http://pdl.warnerbros.com/wbol/us/whv/med/empire_records/empire_records1_300.wmv

Brad Delong on Peggy Noonan’s About-Face  

  

Peggy Noonan Realizes She Has Conned Herself–and Says That She Wouldn’t Have Voted for Bush If She’d Known Who He Was

She looks at Bush fiscal policy and joins the Ancient, Occult, and Hermetic Order of the shrill, saying that if she’d known who George W. Bush really was she wouldn’t have voted for him:

OpinionJournal – Peggy Noonan: Hey, Big Spender Should we have known that President Bush would bust the budget?: Thursday, March 16, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST: This week’s column is a question, a brief one addressed with honest curiosity to Republicans. It is: When George W. Bush first came on the scene in 2000, did you understand him to be a liberal in terms of spending?

The question has been on my mind since the summer of 2005 when, at a gathering of conservatives, the question of Mr. Bush and big spending was raised…. Everyone murmured about… how the president “spends like a drunken sailor except the sailor spends his own money.” And then someone, a smart young journalist, said, (I paraphrase), But we always knew what Bush was. He told us when he ran as a compassionate conservative. This left me rubbing my brow in confusion. Is that what Mr. Bush meant by compassionate conservatism?

That’s not what I understood him to mean. If I’d thought he was a big-spending Rockefeller Republican…. I wouldn’t have voted for him…. I didn’t understand Mr. Bush’s grand passion to be cutting spending…. But he did present himself as a conservative… conservatism is hostile, for reasons ranging from the abstract and philosophical to the concrete and practical, to high spending and high taxing….

How did this happen? In the years after 9/11 I looked at Mr. Bush’s big budgets, and his expansion of entitlements, and assumed he was sacrificing fiscal prudence–interesting that that’s the word people used to spoof his father–in order to build and maintain, however tenuously, a feeling of national unity. I assumed he wanted to lessen bipartisan tensions when America was wading into the new world of modern terrorism. I thought: This may be right and it may be wrong, but I understand it…. Mr. Bush will never have to run again, and he is in a position to come forward and make the case, even if only rhetorically, to slow and cut spending. He has not. And there’s no sign he will….

Mr. President:

Did you ever hold conservative notions and assumptions on the issue of spending? If so, did you abandon them after the trauma of 9/11? For what reasons, exactly? Did you intend to revert to conservative thinking on spending at some point? Do you still? Were you always a liberal on spending? Were you, or are you, frankly baffled that conservatives assumed you were a conservative on spending? Did you feel they misunderstood you? Did you allow or encourage them to misunderstand you?

What are the implications for our country if spending levels continue to grow at their current pace?

What are the implications for the Republican party if it continues to cede one of the pillars on which it stood?

Did compassionate conservatism always mean big spending?

Now Peggy Noonan and the rest of the plastic Republican chattering teeth did not think back in 2000 that Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” meant that he was a spender, they thought it meant that he was a liar–and that they were in on the con. The Bush budget strategy, they thought at the time, had four components:

1. Highball estimates of future budget surpluses in order to make it look like there’s more room for tax cuts than there was.
2. Lowball the costs of the tax cuts by telling people that the AMT will be repealed when you calculate the magnitude of their tax cut and yet keeping the AMT in effect when calculating the revenue cost of the tax cut.
3. Call yourself a “compassionate conservative” to convince voters you don’t want to make elderly emphysema patients front the money for their oxygen cylinders.
4. Then, when deficits reemerge, say: “Oh. What a surprise. We have to cut way back on federal services and programs after all.”

That’s the David Stockman quadrille. They thought Bush was lying to everybody else–that, as Andrew Sullivan liked to put it:

Some… get steamed because Bush has obscured this figure or claimed his tax cut will cost less than it actually will, or because he is using Medicare surplus money today that will be needed tomorrow and beyond…. [T]hey miss the deeper point… Bush has to obfuscate his real goals of reducing spending with the smoke screen of ‘compassionate conservatism’…. B.S. is necessary for any vaguely successful retrenchment of government power in an insatiable entitlement state…. I just hope the smoke doesn’t clear before the spenders get their hands on our wallets again.

Now they are surprised–and shrill–to learn that George W. Bush was lying to them too.

http://www.skylook.biz/

• Meteor Blades’s diary :: ::

I’m clueless as to how many of those could qualify as political. Not to mention how many of those would call themselves progressive or politically left. Nor how many frequently have something worth reading, something original, inspiring, revelatory or investigatory. Thousands, for sure.

For someone as obsessed as me, it’s maddening. Speed-reading can only get you so far. But it’s simultaneously wonderful. For an antique journalist and Op-Ed junkie like myself, what could be more liberating than this plethora?

