Update: Hell’s Handmaiden does a Noonan dissection, with extra goodness from around the media and no run-on sentences! Enjoy. ^.^

*note to self – “death before proofreading” is still not a viable editing strategy!*

From two posts, we have someone out of touch with reality chiding those who he thinks are out of touch with reality. First, Noonan is shocked and appalled that non-Bush-lovers might be a little testy:

NRO’s The Corner notes the following:

On the edition of his program taped in Washington, Bill Maher interviewed John Kerry. In the chit-chat at the beginning of the interview, Kerry said he and his wife had gone to Vermont for a getaway for her birthday. Maher said they could have gone to New Hampshire and killed two birds with one stone. Kerry’s response:

“I could have gone to 1600 Pennsylvania and killed the real bird with one stone.”

This anti-Bush psychosis has gone from amusing to alarming…really, there has to be an end to this unreasoning hatred.

Oh, gee. And wanna-be conservative commentators haven’t been out of line at all in calling anyone who steps outside the BushCo line traitors, terrorist-enablers, and moral scum? Just when are y’all going to get over yourselves and stop going all Marquis of Queensberry about our tactics every time we stand up for ourselves? :D By the way, here’s the sequence he’s referring to.

Then again, your opinion is no longer relevant, since y’all are managing to work your way out of political ascendancy with a speed and daring which defies description.

Second, a whine about “Bush-haters” judging Bush too early.

The backstory to the 2006 midterms is that President Bush is an utterly failed President who is, now, dragging his party to mid-term defeat. As everyone who reads this blog knows, I hold that this is an overly-hasty view of matters which doesn’t take in to consideration that those inside an event are often least able to judge it properly. Noemie Emery over at the Weekly Standard thinks so, too, and puts a bit of perspective on things:

…

We had 8 months of calmness in the Bush Administration, and then it has just been one massive, earth-shaking crisis after another. As someone I read pointed out, we live in excruciatingly interesting times. Those that currently hate President Bush are really no different from those who hated Reagan in 1986, or FDR in 1938…people who haven’t really thought about what has happened and who have allowed their personal animosity to completely blind the to reality. As for me, I think that in the future, after most of us have passed from this world and controversy is stilled by the grave, historians will rate President Bush as one of those watershed leaders who break out in to new paths and change the world for the better. Something had to be done to break the dead hand of a exhausted liberal worldview – it was unfortuante that it took a wake up call like 9/11 to break the logjam, but some times it takes such a shock to get anything moving.

When someone is building a house, and they’re using poorly made materials to do it, and winging it rather than dealing with little things like blueprints, it’s not out of line to say that this particular idiot should never have tried building houses, and that living in this rat-trap-to-be, no matter how nice it looks on the outside, is not something you’re intending to do. Now people who don’t like Bush being like people who didn’t like Reagan, I can buy – except Reagan actually did a very few good things (such as do some major work with Gorbachev, even with the Evil Empire strangeness, and shoring up Social Security). But FDR? Puh-leeze.

As for Bush being one of those watershed leaders… I think Noonan’s words may have a certain correctness to them, just not what he intends. Also, Bush may have gotten a good number of things moving… but I don’t think he did it the way he either intended, or in a way that you could call “good.”

As for the “dead hand of an exhausted liberal world-view…” that ‘dead hand’ is seeming more and more like it would have been the right thing to do all along. The position that liberals have had a stranglehold on the government is a particularly amusing one, since the country hasn’t been “liberal” since the 70s. quite possibly the most liberal presidents in my lifetime have been Johnson and Nixon, and they were liberal for electoral reasons, not so much ideological ones.

Point blank: Liberals haven’t damaged anything in this country, and not only that, haven’t had the opportunity to even see whether large-scale liberal policies would work (except for parts of FDR’s New Deal). You can’t say what the effect of liberal policies would have been, because the only time liberal policies have been applied is because poor people were rioting. :P

I do know that Social Security seems to be doing ok, and will continue to do so if we were to do something like remove the ridiculously low cap on SS-taxable earnings.

Posted on Monday, October 9th, 2006, at 22:47 [Mark Noonan, You Annoy Me].
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