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Peggy Noonan Condescends to Barack Obama on “Authenticity”
Posted by KTK

Peggy Noonan mostly praised Obama’s speech, and largely seemed to understand it, which puts her in a minority of conservative commentators. But she criticizes him, near the end of her article, for . . . wait for it . . . not understanding America. Yes, snotty Reaganite lickspittles who made a profession of courting racists and religious bigots with coded signals, demonizing “welfare queens”, glorifying death squads and Nazi war dead, excusing incompetence and ignorance at every turn, and obsessing over wayward blowjobs, now presume to tell candidates of the working-class party what the real America is all about.

Near the end of the speech, Mr. Obama painted an America that didn’t summon thoughts of Faulkner but of William Blake. The bankruptcies, the dark satanic mills, the job loss and corporate corruptions. There is of course some truth in his portrait, but why do appeals to the Democratic base have to be so unrelievedly, so unrealistically, bleak?

This connected in my mind to the persistent feeling one has — the fear one has, actually — that the Obamas, he and she, may not actually know all that much about America. They are bright, accomplished, decent, they know all about the yuppie experience, the buppie experience, Ivy League ways, networking. But they bring along with all this — perhaps defensively, to keep their ideological views from being refuted by the evidence of their own lives, or so as not to be embarrassed about how nice fame, success, and power are — habitual reversions to how tough it is to be in America, and to be black in America, and how everyone since the Reagan days has been dying of nothing to eat, and of exploding untreated diseases. America is always coming to them on crutches.

But most people didn’t experience the past 25 years that way. Because it wasn’t that way. Do the Obamas know it?

Aside from the prima facie absurdity of Reagan Republicans claiming to represent ordinary Americans, in the face of the “ignorance” of black Democrats like Obama, and aside from the self-contradictions Noonan cannot even recognize (she praises the parts of Obama’s speech that catalog racial and economic inequality, then claims he is out of touch in believing that that actually affects people’s lives), she is simply, entirely - and characteristically - wrong.

The Reagan years were an economic disaster, as the direct result of his incompetent, delusional, and openly class-biased policies. In the Reagan/Bush years:

• CEO pay for the first time quadrupled to over 100 times that of workers, and tripled as a share of corporate profits 
• the lower income brackets for the first time began losing ground in terms of real wage growth, compared to the upper brackets 
• wealth concentration shifted to the richest segments to the greatest degree since the Depression 
• the minimum wage remained stagnant for almost a full decade 
• average real income grew 5% or less, in total, for the lowest 60% of the population, while growing over 20% for the top 10th and over 40% for the top 1% 
• the percentage of total national income dropped at every level for the lowest 80% of income brackets, and rose only for the top 20% 
• national debt as a percentage of GDP doubled, and in absolute dollars more than quadrupled 
• percentage job growth was lowest among all recent presidents back to Kennedy 
• the percentage of the population living in poverty reversed a consistent downward slide underway since the mid-60s, and climbed steadily to a level equal with the period before Johnson’s “Great Society” programs were begun - essentially erasing over 30 years of progress against poverty 
• the percentage of children living below the poverty level increased by half, rising over 20% for the first time 
• the effective personal income tax rates rose highest for the lowest 20% of earners, and fell most for the top 20% - overall effective income tax rate changes systematically benefitted higher earners at every bracket-change level 
• the percentage of total income spent on taxes dropped consistently at every income level, from about 13% for the lowest 20% of earners to about 7% for the highest 1% (for same-sized population groups, remember), and the gap grew wider during the Republican administrations 
• the percentage of federal revenues derived from corporate income taxes was cut almost in half during the Reagan years, while the percentage from workers payroll taxes increased
• the nation racked up its largest federal budget deficit, in real terms, in history.

And all this during just the long nightmare of the Reagan and Bush I years. Clinton turned most of these statistics around, particularly including job growth and budget management; he ended his two terms with the largest federal budget surplus ever known. And almost every category above was then turned around once again by Bush II, who turned the largest budget surplus in history into the largest deficit, exceeding even Reagan’s disastrous performance; created an unbroken history of sustained job loss never before seen; and likewise destroyed the economy to a degree it was believed was simply not possible prior to his bungling. We currently face what many fear may be the greatest recession since the Great Depression, which itself is a direct result of the deregulation of financial markets by Republican legislators and presidents, and the rise of pirate capitalism after decades of Democratic efforts to enforce economic discipline.