Liberating and essential. We’ve got Guckertgate, Plamegate, Torturegate, Coingate and Spygate. We’ve got corruption and incompetence and unconstitutionality spread from sea to shining sea. We’ve got a foreign policy that makes Manifest Destiny look altruistic. With mercenaries, propagandists and lily-livered chicken-hearts dominating the megamedia, how could we have put so many pieces together without the blogs?

Not that a few good journalists haven’t alerted us to a smidgen of what’s going on. But, until recently, supine has been the usual position in which we’ve found our supposedly watchdog media. Worse still in the opinion sections. Worst of all on television. Anyone who has wanted something other than the same old talking points, something more than the same shy obeisance to an Administration out of control, something even close to a reading between the lines, has turned to blogs.

On the Op-Ed pages of the old Los Angeles Herald Examiner, I used to buy maybe 50 “citizen” pieces a year and fill the rest with the same, publisher-approved, mostly sad collection of syndicated columnists that the rest of America’s newspapers published. At the Los Angeles Times, we maybe managed to get 250 citizen pieces onto the Op-Ed and Sunday Opinion pages each year, and filled the rest with syndicated writers.

For 11 years before it was absorbed by Tribune Media Services, I contributed to this narrow little world of pre-packaged opinion as editor at the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, where a staff of salespeople worked to cram 21 political columnists – including Cal Thomas, Arianna Huffington, Robert Reno, Henry Kissinger, Jesse Jackson, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Bill Press and Armstrong Williams – into as many of the nation’s 1,500 daily newspapers as possible. Foreign sales were big, too.

Three major syndicates and a handful of minor ones still run their own stables of political columnists. Ultimately, with 125 or so syndicated columnists available, about 10 dominate the dead-tree media. Right or left, they’re treated like commodities. Check out the TMS page. You need a liberal or a libertarian on your Op-Ed? Just click on the mini-window.

You can depend on almost every one of these columnists never to break the formula. Never too long. Never too colorful. Definitely nothing to upset the brand. They’re sold as a conservative, they’d damn sure better stay one, or they’ll wind up pissing off client editors the way Huffington did when she started making her move from right to left. Predictability is essential.

Which is why I love political blogs. Unpredictable. Fresh. Unique. The standard Op-Ed is 700 words per entry. If it suits a blogger, s/he’ll write 7,000 words. Or 70, plus a link to somebody’s else’s 7,000 words. Or a 7-word caption on a picture . Or just the picture with a comment thread so you can write your own caption. Rant, rave, rumination, reminiscence, reflection, review, rehash, research, reverie, revolt – there are simply no limits to form or style or substance. The political blogger can create a smackdown that is pure poetry, as well as exposés, dot-connections or raw speculation. S/he can write a diatribe or a dissertation. Or serve as focal point for activism. Nobody can tell the blogger what to say, what conclusions to draw. No editor is on the phone suggesting the latest effort be toned down or started over. Of course, this free-for-all means some wild-ass nonsense gets posted. And a few typos.

It also means an abundance so rich that if you’re at all like me, you can’t even keep up with the names of all the new progressive blogs, much less their substance. Happily, each year at this time, the folks over at Wampum help us all out by hosting the Koufax Awards.

http://nyheraldsun.com

http://wizbangblog.com/2006/03/04/associated-press-admits-error-in-katrina-video-story.php

Don Imus August 18, 2001

MAR. 16, 2006: MY OWN IRAQ QUESTION Iraq may be a disorderly and violent place. But it is not west Africa. It seem that every Iraqi has a (working) cell phone. It seems that every building in Sadr City has a satellite dish – presumably connected to a TV. One hears no complaints of hunger and malnutrition. The streets are full of cars. (We’re told: 1 million more than before the war.) When you fly over rural Iraq, you see green farms, meaning that somebody has both an irrigation system and irrigation rights.

So my question is this: Where do Iraqis get their money? Corruption tends to enrich a well-placed few, not to put cell phones in the hands of everybody. And yet when I asked Americans in Iraq about the Iraqi private economy, everybody agreed that it must exist – but nobody seemed to know what precisely it was, how big it was, or how big it had been in the immediate past, to enable an assessment of whether it was growing and if so, how fast.

In the past, I have cited statistics here about Iraqi economic growth. I am baffled now how anybody could have generated them in the absence of so much information. On the other hand something is obviously going on. Any NRO readers have any insights?

http://frum.nationalreview.com/

 

 

http://www.slate.com/id/2000168/
Subject: The Rules Girls Are Back
Friday, May 12, 2000, at 9:17 AM ET

Yes, I thought that was a rather curious intervention by Eric Alterman, too. Maybe you could try to worm your way back into his good graces by getting caught for having slipped American nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union?

