Founding the Republican Future. In a Friday op-ed, Peggy Noonan has what might appear to be a fair piece of advice for Obama-- He'd better prevent another major terrorist attack like 9-11. Referring to a recent report on the dangers of terrorists getting loose nukes, Noonan warns the Obama administration to take such reports seriously. "When Republicans say, in coming years, "At least Bush kept us safe," Democrats will not want tacked onto the end of that sentence, "unlike Obama."

The idea that "at least Bush kept us safe" has become the Republican mantra concerning the Bush administration. At a Republican Christmas gathering that Noonan visited,

[t]here was . . . considerable grousing about the Bush administration, but it was almost always followed by one sentence, and this is more or less what it was: "But he kept us safe." In the seven years since 9/11, there were no further attacks on American soil. This is an argument that's been around for a while but is newly re-emerging as the final argument for Mr. Bush . . .[T]he meme will likely linger. There's a rough justice with the American people. If a president presides over prosperity, whether he had anything to do with it or not, he gets the credit. If he has a recession, he gets the blame. The same with war, and terrorist attacks. We have not been attacked since 9/11. Someone—someones—did something right.

Noonan gets this wrong. The "at least Bush kept us safe" meme isn't going to die, but it's going to continue in the American media because the Republicans think they need it to continue. The American public certainly doesn't buy the idea that "Bush kept us safe." Otherwise, Bush's approval ratings would be in the 50's rather than the 20's and John McCain wouldn't have had to avoid the White House like the plague. I'd like to see Noonan can test her idea of rough justice. She can have Bush drop his social service protection, move to a city like Philadelphia and see how he's welcomed. Maybe he can drop into the bar where Atrios and his cronies hang out. Call me pessimistic, but I suspect he wouldn't be receiving a lot of congratulations for "keeping us safe."

However, the Republican Party's instinct seems to be that promoting Bush's legacy is the key to their future as a political party. And the idea that "Bush kept us safe" is the foundation on which they're going to try to rehabilitate the Bush administration and the Republican Party. The logic for the GOP is that the "fact" that "Bush kept us safe" justifies other "controversial" policies like the invasion of Iraq, Guantanamo, extraordinary rendition, torture, and warrantless wiretapping as "actions that kept us safe." For the Republican Party, all of these actions are manifestations of core attitudes toward other countries, international law, and the "liberal values" that militate against the invasion of individual privacy, arbitrary imprisonment, and torture. Conservative Republicans have a profound commitment to swaggering belligerence toward other countries, disdain for international law, and the kind of psychological and physical brutality exercised on terrorist suspects at Guantanomo and other facilities. If they want to be able to advocate these core values in the future, the Republicans have to mount a defense of the Bush administration.

Otherwise, the Republican Party would have to change their core values and the Republicans have made it clear already that they reject that kind of change.

That's why the ideological struggle over the Bush legacy will be one of the key arenas of partisan politics over the next eight years.