Noonan Scores "Old Republicans" and Democrats in General

Bitch-in-Heat

"Tea Party to the Rescue" is Peggy Noonan's self-explanatory Op-Ed in the WSJ:

Two central facts give shape to the historic 2010 election. The first is not understood by Republicans, and the second not admitted by Democrats.

The first: the tea party is not a "threat" to the Republican Party, the tea party saved the Republican Party. In a broad sense, the tea party rescued it from being the fat, unhappy, querulous creature it had become, a party that didn't remember anymore why it existed, or what its historical purpose was. The tea party, with its energy and earnestness, restored the GOP to itself.

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Associated Press
In a practical sense, the tea party saved the Republican Party in this cycle by not going third-party. It could have. The broadly based, locally autonomous movement seems to have made a rolling decision, group by group, to take part in Republican primaries and back Republican hopefuls. (According to the Center for the Study of the American Electorate, four million more Republicans voted in primaries this year than Democrats, the GOP's highest such turnout since 1970. I wonder who those people were?)

Because of this, because they did not go third-party, Nov. 2 is not going to be a disaster for the Republicans, but a triumph.

This is a victory over GWB as much as it is over BHO:

The tea party did something the Republican establishment was incapable of doing: It got the party out from under George W. Bush. The tea party rejected his administration's spending, overreach and immigration proposals, among other items, and has become only too willing to say so. In doing this, the tea party allowed the Republican establishment itself to get out from under Mr. Bush: "We had to, boss, it was a political necessity!" They released the GOP establishment from its shame cringe.

And they not only freed the Washington establishment, they woke it up. That establishment, composed largely of 50- to 75-year-olds who came to Washington during the Reagan era in a great rush of idealism, in many cases stayed on, as they say, not to do good but to do well. They populated a conservative infrastructure that barely existed when Reagan was coming up: the think tanks and PR groups, the media outlets and governmental organizations. They did not do what conservatives are supposed to do, which is finish their patriotic work and go home, taking the knowledge and sophistication derived from Washington and applying it to local problems. (This accounts in part for the esteem in which former Bush budget chief and current Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is held. He went home.)

My wife had lunch with Mitch way back in the day and he was an unlikely hero of the Republican Renewal. And "shame cringe" is a good way to describe GWB as he was unjustly pilloried for Katrina & a number of untoward events completely unfairly, but NEVER TRIED TO DEFEND HIMSELF...! That sort of was the mantra for the Repubs..., never say you're sorry, but never say the Demonrats are a lying bunch of morons, most of all Dingy Harry and Botox Nancy...! If this is some sort of 'gentleman's agreement," it is certainly honored more in the breach by the Demonrats. They deserve MORE than the drubbing they're going to get at the polls next fortnight. But the obnoxious little creep and chronically wrong Fareed Zakaria quoth thus:

There is also this week a striking essay by Fareed Zakaria, no tea partier he, in Time magazine. He unknowingly touched on part of the reason for the tea party. Mr. Zakaria, born and raised in India, got his first sense of America's vitality, outsized ways, glamour and crazy high-spiritedness as a young boy in the late 1970s watching bootlegged videotapes of "Dallas." What a country! His own land, in comparison, seemed sleepy, hidebound. Now when he travels to India, "it's as if the world has been turned upside down. Indians are brimming with hope and faith in the future. After centuries of stagnation, their economy is on the move, fueling animal spirits and ambition. The whole country feels as if it has been unlocked." Meanwhile the mood in the U.S. seems glum, dispirited. "The middle class, in particular, feels under assault." Sixty-three percent of Americans say they do not think they will be able to maintain their current standard of living. "The can-do country is convinced that it can't."

That's because of a sclerotic GOP and an aggressively socialist Demonrat Obummer---both will be encircled in part by this new populism against 'death panels' and wars against the well-off and the over-the-hill waged by Demonrat shitheads. And Commissar Ron Klein and Citizen Prosecutor Wasserman-Schwartz [!?!] deserved to be dragged naked through the streets of South Florida behind a phalanx of Harleys manned by vets and over-the-hill bikers...!