Peggy Noonan, columnist for the Wall Street Journal, said on two occasions on this week's Meet The Press that serious people need to step up and do serious things. With regard to spending and the new Congress, she said that Republicans need to move in a serious way. And for the 2012 Presidential election, she said that Republicans need a credible alternative, a serious person, to which Bob Woodward interjected that that would rule out Sarah Palin. Who she has in mind for the 2012 Republican Presidential Nomination is anyone's guess because when she says 'someone serious,' we're hard pressed to find someone on the Republican side who is serious. As for Republicans moving in a serious way in the new Congress, we'll have to wait and see, but the tax cuts for the top 2% that the Republicans negotiated for did two things. One, it disqualified them as being serious about cutting spending and the debt. Secondly, it opened up the gates for President Obama to score a series of victories during the lame duck session. And on this note, we have to question Ms. Noonan's seriousness because she mentioned entitlement spending as a serious issue but didn't mention superfluous tax cuts for the rich.
As for the President's part, Mr. Obama was being pragmatic, to use a word from Valerie Jarrett on today's program. Not weak for compromising? Given the consequences of not making the deal and knowing the number of votes he had, or didn't have, pragmatism was the President's only course. However, these kinds of compromises may be good looking politically, but the reality of this kind of compromise will bring down the whole economic house.
So when Ms. Noonan kept interjecting her tidbits about how awful and wrong the healthcare bill is, it's difficult to take her seriously. She said the people don't understand the new healthcare coverage. That misunderstanding didn't just come from hearing the facts. Opposition to healthcare reform put out hundreds of millions of dollars worth of misinformation to try and defeat it. Ms. Noonan, with all due respect, is not even on a long list of people we'd seek out to get the pulse of the people.
On the other hand, the President, at least, acknowledged that he did not connect enough with the people this year and legislated too much instead of going and listening - this is according to Ms. Jarrett. The economic crisis sucked up too much of his time, she said, to have him spend more time out in the countryside. Nor did it allow him time to think about Sarah Palin, Ms. Jarrett's answer to Mr. Gregory's stupid question. That's like asking Timothy Geithner if he thinks about a game show host when trying to solve fiscal issues.
[What the press needs to do with Sarah Palin is to stop covering her, especially the liberal leaning press which is fixated on her more than the right, all in an attempt to further discredit her. Our advice is to just let Ms. Palin discredit herself as she weighs in on serious issues, and then this issue, will take care of itself.]
First and foremost, Mr. Brokaw said it best when he said that the President had a good month but let's not get ahead of ourselves. However, there was the defining of 'austerity,' which was presented on the screen as such: enforced or extreme economy. The joke is that everyone sitting at that table thinks of that all in the hypothetical, not the reality of it. Certainly, Washington throws that around without understanding, or feeling, the real consequences of their actions. And for Tea Party Republicans, the elected political figures talk austerity at the expense of the the citizenry of this movement who voted for them.
Which brings us back again to Ms. Noonan. She said in her sympathetic but I know better way, that 40 million people in this country are on food stamps, that there are entrenched state employee unions, and that we need a leader that we can trust. Excuse us for asking, but for her being a Republican, who the hell is she talking about? Mitch McConnell? John Boehner? These people are compromised lawmakers - completely in the pocket of the multi-national corporations. And that she would mention food stamps and state unions in the same breath subliminally equating the two is the type of Republican intellectualism that empowers the narrative and agenda of such politicians as McConnell and Boehner.
Ms. Noonan also mentioned political change in that adults today realize that their children won't have it better than they did so there is a lot of pessimism right now. It's these adults who created this situation in the first place. Anymore, Ms. Noonan is an ideologue, not a serious thinker, to which she calls.
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