Why do we bother with Peggy?

by Smitty

Look, Peggy: go read some history. While you're doing that, let's flog your latest drivel.

The new economic statistics put growth at a healthy 3.5% for the third quarter. We should be dancing in the streets. No one is, because no one has any faith in these numbers.

It's not a religious question. Forget faith. It's a tacit admission that we all know the numbers are a godforsaken lie, a propaganda move, a fart in a thunderstorm.

The biggest threat to America right now is not government spending, huge deficits, foreign ownership of our debt, world terrorism, two wars, potential epidemics or nuts with nukes. The biggest long-term threat is that people are becoming and have become disheartened, that this condition is reaching critical mass, and that it afflicts most broadly and deeply those members of the American leadership class who are not in Washington, most especially those in business.

Nitwit. Forget the mood ring: its color is a function of heat. The chief threat to the country the last century continues to be its slide in the direction of aristocracy. Take Newt's endorsement of Dede. Out back. Ventilate the endorsement with your weapon of choice.

Having some bozo who claims to be smarter than you decide who goes on the ballot should induce a chorus of vomiting from All Real Americans. The river of bile hasn't quite been the GOP-cleansing flood for which one would hope, but the direction of the level over time goes up up up.

I talked this week with a guy from Big Pharma, which we used to call "the drug companies" until we decided that didn't sound menacing enough. He is middle-aged, works in a significant position, and our conversation turned to the last great recession, in the late mid- to late 1970s and early '80s. We talked about how, in terms of numbers, that recession was in some ways worse than the one we're experiencing now. Interest rates were over 20%, and inflation and unemployment hit double digits. America was in what might be called a functional depression, yet there was still a prevalent feeling of hope. Here's why. Everyone thought they could figure a way through. We knew we could find a path through the mess. In 1982 there were people saying, "If only we get rid of this guy Reagan, we can make it better!" Others said, "If we follow Reagan, he'll squeeze out inflation and lower taxes and we'll be America again, we'll be acting like Americans again." Everyone had a path through.

Peggy, have you seen the National Debt Road Trip? Three minutes might wash the filth from your eyes, so that you can see the threat:

This is historic. This is something new in modern political history, and I'm not sure we're fully noticing it. Americans are starting to think the problems we are facing cannot be solved.

Absolutely, they can. Just not by you, not by elite North Easterners, not by Progressive thinking. Get the [debris] out of the way. You're part of the problem, not the solution, Peggy.

Part of the reason is that the problems—debt, spending, war—seem too big. But a larger part is that our federal government, from the White House through Congress, and so many state and local governments, seems to be demonstrating every day that they cannot make things better. They are not offering a new path, they are only offering old paths—spend more, regulate more, tax more in an attempt to make us more healthy locally and nationally. And in the long term everyone—well, not those in government, but most everyone else—seems to know that won't work. It's not a way out. It's not a path through.

Oh, it's going to work all right, Peg. For certain sorry-about-your-liberty, sovereignty-was-overrated, meet-your-transnational-plutocratic-overlords values of "work". The demolition of the States and creation of the Imperial Fed in DC paves the way for the theft of all we hold dear via the Federal Reserve.

Once federal entitlements have finished turning the United States into Europe, imposition of real rule via agreements of the Copenhagen variety can commence. So that's the destination, and thank your flaccid analysis for helping get us there.

When I see those in government, both locally and in Washington, spend and tax and come up each day with new ways to spend and tax—health care, cap and trade, etc.—I think: Why aren't they worried about the impact of what they're doing? Why do they think America is so strong it can take endless abuse?

Peggy, you article goes sailing majestically over the shark here. The only thing our aristocratic overlords feel is boredom at how long it's taking to subjugate the American people.

But let's switch to Janet Daley for a rebuttal, as her mood seems less peevish than mine:

Well America, welcome to the place where Britain and Europe have been for roughly two generations. What you have discovered are the limits of Big Government – the no-hope, tried-everything, dead end of centralised formulae for ever more socially-engineered national "happiness". Please don’t give up. If any nation in the world is capable of seeing the real lesson in this, and of saving itself from the despair and cynicism which are now commonplace on this side of the Atlantic, you are. You could still teach the world to sing.

