The National Review Also Gets Letters

The Corner also engages in the irritating practice of posting letters that express views that are in agreement with yours, but are so laughable that you are afraid to express them and so only do it via proxy. Here is one such example

Peggy Noonan wrote this in 2002. I think she was right then and I think this is what we're seeing now too:

The reason is Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The reason is that GWB is doing an FDR.

And I think people know this without quite knowing it.

FDR would sacrifice anything, he'd tack left right and center, to win World War II. You can almost literally trace the end of FDR's New Deal legislation to the beginning of the war in Europe in September 1939. Yes, the court-packing scandal had something to do with it, and so did the Supreme Court finding aspects of the New Deal unconstitutional. But after Hitler moved on Poland, Roosevelt sacrificed almost all his liberal domestic plans, angering his own supporters and disappointing his party's interest groups, in order to mollify conservatives and refocus voters' attention away from the Depression and onto the war. He knew he would need broadened support to execute a war. He disappointed much of his base to get it.

Mr. Bush is doing the same thing. He is accepting what he thinks he has to accept (pork, a bad trade bill) in order to keep or expand the power balance he has in Washington, and in order to keep from angering or offending your basic, normal, politically nonobsessed citizen.

Shorter The Corner: FDR+Lincoln+Washington+Woodrow Wilson+Reagan+Jesus Christ=George W. Bush

I guess that enormous and unpopular 2003 capital gains tax cut that Bush rammed through congress was meant to show how much he was willing to compromise his domestic agenda in the name of the war on terror and in the spirit of national untiy. Thank goodness that Bush isn't as a divisive figure as Howard Dean, otherwise we might be at the mercy of a lunatic whose minor foibles are known to us (rather than presented as virtues by his crotching sniffing lapdogs in the press).