Peggy Noonan on George W. Bush

Noonan, one of Ronald Reagan's speechwriters, spent much of her Wall Street Journal column on Bill Clinton, then wound up all too briefly with this truth:

George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues.

Bush has done quite a job of uniting the country. Democrats, Libertarians, and plenty of Republicans unite in detesting him, all too often for the same reasons.

Still, the Republican Party was already worth throwing out: they sold their soul for the so-called War on Drugs, which was no such thing. It is a war on American citizens who prefer the wrong medical & recreational substances, a war on their own claimed cause of Federalism, and a war on the Constitution. See HERE for a good short summary (written by Jonathan Adler before the decision was handed down) of how George Bush's federal government stomped Angel McClary Raich's face into the mud, and Federalism along with it. For more, written by Randy Barnett, one of the lawyers who argued the case, see here.

When it gets down to it, George Bush and the Republican anti-drug warriors utterly destroyed the the Commerce Clause's restrictions on federal intrusion into state matters. Now the Republicans can safely pontificate about the importance of Federalism, secure in the knowledge that they have quite deliberately, utterly destroyed one of its most important bulwarks.

The Democrats were right: Bush should have been impeached.