I don’t really know who Peggy Noonan is, other than an op-ed writer for the Wall Street Journal, but given firedoglake’s reaction to her recent piece, I’ll assume she’s conservative. She’s saying that Bush has “torn the conservative coalition asunder”. FDL casts this as conservatives distancing themselves from Bush while not admitting they have to sleep in the bed they made, but whatever. Here’s the part that got me:

The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic–they “don’t want to do what’s right for America.” His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, “We’re gonna tell the bigots to shut up.” On Fox last weekend he vowed to “push back.” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want “mass deportation.” Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are “anti-immigrant” and suggested they suffer from “rage” and “national chauvinism.”

Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of opponents who are concerned citizens? And often, though not exclusively, concerned conservatives? It is odd, but it is of a piece with, or a variation on, the “Too bad” governing style. And it is one that has, day by day for at least the past three years, been tearing apart the conservative movement.

I suspect the White House and its allies have turned to name calling because they’re defensive, and they’re defensive because they know they have produced a big and indecipherable mess of a bill…

What. WHAT. I mean I had a hard time getting together the will to write this entry, because reading this, re-reading this, it just sticks me between high amusement, wall-punching anger, and the uselessness of saying anything at all. I’m really freakin’ indignant about this, I want to go all how dare she about it, which is an unusual place for me to be.

Now. Now it’s a problem, the dehumanizing, the straw man attacks? Years of Democrats being cut-and-runners, of “wanting America to fail”, of “providing comfort to the enemy”, of “not supporting the troops”, of (one of my personal favorites) “calling the troops ‘losers’“. Of course you haven’t had to deal with this, the neocons have mostly been in lockstep for years. But now that people are starting to understand that Bush is a fuckup and it’s not verboten to think of him as less than an emperor king, there’s dissent on this immigration bill. So they pull out the same goddamn guns they’ve been using for liberal opposition for years, turn it on their own base, and this dink is surprised and shocked, shocked by this turn of events.

As I’ve said before, I am more often drawn to the way an argument is conducted, over the subject of the argument itself. And I’ve watched this over and over, these neocons using the same buzzwords, the same bent logic, the same intellectually dishonest reasoning to (somehow effectively!) control the debate in their favor. And now, some conservatives are the target of it, and OH NO NOW BUSH IS A MEANIEHEAD WHEN HE’S BEEN SO GODDAMN WONDERFUL UP TO THIS POINT, HOW CAN THIS BE.

Goddamnit.