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Anatomy of a Column

eggy Noonan completed watching the “Death Valley Days” marathon on her old black and white Philco television set in the back bedroom at the Aviary 2, the name she christened the new Penthouse (so large, so chic), when she buzzed the concierge.

“A horse, a horse, half my kingdom for a horse,” she whispered into the phone. They quickly made arrangements for a riding lesson in The Park. Watching her beloved Ronnie in the greatest western television series ever inspired Noonan to give horseback riding another try, her previous attempt had ended in failure at the Reagan Ranch in the hills above Santa Barbara, and of course 30 years of mocking from her nemesis, Nancy Reagan.

Noonan shuddered thinking about Nancy’s scratchy voice bellowing over the hills, “Hey Ronnie look! A horse with two asses!”

“This time,” Noonan sniffed, “things will be different.”

Just like for the GOP, she mused. “Whatever word means the opposite of snakebit, that is what the Republican Party is right now.” Noonan took a thoughtful sip of her Mai Tai as she changed into her riding togs, red coat, and black boots, funny cap, and just as quickly changed her mind. “Western saddle, that’s what Ronnie would want.”

Changing into denim jeans, and a plaid flannel blouse, Noonan mused further on the luck of the GOP. “One reason they are feeling hope is that they have received two big and unexpected gifts from President Obama,” she grinned to herself, “The first, of course, was his political implosion—his quick descent and speedy fall into unpopularity, which shaped the outcome of the 2010 elections.” She cursed under her breath while struggling with the skinny jeans that seemed to stop at her ample calves. “Fuckin’ cleaners must have shrunk them,” she snarled as she took a deep quaff of Mai Tai, and tried to peel off the jeans. She worried that she might look like a turtle that rolled onto its back as she struggled to pull them off, writhing on the floor.

“Obama’s second gift, of course, is how he reacted to the election’s outcome in a way that suggested he’s still in his own world, still seeing a reality no one else is seeing,” Noonan huffed, out of breath. Noonan giggled at the thought of the very smart and unlikable man sitting at her beloved Ronnie’s desk not being aware he was not political enough, too serious, too substantive, and no one could see the size of his achievements.

Grimacing, Noonan thought about how the media was going to treat the incoming GOP freshman class, “The mainstream media this January will be looking for the nuts,” she thought as she slurped the pineapple wedge. She had seen this before when the new Republican Congress came in in 1994. The spirited Helen Chenoweth, freshman from Idaho, talked a little too much about “black helicopters.” She was portrayed as paranoid and eccentric. Bob Livingston, from New Orleans, went to his first meeting of the Appropriations Committee wielding a machete. The new speaker, Newt Gingrich, was full of pronouncements and provocations; he was a one-man drama machine.

***

Iced to the eyebrows, Noonan poured herself out of the cab at the stables in The Park and asked the driver to stick around for the return trip home.

“Howdy, Ma’am. What do you want to do today,” the friendly instructor asked her.

“As Mrs. Patrick Campbell once said, I don’t really care what people do as long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses,” Noonan said as she slipped off her coat, and Lady Godiva-like, mounted her steed.

Obama’s Gifts to the GOP, by Peggy Noonan

World Exclusive Photos!

Our intrepid photojournalist, DistributorcapNYC was there!

Exactly 47 years to the day after Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech from the feet of the Lincoln Memorial, America’s Favorite Free-Range Conspiracy Theorist, Glenn Beck took to the same stage to dog-whistle to the simple-minded the repellent message: let’s get that nigger out of our White House. The rally was ostensibly about restoring America’s honor, but conveniently no one mentioned how we lost it.

Perhaps now would be a convenient time to do that.

It’s too easy to say that Former President Chimpy McStagger is the root of all evil. He had help from Richard Nixon’s hand maiden, Dick Cheney and a legion of toadies and minions from both parties. It is not an exaggeration to say that our loss of honor, the nadir was reached under Chimpy’s administration with secret renditions, wire tapping citizens, torturing suspects, and the suspension of habeas corpus. Just to name a few.

