Frank Rich and Peggy Noonan Bash Obama Administration

I'm so sick of talking heads, especially the ones on the left and the right. They're so pompous. In a way, Frank Rich and Peggy Noonan wrote the same column for today.
On the left, here's Frank Rich's column.
On the right, here's Peggy Noonan's "snakebit" column.
Folks are just using the oil disaster to push their own agendas. On the left, Rich is pushing for more government power by stating his belief that the Obama administration has been impotent.

On the right, Noonan is pushing the Obama-is-incompetent narrative that the republicans have been pushing since Obama took office.

The right has only been interested in more power for themselves, not in solving any of the problems this nation faces. For the republicans, the answer is always smaller government, lower taxes. That's all they have. Noonan says Obama is so incompetent that he's relying on luck and academia.
The two extremes are the only ones that ever get heard, but they're not the majority. There are grains of truth in both sides but neither the left or the right have solutions to problems. They only have their self-righteous agendas.

This story explores whether it matters what the so-called chattering class has to say. I think not.

It is not just the number of commentators or the abundance of platforms that is diluting the influence of the mainstream media, but their speed. Opinions are being served up so fast that in this case many of them were stale by the next morning.

“Things have expanded so much,” Dennis Ryerson, the editor of The Indianapolis Star, said on Thursday. “Forty years ago, newspapers ran opinion pieces by a lot of columnists, most of whom were in Washington. They had a good following and were widely respected. But now anyone with a cheap computer can become a columnist or a pundit. The definition has changed. More people are in the game right now.

“Obama couldn’t get a break from any of the national commentators,” he said. “So I was surprised when I saw a poll today that showed that Obama’s approval rating didn’t change that much. I don’t know if anyone has figured out the impact of the new information order when you have so many opinions out there.” NYT

Obama Is What He Is and Always Has Been

A great comment in response to too-liberal-for-my-taste Frank Rich's column:

I am one of those who always saw Obama largely as he said he was. I knew who I was voting for. I expected a very intellectual, pragmatic, temperate man. I expected him to do some policy in the middle and some to the left. He was known to not be about ideology when he was my senator.
He always seemed to combine the idealism with the hard reality. The inspirational with the pragmatic.
And, I have not found myself disappointed by him because he's operated the same as I expected him to.
the one thing I did feel was that he would not abandon health care like so many others did.
In our society today we mistake loud, crude and bullying and bragging as strong. We think quiet, reflective and thoughtful as weak. We see a guy who preens and brags and throws out the empty, simple tough guy rhetoric as strong.
The chest beater and fist pounder.
But, the quiet ones are just as resolute and strong - if not stronger. The guy who did the hard stuff like save the banks on Wall Street to prevent collapse, the guy who decided we had to do a little drilling to bridge us over until we are energy independent and green, the guy who walked into the lions den that day to mix it up with republicans and signal health care was not dead were all hard things.
tough things.
Like Gary Cooper, Obama is strong but quiet about it.
He will never let his opposition know what he will do and what he thinks.

Liberals Insisting Brown's Win Wasn't About Healthcare

Liberals don't want to admit that Scott Brown was elected, in part, so that he could vote against the healthcare bill. Yes, Massachusetts has healthcare. No, they didn't want the Senate bill. Yes, that's one of the big reasons they elected Brown. But liberals won't admit it because they want to pass healthcare as it stands. Anything that has to be rammed through can't be good. Also, Ben Nelson shouldn't get his special deal. The NYT's Frank Rich, voice of liberals, has his agenda, which is that Obama needs to move more to the left to be a good president. Here's another disappointed liberal ranting. I'm tired of the liberals. I'm tired of the conservatives. They're all wrong:

It was not a referendum on Barack Obama, who in every poll remains one of the most popular politicians in America. It was not a rejection of universal health care, which Massachusetts mandated (with Scott Brown’s State Senate vote) in 2006. It was not a harbinger of a resurgent G.O.P., whose numbers remain in the toilet. Brown had the good sense not to identify himself as a Republican in either his campaign advertising or his victory speech.

