Noonan Likes Chris Christie, Too!

Peggy Noonan is the Saturday gal at the Wall Street Journal.  I read her regularly.  These conclusions are my own, as is whatever I write, say or sing. 

She strikes me as uppity, protected, removed.   She might insist on washing her hands or take a brief shower after watching TeaParty folks interviewed on television in order to be more comfortable.

I admit, I, too, cringe occasionally.   They are on my side.  I welcome them, yet  they could ruin my side and their own noble cause.   Whatever the Marxists of mainstream media hate can’t be bad.  And this media tries hard to smear the group.  This media hates Sarah Palin as well.   So does Peggy Noonan.

No, I don’t want to see Sarah Palin as president.   But, I really like that gal except for her awful voice.

But, Peggy Noonan can’t be all bad either.   She writes down some good ideas and news from time to time.   And she apparently likes Chris Christie.

And so do I.

In last Saturday’s Journal, she wrote, “Try a Little Tenderness” and its subtitle, “Chris Christie, not the Tea Party, is the model for Republicans”.    AMEN!

(The AMEN is mine, in case you didn’t pick that up.)

In the article she writes: 

“Members of the Tea Party are not going to vote Democratic, and the Democrats have figured this out. Someone noted on cable the other day that only months ago many Democrats still hoped they might benefit to some degree from the Tea Party’s populist spirit, and attempted a certain tentative sympathy. True, but they did it like anthropologists discovering a new tribe in Borneo: “Come. No hurt. Be friend.” Now, seeing the Tea Party is not gettable or co-optable, the Democrats are attempting to demonize them, and use them to demonize the GOP.

Thus the new DNC scare ad, which features the usual “Jaws”-like monster music, and then the charge that the Tea Party and the GOP are “one and the same.” Not only that, they’re cooking up a plan to “get rid of” or privatize Social Security and Medicare, repeal the 17th Amendment, and abolish the departments of energy and education and the EPA.

Your average viewer will see this not as information but as theater, like Demon Sheep, and of course propaganda, though some will perk up at abolishing the agencies. But the ad signals a central Democratic argument for the fall, which The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder summed up as “We may be incompetent, but they’re crazy.”

It’s a sign of Democratic panic that a week ago they were saying what was wrong with the GOP was they have no plan, while now what’s wrong is that they do have one.

The problem for the Democrats, however, is not a new Contract With America, or the Tea Party. Their problem is Chris Christie.

National Republicans don’t want to talk about specific cuts in spending for the obvious reason: The Obama administration is killing itself, and when your foe is self-destructing, you must not interrupt. Let the media go forward each day reporting the bad polls. Turn it into “Franco: still dead.” Don’t let the media turn it into a two-part story: “Obama is Struggling and The Republicans Will Cut Your Benefits.”

That is classic, smart political thinking, but wrong. The public thinks we’re sinking as a nation. They want to know someone has a plan to help. The most promising leader in that respect is Mr. Christie, the New Jersey governor, who just closed an $11 billion budget gap without raising taxes. He is famously blunt and doesn’t speak in those talking points that make you wonder, “Should I kill myself now with rude stabs to the chest, or should I just jump screaming from the window?”

On “Morning Joe” this week he said, “There were a lot of hard cuts and difficult things to do in there, but fact of the matter is we’re trying to treat people like adults. They know that we’re in awful shape, and they know that no one else is around anymore to pay for the problems that won’t hurt them.”

What about the argument that in a recession we need stimulus spending? “It’s dead wrong. More spending with what? The federal government continuing to print more and more money and leaving that debt for our kids? It will only grind the economy down further.”

On public schools: Teachers complain when they’re getting “4% and 5% salary increases a year in a 0% inflation world. They get free health benefits from the day they’re hired for their entire family until the day they die. They believe they are entitled to this shelter from the recession when the people who are paying for that shelter are the people who have been laid off, who’ve lost their homes, had their hours cut back. And all we ask them to do is freeze their salary for one year and pay 1.5% of their salary for their health benefits. . . . As much as I love teachers, everyone’s got to be a part of the sacrifice.”

Mr. Christie was direct, unadorned: You can’t tax your way out of a spending problem, you’ve got to stop spending. Governors have budgets for which they’re held accountable, so he had to move. But Mr. Christie’s way is also closer than most national Republicans have come—or Democrats will come—to satisfying the public desire that someone step forward, define the problem, apply common sense, devise a way through, do what’s needed.

He’s going to break through in a big way. The answer to our political problems lies in clarity, competence and courage, not a visit to crazy town. And he knows how to put out his hand. “As much as I love teachers.” That’s good.”