All superb points about the Not Quite a Million Moms. Can I go back though to the even more troubling media treatment of the Claudia Kennedy sex harassment case? Despite their chunky appearance, America’s feminists impress me as an unusually agile bunch, able to execute ideological pirouettes at a speed that would have dazzled Nijinsky. Back during the Anita Hill controversy, we were all introduced to the four rules for understanding sexual harassment:

A) It doesn’t matter that the annoyance in question seems trivial to most men or even to many women: It becomes punishable harassment if the woman on the receiving end was offended by it. Millions of Americans might have thought Anita Hill hysterically over-sensitive even if everything she said were true, but what mattered were Hill’s feelings……

Hugh Hewitt is still a complete ass.

 

 Thursday, March 16

Mark Steyn’s position on commissions.

03-16steyn.mp3

HH: I begin this Thursday as I do most with Mark Steyn, columnist to the world. Mr. Steyn, we begin a story that centers on you. What has happened to the Sunday Telegraph and the Spectator? The Hugh Hewitt listeners want to know where the Mark Steyn material is.

MS: My relationship with the Telegraph group, which the Spectator also belongs to, deteriorated over the last year, and became adversarial, which I don’t think is particularly healthy. And I don’t mind…I’ve been the token conservative on liberal newspapers. I don’t mind an adversarial relationship in terms of your position on the Gulf War, or Afghanistan, or the European Union or whatever. I don’t mind having differences with editors and so forth on that. But when it gets into, when the whole relationship just becomes generally toxic, then I think it’s best to hang out your shingle somewhere else, which I will do in the United Kingdom at some point.

HH: That’s the important part. You will be back writing in the UK. Any time frame set for that, Mark Steyn?

MS: Well, I would hope sooner rather than later. One of the things, if you’re a controversial writer, when I parted company with the National Post up in Canada, I thought well, every newspaper’s going to start calling me, because I was the hottest columnist there, according to some of their reader surveys and things. And of course, instead, these editors think oh, well, good riddance to that right-wing wacko. We don’t need a crazy guy like him. And after a couple of years of the phone not ringing, they all came kind of slinking back and made me derisory offers of one kind or another. And I would bet on the same thing happening over in London.

HH: Now isn’t this sort of suicidal behavior on the part of newspapers, Mark Steyn? And we’ll take you out of it. But we just had a Pew report showing they’re in terrible condition. Nobody cares about their in-house tubas that go on, boom, boom, boom on the old, same notes. They’re killing themselves if they deny their readers what their readers want.

MS: Well you know, one of the things I find, and I’m sure you do, too, you travel a lot around the country. And the thing about American newspapers in particular, but it’s also true of Canada and certain others, is that if you get off the plane at almost any airport on the continent, and you’ll pick up the local paper which will be a monopoly daily, published by Gannett or some other similar company, and it will just have like the world’s dullest comment page, the world’s dullest op-ed page. This is a great riveting time of war, and say what you like about crazy folks on left or right, but there’s a lot to say about it. And in fact, the newspapers, and their monopolies, have made them dull, and that’s the danger, I think, in much of the United States, that you want someone, whether you agree with him or not, that you want something that will be riveting and thought-provoking. And some of these guys have been just holding down prime op-ed real estate for decades. It’s amazing to me.

HH: Mark Steyn, last question on this. One of the Telegraph suits sent out an e-mail to someone questioning, saying we hope to have Mark Steyn back within the Telegraph family soon. Is that just shining on their distraught readers?

MS: Yeah, I don’t quite know why they’re saying that, because (laughing)

HH: You’re not coming back soon. All right.

MS: I’m not…that’s certainly something that…there’s no reason for them to be sending that out to readers.

HH: Oh, except to get the readers to go away for a while. Let’s turn to international affairs, but beginning in the domestic side. Yesterday, there came word, Mark Steyn, that the Iraq Study Group had been formed. Now I cannot find the statute that authorized this, and I suspect it’s a John Warner/Frank Wolfe gambit. But it’s got James Baker and Lee Hamilton, and a bunch of the usual suspects to study the war. I can’t believe we’re going to do the 9/11 Commission again. What’s your reaction to the formation of this group?