Janet, it's not going to be easy. We've a century-long bout of Constitutional illiteracy from which we're awakening. The root of every evil before us can be traced to willfully ignoring the advice of our Founding Fathers. About the only thing the Progressives can note with validity is that we've been steering this course these many decades and administrations. They can claim precedent.

That doesn't mean we have to stack up the ship of state in the shoal water, ye Americans! Listen to this and get behind real, American, conservative candidates like Hoffman: The Warrior Song

Dan Riehl also weighed in on Peggy.

Update: A Newly Conservative Lesbian offers similar thoughts, though Cynthia takes a Reagan turn at the end.

Punk bands over pundits

by Smitty (h/t Kathryn Jean Lopez)

Oh Peggy. "Pull the Plug on ObamaCare", you say, as gently as possible. You cast Obamacare opposite Hillarycare, as if Congress was first supposed to create a fine mess,

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.

Saved by the passive voice, the poor wee "wee-weed" President.

The Circle Jerks underscore the President's 'record', with a bladder-load of legislative blather on disc...

Come to think of it, that 'release' does contain some advice that's scatalogical, echoes the president, and is about as useful as anything coming out of the likes of Noonan and Krugman:

"When the s**t hits the fan"
in a sluggish economy
inflation,recession
hits the land of the free
standing in unemployment lines
blame the government for hard time

we just get by
however we can
we all gotta duck
when the s**t hits the fan

10 kids in a cadillac
stand in lines for welfare checks
let's all leach off the state
gee! the money's really great!

soup lines
free loaves of bread
5lb blocks of cheese
bags of groceries
social security
has run out on you and me
we do whatever we can
gotta duck when the s**t hits the fan

Here it is on YouTube:

Back to the Noonan, starry-eyed, as with a thousand points of light.

Every big idea that works is marked by simplicity, by clarity. You can understand it when you hear it, and you can explain it to people. Social Security: Retired workers receive a public pension to help them through old age. Medicare: People over 65 can receive taxpayer-funded health care. Welfare: If you have no money and cannot support yourself, we will help as you get back on your feet.
These things are clear. I understand them. You understand them.

You understand that the economics fail, lady? You could as reasonably wish water would flow uphill.

• The Constitution was never amended to support entitlement concepts at the Federal level.
• The demographics don't supply the necessary population to feed the beast.
• The moral hazard of that much cash before Congresses composed of that little integrity was too much.

Get Over It!

And when normal people don't know what the words mean, they don't say to themselves, "I may not understand, but my trusty government surely does, and will treat me and mine with respect." They think, "I can't get what these people are talking about. They must be trying to get one past me. So I'll vote no."

Normal people do understand this much: when things are too complex, money is moving from Wallet A to Wallet B. If you don't understand the mechanism (and I'll bet a pizza that your condescending butt does not, at any useful level of detail) then you are Wallet A. Was that explanation simple enough?

In a more beautiful world, the whole health-care chapter could become, for the president, that helpful thing, the teachable moment. The president the past month has been taught a lot by the American people. It's all there in the polls. He could still step back, rethink, say it didn't work, promise to return with something better.

When presidents make clear, with modesty and even some chagrin, that they have made a mistake but that they've learned a lesson and won't be making it again, the American people tend to respond with sympathy. It is our tradition and our impulse.

Peggy, I understand you're Roman Catholic, so let me tell you directly: this more beautiful world is the Kingdom of Heaven, ushered in by the return of the carpenter. Short of that, just give it up. Modulo individual, random acts of beauty, the world is a circle of jerks.

Article V is the appropriate place to start. If the POTUS and the Congress That Shall Live in Infamy don't start at square one, then I say they should all stand impeached for failure to carry out their oaths.

As for you, Peggy, lose the purple prose and acquire some historical and economic analysis, or continue to seem less useful than a punk rock band.

Peggy Noonan, 'Rapidly Aging Shrew'?

So says my friend Joe at NovaTownhall, who's riffing off Ace, who's linking something about Sarah Palin.

Aren't we all "rapidly aging"? Is Peggy's presence on the cusp of dowager/crone status really relevant to her attacks on Palin? Can anyone think of a better insult for Noonan, one that doesn't imply a general disdain for all Women Of A Certain Age? Because there are plenty of women Noonan's age who still have teh sexy.