By contrast, here’s what Noonan said about Katrina:
• President Bush. The political subtext: Does he understand that what has happened in our gulf is as important as what is happening in the other gulf? Does he know in his gut that the existence of looting, chaos and disease in a great American city, or cities, is a terrible blow that may have deep implications? It was bad luck that on the day it became clear a bad storm was a catastrophe he was giving a major Iraq speech, and bad planning that he arrived back at the White House cradling a yippy puppy. But his Rose Garden statement was solid. Yes, it was a laundry list, but the kind that that gives an impression of comprehensive government action. Having the cabinet there was good. His concern was obvious. But more was needed in terms of sending a U.S. military presence into New Orleans.
• The media. Excellent as always in time of crisis. We all love to hate them, but when a story like this comes along you’re glad Anderson Cooper decided to stand there up to his butt in snakes and alligators to tell you about the city that’s become a swamp. You’re glad the anchors are so crisp and contained, you’re glad Brian Williams is in the Superdome telling you what’s going on. They’re rich and celebrated, our media stars, but when stories like this come they earn it. Not sufficiently celebrated: television cameramen, who do much of what Anderson Cooper does only while walking backwards and with their eye in a viewfinder. They’re good.
Maybe Tom Friedman and Fareed Zakaria are right and we should just go over to a Chinese-style system with a state-run media.
Corner Stone
Joe Sestak!
Joe Lisboa
Peggy Noonan: first against the wall.
MikeJ
Love her bit about the media, especially after reading Wonkette’s current top story.
licensed to kill time
DougJ, you picked out the same two nuts that I did in the thread below! I liked the bad planning, the concern and especially the impression of government competence.
Also, Anderson Cooper up to his butt in snakes.
edit:took out italics for fear of nuking the joint
P.S. great title, as usual
kommrade reproductive vigor
Um. Has anyone ever seen Noonan and Althouse in the same room?
GambitRF
OBAMA SHOULD OBSTRUCT THE LEAK WITH ALL HIS TELEPROMPTERS OLOLOLOLOLOL
Cherry Picker
I get so mad and then I look into Sestak’s baby blues and all the pain begins to melt away.
Mike Kay
nothing about the 2,000 dead people floating in the streets?
Mike Kay
@licensed to kill time:
Um, those aren’t snakes….
Ella in NM
My first thoughts when I read about her column was a flashback of her disgusting Katrina diatribe against all those savage black people behaving so badly and stealing food from grocery stores after the flood.
I really want to see a million talking heads rub her nose in this shit.
JGabriel
DougJ @ Top:
Change state to party, and it becomes clear that we already have.
.
licensed to kill time
@Mike Kay:
Everybody listen! We have to put a barrier between us and the snakes!
Legalize
@licensed to kill time:
Anderson Cooper: *raises hand*
Violet
Nooners is still holding a grudge because Obama didn’t go to Myrtle Beach as she suggested. Oh, wait, that’s Cokie. So easy to get them mixed up.
Lolis
Sad that my first reaction these days is thank goodness nobody reads newspapers anymore.
Comrade Jake
Snakes on a motherfucking gay!
Scamp Dog
What we have now is a media-run state. They like to have a good competition between the Republicans and the
Washington GeneralsDemocrats. If they continue to run our system into the ground, I might start thinking that the Chinese system might be an improvement.Corner Stone
@Comrade Jake: Hmmm. This is the second thing I’ve learned here today.
jl
Thanks for the contrast of Noonan, then and now.
Seems similar to the contrast between Brooks’ evaluation of the pros and cons of effects of ambition and caution on career choices between Roberts and Kagan.
Funny how that works. Anyone see a pattern?
I think the average votercan see the difference between the technical hurdles in evacuating New Orleans before a well and long tracked storm arrived, and this venture into the technological unknown.
I have read a lot of interesting things were said by technical people at a Congressional hearing today, and that the BP guy who wanted, and got, a last minute change to procedures in sealing the well pleaded the fifth.
This mess is BP’s fault, and it was not just one of those ‘necessary accidents’. They screwed up and one hopes that all those fancy PR commercials they pay for will not affect media reporting (ha ha ha!).
The only way Obama could have stopped this would have been to made fixing corrupt regulatory practices of the Bush II years top priority, and come down like a brick outhouse on Big Oil operations among the first things his administration did. Who knows if that was doable within 18 months? I don’t.
Maxwel
In my fantasy, there’s a breakout at a local hard core prison and about 40 prisoners barricade themselves in Noonan’s house. You can guess the rest.
jl
@Maxwel: Her pills and booze kill them off like flies?
celticdragonchick
@Maxwel:
Not cool.
Mockery is one thing. Advocating (even as a joke) gang rape is something else entirely.
Martin
@Mike Kay: They were black, so, y’know…
The Moar You Know
So long as Nooners is one of the first ones to end up with two 9mm rounds placed right behind her right ear, consider me on board.
jl
Even though I made of fun of the comment at first, I agree with celticdragonchick. Better to mock these people, expose their double standards, ignorance and bad faith in a way that persuades people. Talk of violence, or ‘up against the wall’ type comments are not a good way to go. Let the teabaggers and GOP nutcakes lose their tempers and give in to blind rage and anger. Consider how well that approach is serving them.
celticdragonchick
@Mike Kay:
Doubtless they were strapping young bucks who had died while en route to the corner store to buy steak. They don’t count.
