armenian Christians once made up a third of the population around Van, Miniter dutifully gives “both sides of the story” about why there are few Armenians still living in Van today: While most Turkish historians concede there was a massacre of Armenians (while pointing out that Armenians slaughtered Turks from 1890 to 1915 and that most Armenians were relocated, not slain), they hesitate to call it genocide. The Armenians do not hesitate - and sometimes compare it to the Holocaust. Unfortunately, Miniter’s knowledge of history is a bit spotty, because the period of time that Armenians are supposed to have been slaughtering Turks coincides with the Hamidian Massacres from 1894 to 1897 and the Adana Massacre in April 1909, a year after the Young Turks seized power in a military coup. According to various estimates, between 80,000 to 300,000 Armenians were slaughtered in the Hamidian Massacres, and another 20,000 to 30,000 in the Adana Massacre. Armenians were not indiscriminately murdering Turks; they were protecting their families and their villages. The Great Massacres were followed by the Armenian Genocide, the systematic annihilation of Armenian men, women and children meant to finish the job Sultan Hamid began. In fact, Miniter's story does not start with the restoration of the Church of the Holy Cross, but with what happened to the Armenians of Van – and how the monastery fell into ruins. Here, an excerpt from "The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War," by architecture and design critic Robert Bevan (Reaktion Books Ltd., 2006): After a period of beatings and deaths, the genocide began on 23 April 1915 with the rounding up and murder of thousands of Armenian community leaders. Systematic mass murder followed throughout Turkey. Men and women were often separated and the men murdered immediately or sent to death camps, such as those at Ras-Ul-Ain and Deir-el-Zor. Those who survived the sadistic deportations were forced into permanent exile. Armenian churches, monuments, quarters and towns were destroyed in the process. Some Armenians were burned alive in their places of worship. … In the genocide whole cities lost their Armenian populations, including the historic Armenian city of Van. More than 50,000 Armenians were killed and the city itself was almost entirely flattened (apart from two mosques) and the new Kurdish city of Van rebuilt nearby. Armenian property not destroyed during the massacres was transferred to the ownership of the Turkish state in September 1915. … A survey, not in itself comprehensive, prepared in 1914 by the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople listed 2,549 religious sites under its control, including more than 200 monasteries and 1,600 churches. Many were destroyed in the process of the genocide but many more have since been vandalized, flattened or converted to mosques or barns. In contrast to Kristallnacht, where the destruction of architecture offered a warning of worse to come, the Turks have continued to remove, stone by stone, the evidence of millennia of Armenian architectural and art history following the mass murder and exile of the Armenian people. [Note: Emphasis throughout, The Stiletto’s.] Bevan's central thesis is that throughout history, crimes against humanity have been followed by attacks on architecture (what he terms “cultural cleansing”). Not content to have stolen the future of the Armenian people by very nearly destroying their entire gene pool, the Ottoman Turks and their successors sought to erase all traces of this ancient people's past from the region. Had they succeeded, it would have been as though the Armenians never existed; in time, their cities and monuments would have been the stuff of legend, like the lost city of Atlantis. Miniter praises the "spirit of compromise" that led to the restoration of the structure as a museum, not a house of worship (imagine, the Church of the Holy Cross has no cross!). Turkey is 99.8 percent Muslim and its remaining Armenian population of roughly 60,000 does not feel free to live and worship openly as Armenians and as Christians (video link). What Miniter mistakes as compromise is more accurately described as resignation. Editorial Note: According to Bevan, the Church of the Holy Cross was restored only after years of international pressure, and was accomplished with Armenian money - not funds from the Turkish government, as Miniter has it in his article.
Another excellent book (whose author's name has unfortunately slipped my mind) about the Armenian genocide is "The Cross and the Crescent." It has plenty of eyewitness accounts, letters, etc.
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Thank you so much for this information. The Stiletto will go out and buy the book, as she has a lot to learn to stay one step ahead of the Genocide Deniers, minimizers, and those who "don't exactly know what happend way back then" despite all the photos, eyewitness accounts and third-party documentation.
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While I appreciate your desire to sideline social conservatives through pushing Rudy, your vehicle of choice won't run.
Giuliani is one of the biggest immigration panderers in history. Not only was New York a sanctuary city, but Giuliani sued the federal government over the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, to ensure that New York could continue to provide benefits to illegal aliens.
Rudy turned the terrorist attack by a gunman on the roof of the Empire State Building into a platform for GUN CONTROL.
There are many reasons to support Rudy, but immigration-enforcement and terrorism aren't one of them.
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The Stiletto shares many of the same concerns as social conservatives - anti-abortion, anti-embryonic stem cell research, anti-illegal immigration, pro-Second Amendment - but is not a single-issue voter, especially when the supposedly disqualifying issue is symbolic and beyond the president's constitutional purview.
You disagree with The Stiletto on the suitability of Rudy as the Republican nominee. Fair enough. But the idea that conservative Republicans and conservative Dems should divorce themselves from their respective parties to form a fluid bloc that can support either a suitable Republican candidate or a suitable Blue Dog Dem is worth debating.
Conservatives are taken for granted in the Republican party and marginalized in the Dem party. It's time for all of us who are right of center to join forces - irrespective of party label - and form a new coalition. What do you think of this idea? And, of the 19 declared candidates, who should be the standard bearer of his new coalition?
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