And yet Tuesday’s special election was a dire omen for this White House. If the administration sticks to this trajectory, all bets are off for the political future of a president who rode into office blessed with more high hopes, good will and serious promise than any in modern memory. More at NYT

Obama Displeases the Left

Frank Rich is displeased. The ACLU is calling Obama's reversal on releasing the photos a win for al Quaeda. Get real. 
The only people who care about dragging out the torture issue are those on the left and those on the right.
The rest of Americans could care less or want to see Obama move on. We want things like education reform and healthcare reform.
Obama made it clear, going forward torture will not be tolerated. I'm happy to see that Obama has the kind of focus that he can ignore both sides and make decisions--not based on ideology--but on the evidence at hand.
But there are so many ideologues invested in revenge against Bush. This torture issue has been consumed by politics:

TO paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions.

That’s why the president’s flip-flop on the release of detainee abuse photos — whatever his motivation — is a fool’s errand. The pictures will eventually emerge anyway, either because of leaks (if they haven’t started already) or because the federal appeals court decision upholding their release remains in force. And here’s a bet: These images will not prove the most shocking evidence of Bush administration sins still to come.

There are many dots yet to be connected, and not just on torture. This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld’s corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security. The piece is not the work of a partisan but the Texan journalist Robert Draper, author of “Dead Certain,” the 2007 Bush biography that had the blessing (and cooperation) of the former president and his top brass. It draws on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists. NYT

Frank Rich a Little Late on AIG Populist Rage Bandwagon

If I hear or read the phrase "populist rage" one more time....
Frank Rich says Obama needs to address the rage. Duh. He is. He's addressing the rage by fixing the problem. I don't see Obama twiddling his thumbs and frankly, I'm tired of the media and congress exploitation of "populist rage."
Even the folks at Daily Kos think Rich is off the mark.

NYT: Unless and until Barack Obama addresses the full depth of Americans’ anger with his full arsenal of policy smarts and political gifts, his presidency and, worse, our economy will be paralyzed. It would be foolish to dismiss as hyperbole the stark warning delivered by Paulette Altmaier of Cupertino, Calif., in a letter to the editor published by The Times last week: “President Obama may not realize it yet, but his Katrina moment has arrived.”

Obama Has More to Worry About Than Trolls Under the Bridge

Trolls under the bridge is how Chris Matthews described republican antics. Frank Rich describes how serious our problems are and the sense of denial we have, despite.

I don't think any of us in "real America," to borrow a phrase from the republicans, are in denial. Just those who tried to keep up with the Joneses. Those of us in real America watched our neighbors pile on debt and we had to struggle against the temptation to do the same.

Ultimately, we knew it was a house of cards but we couldn't do anything about it except work, save what we could and watch. What we didn't know is that our neighbors' practice of keeping up with the Joneses would also bring us down -- our home values (many of us resisted the easy bake home), our 401Ks, our jobs. Now, as pointed out by Ranting Rick Santelli, many people are livid.

But the fact is, we have to prop up the debtors and those who didn't know any better -- we are a nation in need of financial literacy training --  for the sake of the whole.

NYT: No one knows, of course, but a bigger question may be whether we really want to know. One of the most persistent cultural tics of the early 21st century is Americans’ reluctance to absorb, let alone prepare for, bad news. We are plugged into more information sources than anyone could have imagined even 15 years ago. The cruel ambush of 9/11 supposedly “changed everything,” slapping us back to reality. Yet we are constantly shocked, shocked by the foreseeable. Obama’s toughest political problem may not be coping with the increasingly marginalized G.O.P. but with an America-in-denial that must hear warning signs repeatedly, for months and sometimes years, before believing the wolf is actually at the door.

This phenomenon could be seen in two TV exposés of the mortgage crisis broadcast on the eve of the stimulus signing. On Sunday, “60 Minutes” focused on the tawdry lending practices of Golden West Financial, built by Herb and Marion Sandler. On Monday, the CNBC documentary “House of Cards” served up another tranche of the subprime culture, typified by the now defunct company Quick Loan Funding and its huckster-in-chief, Daniel Sadek. Both reports were superbly done, but both could have been reruns.

Obama's fine line:

Pity our new president. As he rolls out one recovery package after another, he can’t know for sure what will work. If he tells the whole story of what might be around the corner, he risks instilling fear itself among Americans who are already panicked. (Half the country, according to a new Associated Press poll, now fears unemployment.) But if the president airbrushes the picture too much, the country could be as angry about ensuing calamities as it was when the Bush administration’s repeated assertion of “success” in Iraq proved a sham. Managing America’s future shock is a task that will call for every last ounce of Obama’s brains, temperament and oratorical gifts.

