We didn't need another reason to avoid reading the
slippery Peggy Noonan, but she gave us one anyway.
Still in awe of the Dear Leader whose news conference Wednesday
night was in her words "a bit of a masterpiece," in her Friday
Wall
Street Journal column Noonan shows that she has become a
captive of liberal conventional wisdom on yet another issue.
Noonan implies that the Republican Party is too conservative and
as such it forced liberal Sen. Arlen Specter to defect to the
Democrats. Noonan complained that the people inside the party
"can't always be kicking people out of the tent. A great party
cannot live by constantly subtracting, by removing or shunning
those who are not faithful to every aspect of its beliefs, or who
don't accept every pole, or who are just barely fitting under the
tent," she wrote. "Room should be made for them. Especially in
those cases when Republican incumbents and candidates are
attempting to succeed in increasingly liberal states, a certain
practical sympathy is in order."
If only the party had kicked some people out of the
tent years ago, but I digress.
Like Specter who complained he was "ostracized" for voting for
President Obama's disgraceful $787 billion stimulus package -the
biggest spending bill in the history of the Republic- Noonan
treats his vote for the measure as just another vote.
It's not.
It was, as conservatives saw it, the Mother of All Votes, and it
capped a long career of giving the finger to conservatives. That
single vote - which among other things erased the landmark
Clinton welfare reforms, helped lay the foundation for socialized
medicine and expand Leviathan's reach- gave the nation's left a
forward momentum that it hasn't had since the days of LBJ.
Mere ostracism is far too mild a punishment for Specter for such
a shocking betrayal of his party.
Specter's pissed off and alienated conservatives for decades, and
Noonan thinks conservatives should just grin and bear it. She
chastises Republicans for "too much ferocity, and
bloody-mindedness."
For the record,
party apparatchiks bent over backwards to accommodate
Specter. As recently as two weeks ago the National Republican
Senate Committee backed Specter for reelection in 2010 over the
infinitely more conservative Pat Toomey. This was, it's worth
noting, even after Specter's vote for the infamous "porkulus"
bill.
It was only after Specter saw his abysmal polling numbers against
Toomey that he decided his future was bleak in the Republican
Party. He admitted this fact.
The
Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Specter said he made
the decision to change parties after the results from one of his
own polls came in on April 24. "The most important number was the
approval rating - it dropped from the 60s to 31" percent in the
last few months, Specter was quoted as saying.
Specter switched parties to save his skin, yet he self-servingly
whined in front of reporters about how the GOP supposedly left
him and how the big, bad Club for Growth picked on him. As CNN
reports
Veteran Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter said Sunday that he
hopes his recent switch to the Democratic Party will serve as a
"wake-up call" to an increasingly conservative GOP.
He also once again assigned some blame for the recent decline
of the Republican Party to the political advocacy group Club
for Growth, which targets moderate GOP incumbents who do not
adhere to the doctrine of supply-side economics.
Club for Growth fought Specter's GOP renomination in 2004 and
was set to oppose him again in the 2010 primary.
"It would be my hope ... that this would be a wake-up call and
the [GOP] would move for a broader big tent like we had under
Reagan," Specter said on CBS's "Face the Nation."
"The party has changed so much since I was elected in 1980," he
said.
On this last point, Specter's right. The party has become much
more liberal (like him) since he was elected - and that's a
shame.
