They all read "Rules for Radicals".
Noonan is dead to me.
Low information pundit
No @#%# Peggy, how does she make the big bucks writing this stuff now and we have known about this forever!!!!
I liked her description of the airheads in meetings at the White House. It rings true. I attended many such meetings in my time in government.
Peggy may be personal non-grata here, but this is some good stuff, well worth the extended read.
No one in the WH fits that description better than 0bungles hisself. Maximum Affirmative Action in inaction.
They run around tweeting, all of them, even those in substantial positions. “Darfur government inadequate. Genocide unacceptable.” They share their feelings –
Krauthammer nailed 0bama on that. The presidency of rhetoric. 0bungles actually thinks he can alter reality with rhetoric.
Can’t stand elitist snobs like Piggy Noonan, but I’ll put up with her long enough to read the article if it scores some bulls-eyes on these idiots in the white house.
Just like you, Peggy.
Everyone understands in their own rough way that ObamaCare is a big mess. And that it’s not the website, it’s the law itself.
Which we've been saying on FR for months now. If your model is a Mongolian cluster-folk dance, your program is going to look like a Mongolian cluster-folk dance. Fix the model.
But back to the president, and his problem with being known as intelligent—Columbia, Harvard Law, lecturer on constitutional issues at the University of Chicago Law School.
These aren't signs of intelligence, they're institutions, and a nose-picking illiterate is no less a nose-picking illiterate just because he is granted a pass by the admissions committee. 0bama has shown precisely no signs of any sort of credible intellectual life beyond that of a pretentious junior high school student.
Say something and it magically exists as something said, and if it’s been said and publicized it must be real. He never had to push a lever, see the machine not respond, puzzle it out and fix it.
Fact.
From what I have seen the administration is full of young people who’ve seen the movie but not read the book. They act bright, they know the reference, they’re credentialed. But they’ve only seen the movie about, say, the Cuban missile crisis, and then they get into a foreign-policy question and they’re seeing movies in their heads. They haven’t read the histories, the texts, which carry more information, more texture, data and subtlety, and different points of view.
Fact.
And off we go into another dissertation about Reagan - she was his speech writer, don't you know? In this case, though, I'll give Peggy the credit of personal observation. No, 0bama is no Reagan. He can keep a distorted interpretation of Reagan in his imagination and that's all he can do, and here I agree with Noonan's thesis: that's precisely what he and his administration have done with respect to all of the major facets of government they've managed to screw up: foreign policy, the budget process, electronic intelligence, and with such major issues as race relations, gun control, and an out-of-control promotion of gay politics on all fronts. They're the heroes of the movies in their heads on all of these issues and anything bad that happens with regard to them is the super-villains' fault, variously the Republicans, the Tea Party or any one of our international friends who have felt the back of this administration's collective hand.
If they thought he wasn’t very bright, they might give him some leeway on that question. But they think he’s really smart...So they think he knew...And deliberately misled.
On the contrary, he's proven himself to be the possessor of a political tin ear and quite stupid enough to lie blatantly about a program that was a disaster and for which there is no excuse for him not knowing how big a disaster. "Would I be stupid enough to lie about that?" he asked, and the answer is an observable and resounding "YES!" Of course he lied, it's in dozens of video clips. He just didn't think it would matter.
What is befuddling him is not the intrusion of reality - we should be so lucky - but the failure of his usual crew of skid-greasers and spinmeisters to turn it into a triumph. Not that they aren't still trying. But at some point even a low-information voter has to concede that they're putting Christmas ornaments on a clutch of stinkweed.
I’d observed previously that this President seems to operate by WISHING really hard for a reality - which can do a lot amongst sycophants, but rather less amongst outsiders, and nothing against the physical - and it appears Noonan has come to a very similar view.
Unless you can’t Enron, I’ve never seen such “low information” Leadership on display before. I can almost hear him talking like Sgt. Schultz of Hogan’s Heroes....”I know NOTHINK!”
There are only two kinds of liberals. The first kind is too stupid to know what the question is and too emotional to be taught. The second group knows full well the weight of the answer and seeks to undermine it by preying on the first group.
We will all become victims if we continue to listen to the pipers playing the cadence for the right.
This is worth the read.