Friday, August 14, 2009

DOES PEGGY NOONAN EVEN READ WHAT SHE WRITES?

Noonan in her latest column (which is about health-care reform):

It is divisive save in one respect. The Obama White House has done the near impossible: It has united the Republican Party. Social conservatives, economic conservatives, libertarians -- they're all against the health-care schemes as presented so far. They're shoulder-to-shoulder at the barricade again.

Noonan a mere 12 paragraphs later:

Looking back, a key domestic moment in this presidency occurred only eight days after his inauguration, when Mr. Obama won House passage of his stimulus bill.... He won 244-188, a rousing victory for a new president. But he won without a single Republican vote. That was the moment the new division took hold.

So "the near impossible" is so near impossible that Obama did it practically before the ground crew cleaned up after the inaugural. And then he did it again with health care. In between which, I guess, Republicans were bitterly divided -- remember? They were at daggers drawn, some arguing that Obama is Hitler, some that he's Stalin. Republicans are always hopelessly divided by these factional squabbles, as they are by their utter lack of message discipline and their failure to build a cable-news/think-tank/talk-radio noise machine. But, miraculously for them, Obama has come along and helped them overcome these enormous inherent disadvantages -- twice. Each time for the first time.

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