Comment:   If Chris Christie would have a yet to do it, he could with one appearance become a Tea Party hero.    He boasts about his heritage….Dad is Irish and Mom is Sicillian.   He claims he got the best of both.

Watch him closely.   This is a good one for the good side.

Joe Klein, the Journolisto Deviant, on Charlie Rangel’s Troubles

“It takes one to know one”, the saying used to run and in this case it fits quite well.

Joe Klein is a crook of the first degree.  He should be able to recognize his kindred, and he does in Charlie Rangel.   But Charlie Rangel apparently only sleazed with money and its trappings.  Joe Klein is a crook of a worse order.   He sleazes in mud and lies to smear.   He is a Lefty slut who manufactures dirt to damage and destroy people, ideas, and the democratic process.  

I’ll take a crook like Charlie Rangel any day over the grease called Joe Klein.

Mr. Klein writes the following about a  leading Democrat in the House of Representatives, Mr. Rangel:

“But he’s a crook. No getting around it. And his brand of politics–the Harlem Clubhouse patronage and condescension machine–has, arguably, diminished the chances of success, and increased a culture of dependency, for many of his constituents over the past 50 years.

I know less about Maxine Waters–but I do know she’s cut from the same political cloth as Rangel and, at times, has been prone to make extreme racialist statements. But, as with Rangel, the most important thing about Waters isn’t her race, it’s the fact that she is perpetually unchallenged in her district. Rangel and Waters are exemplars of the greatest problem facing our Congress–and therefore our democracy–which is the high-tech gerrymandering of safe seats on both sides of the aisle. That is why they don’t give a fig about the Democratic Party’s fate in the fall. They haven’t had to trim their sails to meet the challenges of real democracy. 

Imagine what sort of legislator Charlie Rangel would have been if his district ran north to south–incorporating Manhattan’s ritzy Upper East Side–rather than East to West, keeping him safe in Harlem. A different one–a more creative and responsive one–to be sure. And then extrapolate that across the breadth of the Congress: more than 15 years ago, I wrote a column about how inner city blacks and suburban Republicans in Georgia had colluded to create a map after the 1990 census that created safe seats for themselves, and destroyed those districts where Representatives (white Democrats, mostly) had to appeal to both constituencies to win. Cynthia McKinney, then a Congresswoman from Georgia whose seat had been carved out in the deal, accused me of racism. But the truth was that the deal–which her father, a power in the state legislature, helped to cut–had created a net gain of safe Republican seats.

Now we’re on the cusp of another redistricting. State legislators across the country will be using sophisticated computer programs across the country to do violence to natural geography, to create districts that look like spiders and neural clusters, in order preserve the fiefdoms of the current incumbents. The process will reinforce the sense of entitlement, and racial politics, of people like Rangel and Waters; it will increase the likelihood that suburban Republicans need only to play to the Tea Party know-nothings in their districts. It will increase the polarization and sense of gridlock–and anger–across the country.

It would be nice if we had a national legislature that was mapped out rationally, according to natural geographic borders. It would be, I believe, the most direct path to a political system run for the benefit of the public, rather than for the regal longevity of its politicians. But, absent a Supreme Court ruling that strikes down racial gerrymandering, I don’t see that happening.”

Comment:  Mr. Klein writes about “real democracy”…..this  honcho of the Journolistos whose goal it was to mix and spread  poisons in all directions   to hide or deflect the  foulness of the 2008  Barack Obama capture of the presidency.    Such people are traitors to democracy.   They cause lasting suspicions and doubts about anything truthful said or written.

Joe Klein is the enemy of the people in a Democracy…..Charlie Rangel’s sin appears to be greed.

On Which Side of the Fence Do You Sit? The Democrat Side?

 

If you ever wondered which side of the fence you sit on, this is a great test! 

If a Republican doesn’t like guns, he doesn’t buy one.
If a Democrat doesn’t like guns, he wants all guns outlawed.   

If a Republican is a vegetarian, he doesn’t eat meat.
If a Democrat is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products banned for everyone.   

If a Republican is homosexual, he quietly leads his life.
If a Democrat is homosexual, he demands legislated respect.   

If a Republican is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation.
A Democrat wonders who is going to take care of him.   

If a Republican doesn’t like a talk show host, he switches channels.
A Democrat demands that those they don’t like be shut down.   

If a Republican is a non-believer, he doesn’t go to church.
A Democrat non-believer wants any mention of God and religion silenced.

If a Republican decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job that provides it.

A Democrat demands that the rest of us pay for his.   

 

 

If a Republican reads this, he’ll forward it so his friends can have a good laugh.
A Democrat will delete it because he’s “offended”.   

Dennis Prager could have written this list.   Thankyou Arlene Taber for sending me this unfortunate listing of some of the differences between the Democrat Left and Republicans.