Zifnab
@Scamp Dog: I don’t know about that. In the Chinese system, bloggers are hunted down, rounded up, and imprisoned or shot.
In the American system, all the well-paid talking heads and cocktail circuit veterans just scoff over the idea of alternative media over champagne and caviar while they predict how many seats the Republicans will take in the Fall.
I’ll take feckless delusional débutantes over zealous hard-nosed fascists any day.
Michael
I truly hate the motherfuckers at NR – the past two weeks have been as vile as anything I could hve ever imagined. Between Andrew McCarthy’s bare calls for civic violence and bullshit like this, it would be nice if we really had some of the re-training camps for Conservatives that they fantasize about.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YjEzZjVlOTJmNmRmMTRhZGU0MzU3MjUxYjRmNjJhNzM=
celticdragonchick
@The Moar You Know:
Christ!
I generally like your comments, but doesn’t this seem more in place over at Redstate or Free Republic?
We are all guilty of this from time to time, and that includes me…but we need to calm the fuck down on this. Noonan stated an opinion that is silly, and it should be treated as such. She has done nothing even remotely deserving of wishing actual homicide!
Sense of proportion, people.
We are not freepers.
Alex S.
Maybe Peggy has placed herself right between the media and the political sphere to switch sides if it’s necessary.
celticdragonchick
@Michael:
The link goes to a rather inoffensive story about battlefield medals.
What does that have to do with batshit McCarthy?
Michael
@jl:
I can hear it now – “TYRANNY!, SOSHUALISM! DICTATORSHIP!!! Impeach the Kenyan usurper!”
handy
The teleprompters aren’t laughing
Michael
@celticdragonchick:
The Medal of Honor is supposed to be extraordinary. The notion that every soldier (no matter whether they did a lot or not) needs to be decked out in ribbons and medals like a Bolivian admiral in order to inspire endless worship (and corresponding benefits) from the public is fucking bullshit.
I’m reminded again of a line a friend of mine jokingly came up with 25 years ago, when the vet fellating had been through a previous peak.
He said it great:
Once we start having a little less hero worship of vets, the better.
Toni
Completely OT, but a third plume has been found:
Here
Top Kill isn’t going as well either, though Heyward keeps saying everything is going to plan. I’ve been watching the WKRG.com video feed and though what is shooting out of the well seems to be lighter in color, there seems to be more of it.
As far as the eye can see
QuaintIrene
But I thought the DC media loves a puppy!
Mike in NC
@Michael:
I agree completely. As a 30-year Navy vet, it makes me cringe. Impressive how many people find it “patriotic” to slap a “Support the Troops” ribbon (made in China, of course) on their cars and leave it at that.
Did Peggy Noonan mention that St. Ronnie would have walked across the Gulf of Mexico to stop the oil leak?
celticdragonchick
@Michael:
I’m not going there with you on that issue, and I still don’t see what in the hell it had to do with the increasingly offensive idiocy coming from McCarthy that you correctly identified.
I happen to think that successfully engaging and killing several enemy ambushers and leading your unit out of the kill zone, picking up wounded along the way after having been shot through the throat and bleeding to the point of passing out qualifies in my book as pretty damned extraordinary.
*sigh*
Michael
@celticdragonchick:
Root through about 50 years of Silver Star citations, and you’ll see the consistency.
bemused
Sort of OT but media madam Sally Quinn, hubby & son were being interviewed by Tweety. Why, I didn’t hear. I’m sure it is something quite special & fascinating.
licensed to kill time
Has DougJ been calling in to radio shows, too?
Hmm…
Scamp Dog
@Zifnab: True. But somehow they’ve come up with a system that has some interest in the common man, and they seem to be (slowly, I know) getting freer as the years (OK, decades) go by.
We’re headed in the other direction, and nobody at the top seems to know or care. Our so-called liberal media are enabling the worst of our politicians, and actively thwarting the best.
I have a tough time seeing how things end well for this country, and it’s tempting to give in to Moar’s thought that violence is the only thing that can get the attention of the courtiers living in Versailles on the Potomac.
I need to make sure I get out and volunteer to help re-elect local Dems in the fall. It made me feel a lot better in 2008 when I helped with the Obama campaign. The Dems do drive me nuts, but, like Digby says, we need more and better Democrats.
JenJen
I’ve spent the better half of the day arguing with conservatards who keep insisting to me that Peggy Noonan was “Obama’s biggest fan evuh” which apparently lends her latest hit job more fantasy-weight, I suppose.
My favorite example of her Obama-lurve was when she said that his DNC Speech in Denver was shaping up like a Nuremberg rally.
Nobody gets me.
Tsulagi
OT, but kinda funny if you like to point and laugh at stupid. RSSF Commander EE has crashed and burned on RedState in a Whitey Tape kind of moment.
For two days he’s been building up he had the exclusive inside scoop behind the blogger Will Folks’ claim of having an affair with Nikki Haley. Like Jack Bauer, EE dug out the truth. Not afraid to name big names. Detail who paid Folks to push his fabricated story.
Yesterday he had a BREAKING blog post complete with little red flashing siren. Teabagger EE was going to start squeezing Folks’ balls and those who paid him for his lies. Tomorrow.
Today, after a lame, dickless post this morning even by EE standards, a later post by the teabagger commander divulged the sum total of his intelligence…
No shit.
Some of the comments in that last post are funny. RS readers are shocked and disillusioned to find EE making shit up. Newborn teabaggers in airport restrooms they are. