Ever since Bush accused his own party of being "fearmongers" and of "trying to scare the American people" and--oh boy, this was the BEST one--being "unpatriotic"--my oh my, it's like being in a metaphorical-cliche shoe store.

You know:  If the shoe fits.

And: putting the shoe on the other foot.

Or, maybe a better cliche would be more culinary:  They can dish it out but they can't take it.

Yeah.  It seems that "unpatriotic" dig was Bush going TOO FAR!!!!

And it has been slyly amusing to watch the howling ensue.  What has been especially entertaining is the Bush loyalists are going into their usual attack-mode that we have grown oh-so-accustomed-to since the man first started to run for president in 1999, only now they're attacking THEIR OWN.

And the attackees are SO OFFENDED and INSULTED.

But I think what really struck me was when I actually found myself reading an essay by Peggy Noonan, Reagan's former speechwriter.

And AGREEING with it.

I've never been able to stand Peggy Noonan.  She has this soft, sanctimonious voice with perfect school-marm enunciation.

PER-FEC-T.

And it has always grated on my nerves, especially because that tone was always so scolding of anyone not-Republican or not-conservative or not-HER.  So I usually avoid having to listen to or even read her whenever I can.

But somehow, this piece fell in my lap, and I started to read, and the interesting thing is that, all you have to do is take out the words "conservative movement" or "conservatives" and stick in either "Democrats" or "Americans" or "human beings," and the meaning is the same.

And that is where the true tragedy lies.  All the hyper-offended conservative howlers who find what Bush has said so insulting have not bothered to take one moment--

One moment, please.

--To realize that THIS IS WHAT WE PROGRESSIVES HAVE HAD TO DEAL WITH, REALLY, SINCE THE NEWT DAYS BUT ESPECIALLY THE ROVE DAYS!

This COUNTRY has been fear-mongered on a massive scale, and ANYONE disagreeing with them has been labeled unpatriotic.  And it has damn near ripped the fabric that weaves the American people together in half.

But I would like to repeat much of what Noonan said, here.  The Wall Street Journal reaches a lot of Republican and Independent minds, and surely at least a few of them, somewhere, will realize the exquisite irony of it all.

And maybe, just maybe, we will begin to see a tipping point away from such tactics as fear-mongering and name-calling. 

I mean, now that they see how it feels.  How unfair and unjustified just because they happen to disagree.  AND, how bad it makes the name-callers really look.

Her piece is called, Too Bad, and here are a few selections:

...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...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 guys are just figuring that out?)

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.  (Again, "conservative Bush supporters"?  Hell, the WHOLE DAMN COUNTRY has felt beaten and abused, because it has been.  And ridiculed.  And taken for granted.  And manipulated.)

But on immigration it has changed from "Too bad" to "You're bad."   (Ahhh, now we're gettin' to the interesting stuff.)

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."  (I don't know about you guys but I'm shocked SHOCKED I TELL YOU!)

Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of opponents who are concerned citizens? (Yes, one wonders wryly.  WHY.  Could it have anything to do with the fact that Republican enablers have allowed Bush/Rove/Cheney et al to keep beating their figurative wives by covering for them time and time again?)  And often, though not exclusively, concerned conservatives? (Not exclusively, indeed.  Lots of other concerned citizens have been beaten.  Repeatedly.)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.   (As per above:  substitute "the country" for "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. (Oh, Lord.  That one's so rich I hardly know where to begin.  But can you spell P-A-T-R-I-O-T  A-C-T?) 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.  (You don't say.)

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!  (Hmmm.  Aren't they using this same tactic to prolong a losing war?  I think Rummy put it best when he paid a visit to beleagured, exhausted, beat-up troops on the ground in Iraq as he left office and comforted them with the stirring and inspirational words: "History will show that I am right.")

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...(Oh God no.  That would require governing.  That would require LEADERSHIP.) They could feel some confidence. And in that confidence real progress could begin.

In her next, heart-wrenching paragraphs, (to neo-cons) she talks about her own personal tipping point away from the Bush administration--his declaration of ending tyranny in the world, which she found to be "so utopian and so aggressive it shocked me."  (Yeah, you and six billion other people.)  She helpfully points out Katrina, the war in Iraq, and so on.

But then she did pinpoint something for which we all hunger, I must say:

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.

Then she talks about how both Bushes came into office with a sense of entitlement, and both proceeded to squander whatever good their predecessors had done, how Bush the younger "threw away his inheritance.  I do not understand such squandering."  (Yeah, well, you put imperialist bastards in the White House, don't be surprised if they proceed to behave like, well, imperialist bastards.)

Noonan concludes by a rallying cry for Republicans to "win back their party," whatever the hell that means, and I lost my warm-fuzzy feelings after that.

Still, I do find this new neo-con outrage toward the White House to be most instructive to the rest of us battered wives that make up the republic, abused and beaten by a tyrant in the White House.  (That remark--"tyrant in the White House"--was not mine.  It came from my conservative sister.  I'm tellin' ya.)

There's only one thing to do when one finds oneself abused.

Get the hell out.  And don't look back.