Gay Patriot fell into bad company yesterday, by which I mean Peggy Noonan, who is too elitist and envious to understand the miracle that is Sarah Palin, and Noonan persuaded him that our nation’s ills are due to us pampered, spoiled Baby Boomers.
Here is Noonan’s central problem: Obama is deliberately bringing down this country, but he is her Messiah and therefore it is anathema for her even to consider his culpability.
Obama is using debt bombs to destroy the United States as a capitalist democratic republic. We have not lost our way. Obama and his handlers and minions intend to destroy the U.S. economy for their own personal gain. They are doing this on purpose. How is it the innumerable times Obama has said one thing and done another, or said opposite things, has never tipped Noonan off? Why aren’t Obama’s socialist and communist and terrorist cronies — to say nothing of the tax cheats and felons — a continent of red flags for her?
The malaise Noonan is just starting to detect is the confusion that a con artist’s marks feel when they realize the con artist says one thing, but does another. They are attached to their belief that what the con artist said and promised must be true because it is just what they wanted to hear in exchange for handing over their power and money. It takes a long time to get the marks to register that you have to ignore what con artists say and pay attention only to what they actually do, which always will be in their own self-interest regardless of anyone else.
Noonan is only three years older than I am and should remember the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies a little better before making pronouncements that Baby Boomers are too pampered to be able to imagine that America can fail. In the Fifties and early Sixties I remember, we had a constant fear of nuclear war with the USSR that would wipe us all out. This was followed by the Viet Nam war and price controls. In the Seventies we had inflation — I am skeptical that any Boomer who remembers inflation does not dread it almost above all other things — gasoline shortages due to OPEC and double-digit mortgage interest rates due to Carter — and we capped off the decade with 444 days of the Iran hostage crisis.
Most of us also were born before the polio vaccine and while there may have been vaccines for them, I had measles, mumps and chicken pox as a child — illnesses virtually unknown to Gen X-ers. And when the AIDS epidemic came, it was friends my age who died and the survivors my age who led the charge to fight it.
When exactly was this halycon time of untroubled bliss that we Baby Boomers had all to ourselves?
The people I saw at the 9/12 Tea Party March on Washington were almost all Boomers — as a crowd, we were old, gray-haired, fat and a truly amazing proportion of the crowd was either in a wheelchair or using a three-wheeled scooter. Boomers ARE the people who know Obama and the Democrats are trying to bring down America and we are the ones organizing to save her.
Noonan: The new economic statistics put growth at a healthy 3.5% for the third quarter. We should be dancing in the streets. No one is, because no one has any faith in these numbers.
Yes, because we know Obama and the Democrats cook the books.
Noonan: Waves of money are sloshing through the system, creating a false rising tide that lifts all boats for the moment. The tide will recede. The boats aren’t rising, they’re bobbing, and will settle. No one believes the bad time is over. No one thinks we’re entering a new age of abundance. No one thinks it will ever be the same as before 2008.
Just because Obama and the Democrats told everyone the tide of cash from the stimulus package would create prosperity doesn’t mean it was true. We Tea Partiers and conservatives tried to stop it because we saw it was fake prosperity but REAL debt. Noonan and Gay Patriot — where have you been during all the Tea Parties and town hall meetings?
Noonan: Economists, statisticians, forecasters and market specialists will argue about what the new numbers mean, but no one believes them, either. Among the things swept away in 2008 was public confidence in the experts. The experts missed the crash. They’ll miss the meaning of this moment, too.
Actually, for a year or two before the crash, the cable TV news shows had a constant parade of experts forecasting a crash. A number of them were flogging books they’d written forecasting a crash. However, perhaps it was possible to miss their relentless warnings if you only watched MSNBC or just read the New York Times.
Noonan: The biggest threat to America right now is not government spending, huge deficits, foreign ownership of our debt, world terrorism, two wars, potential epidemics or nuts with nukes. The biggest long-term threat is that people are becoming and have become disheartened, that this condition is reaching critical mass, and that it afflicts most broadly and deeply those members of the American leadership class who are not in Washington, most especially those in business.
…
The most sophisticated Americans, experienced in how the country works on the ground, can’t figure a way out. Have you heard, “If only we follow Obama and the Democrats, it will all get better”? Or, “If only we follow the Republicans, they’ll make it all work again”? I bet you haven’t, or not much.This is historic. This is something new in modern political history, and I’m not sure we’re fully noticing it. Americans are starting to think the problems we are facing cannot be solved.
Immediately after the crash last September Obama began denouncing the economy and mocked McCain for his efforts to restore people’s confidence in our ability to get through any crisis and to reassure us the fundamentals of the economy were strong. It is Obama who has worked tirelessly to get Americans to stop believing in themselves. And it is the Democrats in Congress who have worked to intrude government into every aspect of our lives to usurp our liberty to solve our own problems.
I [Noonan] talked with an executive this week with what we still call “the insurance companies” and will no doubt soon be calling Big Insura. (Take it away, Democratic National Committee.) He was thoughtful, reflective about the big picture. He talked about all the new proposed regulations on the industry. Rep. Barney Frank had just said on some cable show that the Democrats of the White House and Congress “are trying on every front to increase the role of government in the regulatory area.” The executive said of Washington: “They don’t understand that people can just stop, get out. I have friends and colleagues who’ve said to me ‘I’m done.’” He spoke of his own increasing tax burden and said, “They don’t understand that if they start to tax me so that I’m paying 60%, 55%, I’ll stop.”
