The Wall Street Journal columnist doesn’t have much good to say about the GOP today. She lobs especially strong criticism at Republicans in Congress:
Many are ambivalent, deep inside, about the decisions
made the past seven years in the White House. But they’ve publicly
supported it so long they think they . . . support it. They get
confused. Late at night they toss and turn in the antique mahogany
sleigh bed in the carpeted house in McLean and try to remember what it
is they really do think, and what those thoughts imply.And those are the bright ones. The rest are in Perpetual 1980: We have the country, the troops will rally in the fall.
“This was a real wakeup call for us,” someone named
Robert M. Duncan, who is chairman of the Republican National Committee,
told the New York Times. This was after Mississippi. “We can’t let the
Democrats take our issues.” And those issues would be? “We can’t let
them pretend to be conservatives,” he continued. Why not? Republicans
pretend to be conservative every day.
This reminds me of our recent conversation on the same topic:
There were two generations of conservative leaders who went to
Washington, and some of them tried to do big things, but many of them
tried to simply self-perpetuate, and they took on the ways of
Washington. They became big spenders, government control people,
bullies, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They have made the political
philosophy that they sprang from appear to be somewhat discredited.
Well, it?s a big and vibrant thing. It can?t be discredited by them.
They are mere punks. But it?s not looking so good at the moment, you
know, and you?ve got to be frank about that. Can it come back? Of
course it can.
