“Mr. Obama Lowered The Bar”

bonzo

You have to be drinking a lot of gravy to buy any of the nonsense dished out by former Reagan scriptwriter Peggy Noonan. Two doozies from her latest grab-bag of bullshit in the Wall Street Journal followed by my comments.

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The only thing I feel certain of is how we got here. There are many reasons we’re at this moment, but the essential political one is this: Mr. Obama lowered the bar. He was a literal unknown, an obscure former state legislator who hadn’t completed his single term as U.S. senator, but he was charismatic, canny, compelling. He came from nowhere and won it all twice. All previously prevailing standards, all usual expectations, were thrown out the window.

Anyone can run for president now, and in the future anyone will. In 2020 and 2024 we’ll look back on 2016 as the sober good ol’ days. “At least Trump had business experience. He wasn’t just a rock star! He wasn’t just a cable talk-show host!”

  • As Peg would have it, the reason why the GOP national election process has hit the skids isn’t because the party’s decades-long appeal to the baser instincts in voters with coded, divisive terms (“welfare queens”) has grown into full-on hate speech, but because Barack Obama, someone she deems an unqualified celebrity, ran for President. Denying Obama, a Harvard Law President and Senator before winning the White House, is a serious-minded person with a sense of history, something you couldn’t assign to the Trumps and Carsons, is as dishonest as telling Americans that postwar prosperity was caused by the free market alone and not because it was matched to a severe, bordering on socialist, tax code. The so-called Reagan Revolution was always based on nostalgia for an America that never existed.

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[Joe Biden] would have been as entertaining in his way as Donald Trump…

  • Like Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, Noonan thinks Trump’s a gas, with the way he refers to Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and African-Americans as “lazy” and sees women as bloody servants. She thinks that Biden’s penchant for awkward foot-in-mouth moments (sometimes in support of equality) is similar to the bigoted rantings of a fascist combover who’s politically inferior to a Kardashian. Now there’s some false equivalency.•

 

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