The difficulty of walking this fine line can be seen in the drama surrounding the latest forbidden word to creep around the shadows for months before finally leaping into the open: nationalization. Until he started hedging a little last weekend, the president has pointedly said that nationalizing banks, while fine for Sweden, wouldn’t do in America, with its “different” (i.e., non-socialistic) culture and traditions. But the word nationalization, once mostly whispered by liberal economists, is now even being tossed around by Lindsey Graham and Alan Greenspan. It’s a clear indication that no one has a better idea. Read the rest.

Americans Are Smarter Than Washington Thinks

After hours activity pre-inauguration in DC

If you watched David Axelrod on Meet the Press today, you'd hear him say that. Frank Rich points it out in his column today. It's why Obama took to the town halls in Indiana and Florida, to solicit feedback and rally support for the stimulus and perhaps, for a little reassurance that he's on the right path. 
Rich also eloquently notes, as did Ronald Brownstein, that Obama, once again, has outwitted all the pundits and naysayers:

AM I crazy, or wasn’t the Obama presidency pronounced dead just days ago? Obama had “all but lost control of the agenda in Washington,” declared Newsweek on Feb. 4 as it wondered whether he might even get a stimulus package through Congress. “Obama Losing Stimulus Message War” was the headline at Politico a day later. At the mostly liberal MSNBC, the morning host, Joe Scarborough, started preparing the final rites. Obama couldn’t possibly eke out a victory because the stimulus package was “a steaming pile of garbage.”

Less than a month into Obama’s term, we don’t (and can’t) know how he’ll fare as president. The compromised stimulus package, while hardly garbage, may well be inadequate. Timothy Geithner’s uninspiring and opaque stab at a bank rescue is at best a place holder and at worst a rearrangement of the deck chairs on the TARP-Titanic, where he served as Hank Paulson’s first mate.

But we do know this much. Just as in the presidential campaign, Obama has once again outwitted the punditocracy and the opposition. The same crowd that said he was a wimpy hope-monger who could never beat Hillary or get white votes was played for fools again.

On Wednesday, as a stimulus deal became a certainty on Capitol Hill, I asked David Axelrod for his take on this Groundhog Day relationship between Obama and the political culture.

“It’s why our campaign was not based in Washington but in Chicago,” he said. “We were somewhat insulated from the echo chamber. In the summer of ’07, the conventional wisdom was that Obama was a shooting star; his campaign was irretrievably lost; it was a ludicrous strategy to focus on Iowa; and we were falling further and further behind in the national polls.” But even after the Iowa victory, this same syndrome kept repeating itself. When Obama came out against the gas-tax holiday supported by both McCain and Clinton last spring, Axelrod recalled, “everyone in D.C. thought we were committing suicide.”

The stimulus battle was more of the same. “This town talks to itself and whips itself into a frenzy with its own theories that are completely at odds with what the rest of America is thinking,” he says. Once the frenzy got going, it didn’t matter that most polls showed support for Obama and his economic package: “If you watched cable TV, you’d see our support was plummeting, we were in trouble. It was almost like living in a parallel universe.”

For Axelrod, the moral is “not just that Washington is too insular but that the American people are a lot smarter than people in Washington think.” Read it all

Obama Meeting Liberal Media Tonight

Last night he met with conservatives, including Peggy Noonan, Charles Krauthammer and David Brooks. 
Tonight: 

Barack Obama may have dined with conservative columnists Tuesday night, but that doesn't mean the president-elect is leaving the liberals out. Politico's Michael Calderone reports that Obama met Wednesday at his transition headquarters with a group of pundits from the left, including Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow and the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne and Eugene Robinson. (Some moderates were included as well.) Salon

Focus on the Family Lays Off Workers After Prop 8

By way of an angry Frank Rich (read below), Focus on the Family is laying off workers after pouring money into passing Prop 8. The group, headed by James Dobson, are conservatives, the Palin kind. Focus on the Family co-sponsored this event. Some people say Dobson and Rick Warren share the same intolerance, which is why so many are opposed to Warren's participation at Obama's inauguration.

Colo Independent: Focus on the Family is poised to announce major layoffs to its Colorado Springs-based ministry and media empire today. The cutbacks come just weeks after the group pumped more than half a million dollars into the successful effort to pass a gay-marriage ban in California.

Critics are holding up the layoffs, which come just two months after the organization’s last round of dismissals, as a sad commentary on the true priorities of the ministry.