MS: Well, the 9/11 Commission is the…I mean, you know me. I’m a foreigner, but I’m pro-American. And yet I must say, the 9/11 Commission is everything I loathe about the United States, in that its legalistic, retrospective, showboating blowhards, pompous people going on TV round the clock. And in effect, it becomes something in and of itself. It’s not just commenting on something like a play by play guy is, but it actually changes the course of the something its commenting on. And that’s what’s bad about this. You know, Iraq isn’t a Broadway play in previews. The show has opened, and it’s on now. So it’s too late to have arguments about this little weak spot in the first act, and we should get it re-written. The show has opened, and the responsibility of these people involved in this, James Baker, Lee Hamilton, Rudy Giuliani, all these people, is that they should now be saying let’s win it, and then have the arguments.

HH: But do you suspect the White House attempted to stop this? Or are they at this point reeling on so many fronts, they didn’t think they had the ability to say no?

MS: Well, I think there is a danger in the last couple of weeks that they have lost control of they…not what’s going on in Iraq, but in a sense, the rationale behind it. Now I would imagine that James Baker, who’s very close to the Bush family, I can’t imagine him taking this, if he didn’t at least have a tacit approval from the Bush family. But at the same time, I think this is an example of just what we don’t need with Iraq. We do need a refreshing renewal of war rhetoric, but we don’t need to argue, you know, have a big commission on where the WMD are and all the rest of it, and all that hooey.

HH: Now speaking about the renewal of war rhetoric, yesterday, General John Abizaid, commander of United States Central Command, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee. It’s available on the web. It is hard-hitting. It is actually fierce, and quite unsparing in the protrait that he paints of al Qaeda, and what they will do. And then today, the National Security strategy comes out, which is equally unsparing about Iran and the necessity of defensive action against them, if they refuse to abandon this. Is this what you’re talking about, Mark Steyn? Getting back to basics on the stakes?

MS: Absolutely. I think we have to take these guys at their word. You know, the fact of the matter is that Saddam behaved as if he had weapons of mass destruction. And the basis of American policy in this world should be that if you go around claiming to have weapons of mass destruction, and threatening to use them as the Iranians are currently doing, then it shouldn’t be a matter whether you’re just bluffing or not. We have a responsibility to take you at your word and do something about it. And that’s really the issue in Iran. Iran, actually, does generally walk the walk as well as talk the talk. They are people who have blown up Jewish community centers in Buenos Aires. And it’s hard to, even by the biggest stretch, it’s hard to say that’s a legitimate grievance because of Israeli occupation of Palestine. I mean, they are people with a long reach, and a 25 year history of extra-territoriality. Why would they have nuclear weapons if they didn’t, at the very minimum, intend them for serious nuclear blackmail?

HH: Let’s turn to the domestic side of the attack on national security. Russ Feingold wants to censure the President. How should the GOP in the Senate respond, Mark Steyn?

MS: Well, I would very much hope that the only reason he’s doing this is because Karl Rove has opened up a big bank account in the Cayman Islands for him, because it’s hard to see how this can be of any advantage to the Democrats. It’s amazing to me. Just as they’ve found this sort of rather shrill opportunist bit of good news for them on the Dubai ports deal, where they found a national security angle that somehow in crude political terms worked for them, then they go and blow it all back to…Russ Feingold, basically demanding that we censure the President for eavesdropping on al Qaeda phone calls. There is no good that can come for the Democratic Party out of that, and if Russ Feingold wants to pursue it, to shore himself up with the party base, good luck to him, because it’s only going to make things worse for Hillary Clinton. Hillary will have to run to the left to avoid him peeling off significant support for her.

HH: But do you think Bill Frist will be successful in pushing this through the Judiciary Committee, onto the floor for a debate, and should he?

MS: Yes, I think he should, because I think every time the Democrats come up with this joke…these joke talking points, censure, impeachment, withdrawal from Iraq, timetable for withdrawal now, we need to set a timetable for withdrawal on April 17th, I think you should call them on it, and say fine, let’s get it to a vote, and let’s see how many of you, how many of you trinners and weather vane politicians, the John Kerry’s and all the rest of them, how many of you are actually prepared to put your vote where your party’s big mouths are.

HH: Well put. Now I want to close with a cultural question. The Rock And Roll Hall of Fame had its induction this week. James Lileks has been on this program defending, and will be later again, Black Sabbath and Sex Pistols, as pretty much the summit of American culture. Your reaction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a general proposition, Mark Steyn, and if you have any thoughts on this year’s inductees?

MS: One of the most disgusting examples of the bloated federal budget is that federal money goes to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

HH: Oh, I didn’t know that.

MS: And if rock and roll is not even self-supporting, nothing in America is.

HH: Mark Steyn, always a pleasure. I will put my note to the Sunday Telegraph’s editor, and call him a man of not great precision or truth when he’s communicating with his e-mailers. Talk to you again next week, Mark Steyn.

End of interview.