Posted on 08/20/2009 7:24:00 PM PDT by St. Louis Conservative
Looking back, this must have been the White House health-care strategy:
Health care as a subject is extraordinarily sticky, messy and confusing. It's inherently complicated, and it's personal. There are land mines all over the place. Don't make the mistake the Clintons made and create a plan that gets picked apart, shot down, and injures the standing of the president. Instead, push it off on Congress. Let them come up with a dozen plans. It will keep them busy. It will convince them yet again of their importance and autonomy. It will allow them to vent, and perhaps even exhaust, their animal spirits. Various items and elements within each bill will get picked off by the public. Fine, that's to be expected. The bills may in fact yield a target-rich environment. Fine again. Maybe health care's foes will get lost in the din and run out of ammo. Maybe they'll exhaust their animal spirits, too.
Summer will pass, the fight confined to the public versus Congress. And at the end, in the fall, the beauty part: The president swoops in and saves the day, forcing together an ultimate and more moderate plan that doesn't contain the more controversial elements but does constitute a successful first step toward universal health care.
That's not what happened.
It all got hotter, quicker than the White House expected. The many plans of Congress congealed in the public mind into one plan, and the one plan became a poison pool. The president is now immersed in it.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Well what will her lib pals think of her now?
Ms Noonan is dead to me. Finger in the air, doing no lifting at all.
I guess odumbo didnt offer her a job
Peggy who?
Absolutely, 110% agreed. For each and every single "moderate"-leaning or Republican squish voter she managed to wheedle and con into voting for His Holiness, the Boy King, last year: she owes this nation (in general), and conservatism (in particular).
She is a little late to the game. I don’t really care what she thinks. She can have Obama and the rest of her liberal friends.
They’d never get it started. It’s not like Obama signs the bill and next week people are lining up at the Obamacare clinics; it takes years. A 2011 Congress with the GOP back in the forefront would, if it could not repeal the program outright over Obama’s veto, starve the setup of all funds. The toast would be completely done in 2013.
Peggy Noonan is an idiot. Too little too late, she is a schmuck
Her writing style alone completely turns me off. Nothing but elitist, hoity-toity bull—it filled with incorrect punctuation and grammar.
Well, she is a mine canary. If even Noonan is now saying it’s toast, well it’s toast.
the maureen dowd of the WSJ
“They’d never get it started. It’s not like Obama signs the bill and next week people are lining up at the Obamacare clinics; it takes years.”
if they handle it like they handled cash for clunkers, it will only last a few weeks once they finally set it up. Obama’s not just really liberal. He’s really incompetent.
Oh, and Ms. Noonan, there ISN’T “one plan” anyhow. You talk about a confusing plan, now toss together half a dozen.
She still sounds like a shallow elitist twit
A fascist Jimmy Carter in a browner hue.
I know this will be an unpopular view, given the above responses, but why don’t we gang up on Noonan, shall we?
If they've any sense, they should thank her. Because good-hearted Peggy isn't really criticizing the President -- she's trying to help him.
She isn't attacking the idea of socialized medicine -- she's criticizing the process, the tactics.
Peggy still doesn't recognize the enemy. She still wants Obama to succeed -- because he's the President! And, as a member of the Washington/New York establishment, she wants government to work!
At the same time, she doesn't much care (recognize?) what happens to the country as a consequence.
Peggy has flat run out of that "vision thing"...
she’s one of the reason Obama is in office. Her opinion means nothing.
Not crazy about what she's done either, but I do hope she's right about what she said above.
“It is” nothing but... “it is” filled...
She is actually trying to help Obama ease into a modest apology to get him beloved again in the public eye. She’s NOT on our side.
Luckily, he is far too vain to listen to her. (Because a humble apology for shoving too hard on this WOULD earn him sympathy from a lot of Americans.)
Even a dead clock is right twice a day.
Miss Peggy is yet another Washington insider who looks down her nose on the great unwashed. Her premise is any big legislation must pass the stupid test. If we little confused folk don’t get it, if it is not moron proof then is will go down in flames.
Well, screw you, Peg. We get it all too well. We also get your arrogance and it is not becoming.
Zakly, my FRiend. The Establishment wants to gummint to succeed, and the POTUS, even if he happens to be Charles Manson, to be liked. Because by being POTUS, he is assumed by the likes of Peggy to be good. It is time we realized that instead of throwing unoriginal insults at this good woman of the Establishment.
I give that a hearty double AMEN !
let’s take Sarah Palin’s article and noonan’s side by side. don’t tell people who wrote which. Now ask: who sounds like a vacuous ditz and who sounds like a well researched professional?
poor peggy
Death Panels killed it dead......Go Sarah.
The Republicans will win more seats in 2010 but for certain not enough to change the disaster and overcome Obama veto. If we do not win the Presidency in 2012 then the evil socialized medicine will be enacted.
that’s right. Her problem with obamacare is that it isn’t ‘clear.’ our problem is that it is very clear it is socialism
It’s on the way, and it and cap and tax will be timed to start 2013, so hussein will probably be a safe 2 termer.
I hope people don’t get too happy like we’ve ‘defeated’ anything at this point. The only chance is to somehow win big in 2012 and reverse it all. Fat chance I say, we’re in for some awful awful times.
She still hasn't given up on the Bush-bashing, either. Oh, 0bama can no longer safely engage in it but she still can - what of this assertion the Bush never showed a moment of wry self-criticism? He was, on the contrary, the most humane and approachable of men, as he showed with those raw, exquisitely painful and private moments with the relatives of the slain. What Peggy really means here is that he didn't pander to her; to her and to the entire Beltway-bound gaggle of pundits and press who flatter themselves a ruling class. He didn't humble himself before them. "It ended so well for him" indeed - she saw to every humiliation she and her colleagues could possibly devise. No points at all for humility, Peggy - your own.
BJ Billy Clinton got away with the health-care debacle because he had a fall guy, or more properly a fall gal, his wife. It was her failure, not his. Noonan is right that he was able to insulate the office of the President from the onus of that failure, but not through Congress, through Hillary. And the press played right along.
And it is lack of humility that has placed 0bama in position he now enjoys. It was to be not Congress's victory, assured through what even seasoned professionals mistook for a solid Democrat majority, but his own personal victory, flown in from the clouds on the wings of angels to rescue us all from whatever hell might be ascribed to his predecessor. At no point was he ever to be insulated from this, and yes, Noonan is correct, that was a major strategic error. Because the ground assumption of "hope and change" was infantile progressivism: that everything was wrong and anything else would be better. And the idiots believed every word of their own pious garbage.
And so we're left with another Clintonesque clunker with no Hillary to take the fall for it. The Dems are left with no middle ground between looking like thugs and looking weak. And with the choice of which will hurt them more in 2010.
As for Peggy, no, she still hasn't learned and she never will. This little grassfire wasn't lit by anyone she takes cocktails with on the East Coast. The Republicans there are nearly as frightened of it as the Democrats are because they're nearly as vulnerable. This one's coming from the people they all profess to speak for and not so secretly despise. There'll be plenty of humility to pass around long before this one's over.
The GOP simply has to refuse to vote for any bill with funding for the fiasco. Let the Rats face the furious civil servants.
I doubt that the global warming hoax tax bill will go forward. Barack Obama has already wasted all his political capital in this socialized medicine bill and he will get it but only after he sucked the political blood of every blue dog democrat, there will be no more political blood in them to suck and pass other disasters.
She's living in a dream world.
Ms. Noonan, if this president made the pretense that he "learned from this," that he is not what he really is -- a leftist with a radical agenda -- and we believed it (as you apparently are ready to), we would deserve the hell we would bring upon ourselves by doing so.
That is a good point about the funding, very goog point.
We’re only 6 months in.. 3 1/2 years is a loonnggggg time to pass more hell.
Hey Nooner, while you were eating your Brie and Chablis the Protesters were standing up and changing the World.
Pray for America and Our Troops
Sounds like you read the article. Wondered if anyone had. :)
That’s exactly what she did. She said the American people were too stupid to understand those high minded terms and were just voicing no on the theory if we don’t understand it’s not good. Guess she has completely ignored the confused politicians getting their butts handed to them by citizens quoting this legislation by verse. We know what’s in the bill THEY don’t.
She remains a complete waste of space.
“Luckily, he is far too vain to listen to her. (Because a humble apology for shoving too hard on this WOULD earn him sympathy from a lot of Americans.)”
LOL!!! *snort* This is getting too funny watching him step in it again and again!
Peggy throws the socialist muslim from Kenya under the bus? Obama’s real poll numbers are a disaster and Peggy is starting to jump from the sinking ship like a rat.
If the democrats pass the healthcare bill without broad conscensus, the next president will be elected simply by saying:
“I will recind this deplorable healthcare legislation which cheats seniors, condemns the disabled to an early death, and was passed with arrogant disregard for the will of the people.”
This one sentence will be more powerful than anything Obama ever said about the Iraq War.
After reading this week that the VA used infected equipment to perform colonoscopies on thousands of unsuspecting patients and some of whom have now contracted AIDS, Hepatitus B & C - I can pretty clearly envision where this kind of healthcare would go, a minor change for them. First I see the wealthy being taken on board ships in international waters; staffed by the greatest of medical teams. The average American however would receive the kenyan triage tent treatment, but it would begin only after ten newly legalized immigrants received theirs, it would be staffed by someone whose career was the equivalent of an underpaid vet waiting on the next chimpanzee. For this privilege I would pay but not be allowed to go because my employer would demand I have it to be hired in the first place. There would be no one to concern themselves should I resist or complain as the all-enveloping web of government would be there. No investments in technology would occur as that won’t be in the budget; although endless threats of encroaching budgetary catastrophe will mark every step of the way. I will spend uncalculated hours worrying about treatments for myself and loved-ones, and will be worried about everything the government decides to do or to do away with. The pharmaceuticals will still be there, for that is how chimps are treated: given a pill and told to be quiet. The entropy of services will have begun and life will no longer be regulated naturally but by the State; hours of sleep, wakefulness, productivity, rest, activity and liesure will assume a whole different proportion than they once did once they are mandated, restricted and made part of an interlocking system. Alcohol, tobacco and other staples of the average man will disappear and be replaced with newer forms of pharmaceutical tranquilizers, mood-inhibitors and behaviour-modifiers. In the end a blue or red pill will be all that one receives of heaven or nirvana. People will not be cleaner or healthier or more caring or receptive, on the contrary the will be careless and unconcerned, vapid and venal, cruel and stupid - like the british hooligans who maim their neighbor for sport a la clockwork orange. This way lies dystopia and the great outrage on mankind.
I am so tired of Noonan sleeping until Noonan.
I guess we’re a bunch of masochists.
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