Let’s see, where was I? Right. The failures of the Bush administration. Arriving a tad late to the party, Peggy Noonan has issued a call to conservatives, even Republicans, to dump the president.

The beginning of my own sense of
separation from the Bush administration came in January 2005, when the
president declared that it is now the policy of the United States to
eradicate tyranny in the world, and that the survival of American
liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation. This was at
once so utopian and so aggressive that it shocked me. For others the
beginning of distance might have been Katrina and the incompetence it
revealed, or the depth of the mishandling and misjudgments of Iraq.

(snip)

Now conservatives and Republicans
are going to have to win back their party. They are going to have to
break from those who have already broken from them. This will require
courage, serious thinking and an ability to do what psychologists used
to call letting go. This will be painful, but it’s time. It’s more than
time.

Rod Dreher, as Andrew Sullivan points out, thinks those who have supported Bush ought not revise history so as to

portray ourselves as passive victims of a feckless president. Not
saying she [Noonan] does this, but I think as the last wheel comes off this
presidency, and the GOP comes to grips with what this presidency has
meant for the Republican Party and the conservative movement, there
will be a strong temptation to resist owning up to our own complicity.
Success has a thousand fathers, after all, and failure is an orphan.
This failure is not President Bush’s alone. The Republican Party owns
it. The conservative movement, with some exceptions, owns it.

Read the rest of Rod’s tough, spot-on commentary right here.