“If I were their membership I would be appalled,” said Mark Lewis, a longtime Colorado Springs activist who helped organize a Proposition 8 protest in Colorado Springs on Saturday. “That [Focus on the Family] would spend any money on anything that’s obviously going to get blocked in the courts is just sad. [Prop. 8] is guaranteed to lose, in the long run it doesn’t have a chance — it’s just a waste of money.”

In all, Focus pumped $539,000 in cash and another $83,000 worth of non-monetary support into the measure to overturn a California Supreme Court ruling that allowed gays and lesbians to marry in that state. The group was the seventh-largest donor to the effort in the country. The cash contributions are equal to the salaries of 19 Coloradans earning the 2008 per capita income of $29,133.

Here's Frank Rich, who's angry at Obama for inviting Rick Warren to the inauguration:

But we’re not there yet. Warren’s defamation of gay people illustrates why, as does our president-elect’s rationalization of it. When Obama defends Warren’s words by calling them an example of the “wide range of viewpoints” in a “diverse and noisy and opinionated” America, he is being too cute by half. He knows full well that a “viewpoint” defaming any minority group by linking it to sexual crimes like pedophilia is unacceptable.

It is even more toxic in a year when that group has been marginalized and stripped of its rights by ballot initiatives fomenting precisely such fears. “You’ve got to give them hope” was the refrain of the pioneering 1970s gay politician Harvey Milk, so stunningly brought back to life by Sean Penn on screen this winter. Milk reminds us that hope has to mean action, not just words.

By the historical standards of presidential hubris, Obama’s disingenuous defense of his tone-deaf invitation to Warren is nonetheless a relatively tiny infraction. It’s no Bay of Pigs. But it does add an asterisk to the joyous inaugural of our first black president. It’s bizarre that Obama, of all people, would allow himself to be on the wrong side of this history.

Blago Pales Next To Washington and Wall Street Scandals

Frank Rich makes a point:

Blagojevich’s alleged crimes pale next to the larger scandals of Washington and Wall Street. Yet those who promoted and condoned the twin national catastrophes of reckless war in Iraq and reckless gambling in our markets have largely escaped the accountability that now seems to await the Chicago punk nabbed by the United States attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald.

The Republican partisans cheering Fitzgerald’s prosecution of a Democrat have forgotten his other red-letter case in this decade, his conviction of Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. Libby was far bigger prey. He was part of the White House Iraq Group, the task force of propagandists that sold an entire war to America on false pretenses. Because Libby was caught lying to a grand jury and federal prosecutors as well as to the public, he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. But President Bush commuted the sentence before he served a day.

We Won We Won We Won!

It's still settling in. It was a really good win. We have a really competent president-elect.
Frank Rich does a good job of explaining that it was WE--just about every group and age-- who took back our country:

For eight years, we’ve been told by those in power that we are small, bigoted and stupid — easily divided and easily frightened. This was the toxic catechism of Bush-Rove politics. It was the soiled banner picked up by the sad McCain campaign, and it was often abetted by an amen corner in the dominant news media. We heard this slander of America so often that we all started to believe it, liberals most certainly included. If I had a dollar for every Democrat who told me there was no way that Americans would ever turn against the war in Iraq or definitively reject Bush governance or elect a black man named Barack Hussein Obama president, I could almost start to recoup my 401(k). Few wanted to take yes for an answer.

So let’s be blunt. Almost every assumption about America that was taken as a given by our political culture on Tuesday morning was proved wrong by Tuesday night.

The most conspicuous clichés to fall, of course, were the twin suppositions that a decisive number of white Americans wouldn’t vote for a black presidential candidate — and that they were lying to pollsters about their rampant racism. But the polls were accurate. There was no “Bradley effect.” A higher percentage of white men voted for Obama than any Democrat since Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton included.

Obama also won all four of those hunting-and-Hillary-loving Rust Belt states that became 2008’s obsession among slumming upper-middle-class white journalists: Pennsylvania and Michigan by double digits, as well as Ohio and even Indiana, which has gone Democratic only once (1964) since 1936. The solid Republican South, led by Virginia and North Carolina, started to turn blue as well. While there are still bigots in America, they are in unambiguous retreat.

And what about all those terrified Jews who reportedly abandoned their progressive heritage to buy into the smears libeling Obama as an Israel-hating terrorist? Obama drew a larger percentage of Jews nationally (78) than Kerry had (74) and — mazel tov, Sarah Silverman! — won Florida.