I don’t recall seeing a single GOPer flocking to the mall to protest that loss of honor.

When Chimpy started the illegal and illogical Iraq war, there were world-wide protests. One day the modest estimate was fourteen million people protested. Chimpy said it was a focus group and was not interested.

I don’t recall seeing a single GOPer protesting that loss of honor, either.

So now we see two b-grade Fox News employees and flimflam artists, Beck and Mooselini, get up on a stage and tell us about the dark forces working to put our great country in the dustbin of history is beyond the pale, so to speak. To see a vast sea of uncritically thinking, white-entitled boomers slack-jawed and drooling from the comfort of their lawn chairs, wondering what happened to their country is sad, yet somewhat understandable.

The country is going through convulsions right now, we have an economic crisis of unimaginable proportions (brought to us by Blessed Saint Ronnie of Trickledown-on-Bel-Air and all who suckled at his crotch); I can understand that some of us are looking for divine intervention to save us from what is actually an engineered disaster brought about by thirty years of callous and selfish policy.

What I cannot understand the the lack of willpower on the part of allegedly sane politicians to let charlatans like Beck and Palin frame the issues and set the stage. The mystery is why are Obama, Pelosi, Reid — and other elected official claiming to be a Democrat– why are they letting these buffoons set the agenda? Why is it that the left are not telling us about what we are going through and why. Why can’t they just say it: we are broke.

We are broke because for thirty years we allowed the rich and the powerful to raid the treasury as a matter of policy. And to this day The Powers That Be are doing nothing about it; heck, they are not even trying to prosecute admitted criminals like Chimpy and Blam-Blam. They’ve told the criminal class that the rule of law does not apply to them.

And so instead of frog-marching the supply siders with their ill-gotten gains to the poky, we are being told that we little people must sacrifice, delay retirement till 70, scrap Medicare, oh, and give more tax breaks to the Rich and Corporations. We are broke, unemployed, and about to be screwed again as a matter of policy.

The thing is, the Dims could have fixed it if they wanted to: they had solid majorities. They did not have the willpower, or worse, they did not see this as a problem. The point is that off-shoring your job (or industry for that matter) continues to happen because they (both sides of the aisle) want it to happen; their corporate paymasters want it, and it will continue.

I can understand how a grifter like Mooselini and a snake oil salesman like Beck can suddenly shine in these times. They can say with a straight face that what is wrong is that their pasty white followers are not praying enough; White Jeebus (and it is the white Jeebus) will keep you out of bankruptcy. And the great unwashed masses can believe this message because they can see that no one inside the Beltway is doing anything for them. They’ve been trained for thirty years to hate liberals/progressives/Dims by rote memorization (the promise of a tasty fish as the reward, who knows), and lately the Teabagger phenomenon shows that they have learned not to trust the people who have been giving them the tasty fish.

And so while these simpletons are praying for Jeebus to save them and blaming the Kenyan Usurper for their problems, and showing their independence by attending rallies that are paid for by the GOP establishment that they are opposed to, their allies on the right are picking their pockets and laughing at the rubes.

The housing market is nothing more than a collection of swindles that may never be unwound and resolved, retail is crashing as we are entering what will probably go on record as the Worst Holiday Shopping Season ever, Afghanistan AND Iraq continue to suck billions of dollars out of our wallets, peak oil has been reached and all that that implies is yet to really hit home, and the Teabaggers are going non-linear and being agitated into some sort of Xristian Nationalism. Expect things to get much, much worse.

Unless you are a member of the ruling class. Then expect excellent business as usual.

I think [President Obama]‘s quite complacent, and I think he’s in over his head, and he has poor advisers around him. And I think he’s really in flux when it comes to what his governing philosophy really is. Some of this, though, is a result of him not having much experience.

– Mooselini, who quit being Governor of Alaska about half-way through it.

He spent about the same amount of research time as for his coloring book, Liberal Fascism:

Doughy Pantload: Obama said on The View yesterday that he didn’t know who Snooki is. But here’s Obama at the White House Correspondents Dinner:

Obama: “Of course, that’s not the only thing that we’ve been accused of socializing this year. You might have heard we passed a health care bill and — (applause.) Is that Roger Ailes applauding out there? (Laughter.) Some Republicans have suggested that the bill contains a few secret provisions. That’s ridiculous. There aren’t a few secret provisions in the health care plan — there are, like, hundreds. (Laughter.)

Obama: “Tonight, in the interest of transparency, I’d like to share a couple. Let’s see — this provision is called the Bay State of Denial. It reads: “This bill shall cover short-term memory loss related to the passage of Massachusetts health care reform.” So, good news, Mitt, your condition is covered. (Laughter.)

Obama: “This next provision is called the Jersey Shore-Up. It reads: “The following individuals shall be excluded from the indoor tanning tax within this bill.” Snooki, J-WOWW, the Situation, and House Minority Leader John Boehner. (Laughter.)”

Yup, the Blog at Poo Corner, the most intellectually dishonest rest stop on the Information Superhighway, does it again! You got him dead to rights, Doughy, and if it was good enough to earn Big Dawg an impeachment, well, the Kenyan Usurper is doomed now!

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said Wednesday he had offered to rehire fired department official Shirley Sherrod, and the White House extended a full-throated apology to her, calling her ouster as the result of an out-of-context video an “injustice.”

It is a master class in passive voice, and while I believe that Gibbs meant it to be sincere, it still comes off as dodging and tapdancing – to me. These people cannot do anything with full-conviction, everything has to feel like a compromise.

As you know, I have publicly said that President Carebear and his opponent Iceberg Lettuce were the two worst candidates that the Dims could put forward.

Joe Biden does a better job here in just a few minutes than the Carebear did in his oval office address.

We reported this unnamed comment from the White House (in regards to the Lincoln-Halter campaign) last night in the live blogging, but it is worthy of a little more exposure:

Organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members’ money down the toilet on a pointless exercise,” the official said. “If even half that total had been well-targeted and applied in key House races across this country, that could have made a real difference in November.

–Politico

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that was Rahm Emanuel (just add in the usual expletives on your own, and you probably got the actual transcript).

OK, now I think Progressives (and dare I say Liberals, I think I do!) already know that this White House hates us as much as the Previous Seven Administrations of Saint Ronnie, but if you had any doubts, this comment should wash them from your soul.

In as much as the White House’s preferred candidate, Blanche Lincoln, the bluest of the blue dogs, won the night, this was a pure poison pen letter, and stupid to boot: our idiot President Carebear needs the base to get out the vote in November, so insulting us seems like a stupid thing to do.

Secondly, Labor has been a reliable resource for the left, Blanche Lincoln, not so much. Dissing Labor is a stupid thing to do. Say goodbye to “free” campaign workers, Rahm

Lastly, unless President Carebear’s seven-dimensional chess game is to lose the House in the fall (and it could well be), he needs all hands on deck.

I wonder how much money it will cost the DNC to keep Blanche Lincoln in her seat, because I’m betting that she is not going to get much money from the base who loathe her. And when she loses to GOP’s rising star, Senator John Boozman (and I think she will), somehow Rahm will blame the Left and Unions for the loss of that seat.

Rahm is such a dunce.

UPDATE 1: SEIU President Mary Kay Henry: ‘Sen. Lincoln won a narrow victory after a bruising runoff election … Working families all over Arkansas supported Lt. Governor Bill Halter’s bid … because he spoke up for them … The tens of thousands of volunteers and activists have made their point loud and clear: If you stop fighting for working families, working families will stop fighting for you.’

UPDATE 2: In a blast e-mail to campaign supporters, Lincoln wrote: ‘President Clinton called me tonight when it was clear we were going to win and said, ‘Blanche, you’re the new Comeback Kid!’ The campaign headlined a release, ‘Arkansas’s New Comeback Kid.’ (Jeebus, gag me with a spoon.)

AP

Oh, the humilation! The Freepers must be warming up, even as we speak…