And all this is just on the economic side. Beyond that, there is the galloping moral degeneracy of the Republican party and its corrosive effect on the nation - corrupt, deceptive, and lawless politics; racial, religious, and homophobic divisions openly courted for political advantage; demonizing of minorities and gays; persistent sexism and the howling war on women’s personal and bodily freedom, pursued by Republicans as a sop to their religious-extremist supporters; repeated unprovoked military invasions of foreign countries, from Grenada to Panama to most of Central America to the latest fiascos of the Bush II regime; continued pandering to repressive right-wing governments including Saudi Arabia, Chile, apartheid-era South Africa, and many others - including Iraq prior to the Kuwait incursion; the promotion of torture and death squads as official policy (and not just after 9/11, but long before, in Central America under Reagan and in the US’s School for the Americas torture training program); the destruction of environmental protection, and worker- and consumer-safety policies; the politicization of the federal courts and Supreme Court; scurrilous, false, and deceptive election tactics including personal slander and racist pandering; the systematic disenfranchisement of non-white voters; organized distortion of election results by corruption and in some cases threats of violence; and on and on. It’s especially rich for Noonan to mock Americans suffering from “untreated diseases”, after Reagan spent years refusing even to acknowledge the existence of AIDS, after her fellow party-members (including the repulsive and appropriately celebratedly putrefying William F. Buckley) called for the most vicous harassment of its victims, and after Republicans systematically stoked the epidemic by imposing idiotic limitations on efforts to address it, including medical gag orders, prohibitions on condom distribution to infected patients and their families, and gratuitous limitations on the work of UN agencies and foreign organizations, again to appease the ghouls of their religious-right base while people in the US and Africa were dying in droves.

This is the reality of the America Republicans have created. These are the actual facts of the world Noonan and her heartthrob Reagan slaved to impose on those weaker, poorer, and less privileged than themselves. In stark, unquestionable fact, in virtually every category of analysis, the economic conditions within the United States got worse as a result of Republican policies, and in every single case virtually without exception, they got relatively worse for the worst off, compared with the obscenely privilged few. In case after case, the impact of the policies of the administrations she worked in, supported, and cheered afterwards was to destroy the helpless as a means of benefitting the powerful, deliberately shifting tax dollars from the poor to the rich in a coordinated, relentless, but gut-wrenchingly perverse campaign that went on year after year, while simultaneously eviscerating those functions of the government intended to help the ones they were preying on. This is not analysis, this is not opinion - this is the simple fact of the matter, documented countless times in regard of countless crimes and violations. And accompanying the war on the poor and the welfare economy was the war on liberty for those who thought unlike them - the systematic funding of and participation in organized programs of kidnapping, assassination, and torture by right-wing governments, religiously-based repression of the rights of women and gays, exploitation of racial divisions and pandering to racist supporters, and the use of state power to squelch and punish dissent, and to stifle opposition. And under Bush II, all these failures, economic, democratic, and moral, have been taken to extremes that were literally unthinkable prior to his administration. That is “the way it was” in the Reagan and Bush administrations. These are no more than documented facts.

For Noonan, none of this exists. She openly claims that to say there are problems of poverty, disease, and inequality in America is to somehow slander the country - to tell an untruth by stating the truth that she and her cronies have agreed will not be stated. That anyone who does note such known and proven facts “may not actually know all that much about America”.

I’m sure it’s true that America was not “that way” for Noonan and everyone she knows. I’m sure that for 25 years and more, she has never seen her income go down, she has never worked for anyone who made 130 times what she did and got million-dollar bonuses for putting her out of work, she has never gone without access to healthcare or feared that a family member would die because she couldn’t pay for their treatment, she has never seen anyone in her family dragged from their home at night (on the orders of the man she, Noonan, worked for) and tortured to death over days then disappeared forever, she has never listened to anyone whose great-grandfather owned her great-grandmother as property and raped her regularly tell her that it’s time to “move on” and “stop whining about the past”, she has never been laid off her job and then been mocked by the President of the United States for wanting assistance - out of her own tax dollars - in surviving the transition, she has never contracted a new and terrifying disease and watched it slowly claim the lives of most of the people she knows and loves while she waits for her own end without treatment or hope and listens to the ruling party of her own country explain why she deserves it. It was “that way” for other people while she and her friends were busy making it “that way” and pretending they weren’t guilty. And they agreed among themselves that they would simply never speak those facts, never acknowledge “the way it was” when they were running things, never admit the truth, so they could then accuse those who spoke the truth of being “out of touch”.

America is in no danger of electing a Democratic president who doesn’t know “the way it was”. Noonan and her co-conspirators are in danger that they might elect one who does. And so she spins and slanders as best she may, pretending, bizarrely, that she knows the America that Obama is too privileged to understand. But America - the real America - remembers the way it was, and who made it that way. Obama is the least of her problems.

March 21st, 2008 General, Politics, Church & State, Economics, Culture, News & Current Events, Fiasco, Torture | 9 comments