Back in the USSR

There's a not entirely insane Peggy Noonan column in Thursday's Wall Street Journal online, although with the baseline being her longstanding claim that God and the dolphins brought Cuban non-defector Elian Gonzalez to Florida, maybe our standards are too low for this contribution. It meanders over several different themes but at its core is Peggy's recent discovery, along with other conservatives, that George Bush is a Big Spender. Now such insight makes Peggy another nominee in the crowded field of candidates for the Claude Raines Gambling Awareness award, but she goes on at sufficient length to indicate that she's actually worried about it, and that it's not just a convenient bit of non-election year posturing.

Anyway, to what she says. First and foremost, she's upset at the trend towards implied criticism of her real hero, Ronald Reagan:

This week it was the e-mail of a high White House aide informing us that Ronald Reagan spent tons of money bailing out the banks in the savings-and-loan scandal. This was startling information to Reaganites who remembered it was a fellow named George H.W. Bush who did that. Last month it was the president who blandly seemed to suggest that Reagan cut and ran after the attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon.

Now Bush and Cheney have been using that line about Reagan and the Marine barracks for years*, which certainly puts in a different light in the hysterical declarations of Powerline, Time Magazine's blog of the year, that:

In recent years, the Democrats have violated many of the tacit conventions of civility that have enabled our political system to work for more than two centuries.

Back to Peggy -- right after the above clip, there's a weird segue:

Before that, Mr. Mehlman was knocking previous generations of Republican leaders who just weren't as progressive as George W. Bush on race relations.

Wait a minute, who had previously said anything about Mr. Mehlman? The standard writing style would be mention Ken Mehlman and his position as chairman of the Republican National Committee, and then later refer to Mr Mehlman. So in her mind, Peggy had referred to him before -- perhaps in that e-mail from the unnamed White House aide that had slammed Reagan over the S&L crisis. This e-mail was widely cited, without sourcing, in the conservative blogs, but Peggy in effect names the source with that slip. Interesting to go back and see who gets their talking points from the Republican National Commitee.

Peggy opened her article with what we thought was her strongest point -- a description of the thought process of Republicans as they justify to themselves Dubya's spending spree:

In his Katrina policy the president is telling Democrats, "You can't possibly outspend me. Go ahead, try. By the time this is over Dennis Kucinich will be crying uncle, Bernie Sanders will be screaming about pork."

And once again, the ghost of the Gipper lurks, in the rationale that OK, we're going overboard, but in doing so we'll strain the other guys to the point of collapse. Because what is this but a replay of Reagan's defence build-up? Remember the original basis for this was a bunch of conservatives generating their own intelligence on Soviet weapons, declaring that it was much more extensive than the CIA thought, rationalising a huge response by the USA. Except that it eventually became clear that there were no such Soviet weapons, and a new rationale was needed for the previous action -- that the US would spend the USSR into oblivion.

[As a side note, one benefit of this experience was the White House would never again let itself be misled by politicised intelligence into taking radical military action that would later turn out to be unfounded]

Overall, the message is that the Reagan and Bush II legacies might not play quite so well together. Could it be that the Republicans new found interest in spending restraint allows for only one extra head on Mount Rushmore?

*UPDATE 4 OCT -- the Beirut line is alive and well despite Peggy's tirade; Dick Cheney in Camp Lejeune, NC, on 3 Oct:

In Beirut in 1983, terrorists killed 241 Americans -- and you're well aware of that attack because most of those men were Marines from Camp Lejeune, members of the First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment.

Following that attack, the United States forces were withdrawn from Beirut.

And again, on the 5th, in Washington: And they grew bolder in their belief that if they killed enough Americans, they could change American policy. In Beirut in 1983, terrorists killed 241 Americans. Following the attack, the United States forces were withdrawn from Beirut.