Not until this very day did I realize that Peggy Noonan was an Old Left New Dealer all along.
In this astonishing WSJ column, Ms. Noonan derides her employer and her party and the anti-Keynesian ideology of both, all while deriding their political target as insufficiently Keynesian and inadequately New Dealing.
It's one of the most revolting pieces of twisted hypocrisy and tortured history I have ever read. I quote widely:
It's not a debt and deficit crisis, it's a jobs crisis ...
[Obama] should have seen unemployment entering a crisis stage four years ago, and he did not. At that time I was certain he'd go for public-works projects, which could give training to the young and jobs to the experienced underemployed, would create jobs in the private sector and, in the end, yield up something needed--a bridge, a strengthened power grid. He instead gave his first term to health care ...
[W]hat is the sequester about? At the end of the day it's about fewer jobs or fewer hours. In the midst of what is already a jobs crisis ...
He was the candidate of hope and change, of "Yes, we can," but the mood of his governance has been dire, full of warnings, threats, cliffs and ceilings, full of words like suffering and punishment and sacrifice.
Suddenly the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan is the NY Times' Paul Krugman, times ten. We should pretty much forget the debt, forget the deficit; you know, those fiscal items on which Peggy and the WSJ and the GOP have been hammering Obama for more than four years now. Noonan, a mere two weeks ago: "Debt and deficits don't interest [Obama]."
The real problem is jobs, which the debt-obsessed(?), anti-Keynesian Hoover Obama has arrogantly ignored, except in that stimulus package which Republicans ruthlessly whittled down or converted to less effective tax cuts, in addition to a Jobs Act that Republicans have refused to vote on.
The jobs-gutting sequester? Obama doesn't want it, Republicans do, so naturally it's Obama's fault, as is the dire, suffering, punishing zeitgeist which Republicans created and now enforce.
Huh?
Never mind. For Peggy's sake don't think about it. Just believe it.
My daughter and I were going to see "Oz, the Great and Powerful" this weekend. But now, I don't know. Somehow I feel I already have.
Two words: brown liquor
Posted by: MinneapolisPipe | March 08, 2013 at 07:10 PM
I was shocked as well at her alleged position. .what's up with that? Has she changed? She is for this position as is the GOP until Obama supports it.
Posted by: KBurnsq | March 11, 2013 at 10:32 AM