He felt government doesn’t understand that business in America is run by people, by human beings. Mr. Frank must believe America is populated by high-achieving robots who will obey whatever command he and his friends issue. But of course they’re human, and they can become disheartened. They can pack it in, go elsewhere, quit what used to be called the rat race and might as well be called that again since the government seems to think they’re all rats. (That would be you, Chamber of Commerce.)
Uh, where have Noonan and Gay Patriot been while conservatives have been hollering, “I’m going Galt!” at the top of their lungs since Obama’s inauguration?
Noonan: And here is the second part of the story. While Americans feel increasingly disheartened, their leaders evince a mindless . . . one almost calls it optimism, but it is not that.
It is a curious thing that those who feel most mistily affectionate toward America, and most protective toward it, are the most aware of its vulnerabilities, the most aware that it can be harmed. They don’t see it as all-powerful, impregnable, unharmable. The loving have a sense of its limits.
When I see those in government, both locally and in Washington, spend and tax and come up each day with new ways to spend and tax—health care, cap and trade, etc.—I think: Why aren’t they worried about the impact of what they’re doing? Why do they think America is so strong it can take endless abuse?
I think I know part of the answer. It is that they’ve never seen things go dark. They came of age during the great abundance, circa 1980-2008 (or 1950-2008, take your pick), and they don’t have the habit of worry. They talk about their “concerns”—they’re big on that word. But they’re not really concerned. They think America is the goose that lays the golden egg. Why not? She laid it in their laps. She laid it in grandpa’s lap.
They don’t feel anxious, because they never had anything to be anxious about. They grew up in an America surrounded by phrases—”strongest nation in the world,” “indispensable nation,” “unipolar power,” “highest standard of living”—and are not bright enough, or serious enough, to imagine that they can damage that, hurt it, even fatally.
We are governed at all levels by America’s luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they’re not optimists—they’re unimaginative. They don’t have faith, they’ve just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don’t mind it when people become disheartened. They don’t even notice.
Yo, Noonan! The people who intend to break America and who see making Americans disheartened as one of their first steps to complete control are Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Dodd and Frank. Read Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin — and A Conservative Lesbian — for heaven’s sake!
Eric Erickson at RedState.com recently featured Ronald Reagan’s speech from Oct. 27, 1964, “We Have a Rendez-Vous with Destiny.” Reagan — you remember him, don’t you, Ms. Noonan? — had a clear sense of the perils ever-ready to kill America, as well as the clear solution: keep government small, keep taxes low, create the economic conditions that allow entrepreneurs to be filled with ambition and to thrive. He has the video and full text of Reagan’s speech — here is a pertinent excerpt:
I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I recently have seen fit to follow another course. I believe that the issues confronting us cross party lines. Now, one side in this campaign has been telling us that the issues of this election are the maintenance of peace and prosperity. The line has been used, “We’ve never had it so good.”
But I have an uncomfortable feeling that this prosperity isn’t something on which we can base our hopes for the future. No nation in history has ever survived a tax burden that reached a third of its national income. Today, 37 cents out of every dollar earned in this country is the tax collector’s share, and yet our government continues to spend 17 million dollars a day more than the government takes in. We haven’t balanced our budget 28 out of the last 34 years. We’ve raised our debt limit three times in the last twelve months, and now our national debt is one and a half times bigger than all the combined debts of all the nations of the world. We have 15 billion dollars in gold in our treasury; we don’t own an ounce. Foreign dollar claims are 27.3 billion dollars. And we’ve just had announced that the dollar of 1939 will now purchase 45 cents in its total value.
As for the peace that we would preserve, I wonder who among us would like to approach the wife or mother whose husband or son has died in South Vietnam and ask them if they think this is a peace that should be maintained indefinitely. Do they mean peace, or do they mean we just want to be left in peace? There can be no real peace while one American is dying some place in the world for the rest of us. We’re at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it’s been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Well I think it’s time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.
Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, “We don’t know how lucky we are.” And the Cuban stopped and said, “How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to.” And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.
And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man.
This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
Earth to Noonan and Gay Patriot: Reagan’s message in that speech is ever-green. Boomers are out in droves at the Tea Parties and town halls and we are working our e-mail lists and blogs to wake people up to the intentional destruction and confusion Obama and the Democrats are using to destroy capitalism and America. Not only do we have a clear plan for restoring economic prosperity and strength to America, we’ve been demonstrating and rallying in ever-growing numbers and generally shouting it from every rooftop and IP address. What on earth is the matter with you that you haven’t connected with that?
Update, 11/1/09: Smitty at The Other McCain got to Noonan’s column first and illustrates his points with a couple of YouTube videos that are worth watching — I especially liked “The Warrior’s Song,” which will not surprise my regular gentle readers. Smitty quotes Noonan and comments:
[Noonan] This is historic. This is something new in modern political history, and I’m not sure we’re fully noticing it. Americans are starting to think the problems we are facing cannot be solved.
Absolutely, they can. Just not by you, not by elite North Easterners, not by Progressive thinking. Get the [debris] out of the way. You’re part of the problem, not the solution, Peggy.
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