It is time to let him go

The effortlessly brilliant Peggy Noonan has hit the nail on the head.

For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don't like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don't like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad.

But on immigration it has changed from "Too bad" to "You're bad."

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."

I love our president. He was absolutely the right man (I believe, God's appointed man) for the right time for our nation. No one can argue that Algore would have performed nearly to the degree that W did after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

But, for some inexplicable reason, on the issue of amnesty for illegal immigrants, honest people can no longer disagree. On this issue it's his way or you must be a fear monger.

President Bush sounded like he hoped to sever ties with the remaining 30 percent who like him when he went after critics in his party this week over opposition to his latest immigration plan.

"If you want to scare the American people, what you say is the bill's an amnesty bill," Bush said during a stop in Glynco, Ga. "That's empty political rhetoric, trying to frighten our citizens."

It was his harshest public backhand yet to the conservative bloggers, commentators, politicians and CNN anchor Lou Dobbs, all gassing about how the bill amounts to amnesty.

It is time to let him go. He never was a true conservative. Let him hoist his lack of conservativeness on his own petard.