Let’s defend Hispanic-Americans, too, while we’re at it. In one of the more notorious observations of the campaign year, a Clinton pollster, Sergio Bendixen, told The New Yorker in January that “the Hispanic voter — and I want to say this very carefully — has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” Let us say very carefully that a black presidential candidate won Latinos — the fastest-growing demographic in the electorate — 67 percent to 31 (up from Kerry’s 53-to-44 edge and Gore’s 62-to-35).

Young voters also triumphed over the condescension of the experts. “Are they going to show up?” Cokie Roberts of ABC News asked in February. “Probably not. They never have before. By the time November comes, they’ll be tired.” In fact they turned up in larger numbers than in 2004, and their disproportionate Democratic margin made a serious difference, as did their hard work on the ground. They’re not the ones who need Geritol.

McCain Camp Branding Obama a Terrorist

I received this image in an email today. The email comes via Humanevents.com and is from the group, Our Country Deserves Better, the pac that is pushing the DVD that says Obama is a terrorist. McCain has to know about this and if he was as patriotic as he says he is, he could put an end to this nonsense and I'd feel a whole lot better if he was elected president. But we can't have a president who inspires hate. 

Frank Rich: By the time McCain asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?” it’s no surprise that someone cries out “Terrorist!” The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama’s middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers’s Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.

That’s a far cry from simply accusing Obama of being a guilty-by-association radical leftist. Obama is being branded as a potential killer and an accessory to past attempts at murder. “Barack Obama’s friend tried to kill my family” was how a McCain press release last week packaged the remembrance of a Weather Underground incident from 1970 — when Obama was 8.

We all know what punishment fits the crime of murder, or even potential murder, if the security of post-9/11 America is at stake. We all know how self-appointed “patriotic” martyrs always justify taking the law into their own hands.

Obama can hardly be held accountable for Ayers’s behavior 40 years ago, but at least McCain and Palin can try to take some responsibility for the behavior of their own supporters in 2008. What’s troubling here is not only the candidates’ loose inflammatory talk but also their refusal to step in promptly and strongly when someone responds to it with bloodthirsty threats in a crowded arena. Joe Biden had it exactly right when he expressed concern last week that “a leading American politician who might be vice president of the United States would not just stop midsentence and turn and condemn that.” To stay silent is to pour gas on the fires.

McCain's Truth Troubles

NYT: For better or worse, the candidacy of Barack Obama, a senator-come-lately, must be evaluated on his judgment, ideas and potential to lead. McCain, by contrast, has been chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, where he claims to have overseen “every part of our economy.” He didn’t, thank heavens, but he does have a long and relevant economic record that begins with the Keating Five scandal of 1989 and extends to this campaign, where his fiscal policies bear the fingerprints of Phil Gramm and Carly Fiorina. It’s not the résumé that a presidential candidate wants to advertise as America faces its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. That’s why the main thrust of the McCain campaign has been to cover up his history of economic malpractice.

McCain has largely pulled it off so far, under the guidance of Steve Schmidt, a Karl Rove protégé. A Rovian political strategy by definition means all slime, all the time. But the more crucial Rove game plan is to envelop the entire presidential race in a thick fog of truthiness. All campaigns, Obama’s included, engage in false attacks. But McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates keep repeating the same lies over and over not just to smear their opponents and not just to mask their own record. Their larger aim is to construct a bogus alternative reality so relentless it can overwhelm any haphazard journalistic stabs at puncturing it.
....snip....
For all his fiery calls last week for a Wall Street crackdown, McCain opposed the very regulations that might have helped avert the current catastrophe. In 1999, he supported a law co-authored by Gramm (and ultimately signed by Bill Clinton) that revoked the New Deal reforms intended to prevent commercial banks, insurance companies and investment banks from mingling their businesses. Equally laughable is the McCain-Palin ticket’s born-again outrage over the greed of Wall Street C.E.O.’s. When McCain’s chief financial surrogate, Fiorina, was fired as Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive after a 50 percent drop in shareholders’ value and 20,000 pink slips, she took home a package worth $42 million.

The McCain campaign canceled Fiorina’s television appearances last week after she inadvertently admitted that Palin was unqualified to run a corporation. But that doesn’t mean Fiorina is gone. Gramm, too, was ostentatiously exiled after he blamed the economic meltdown on our “nation of whiners” and “mental recession,” but he remains in the McCain loop. read the whole thing.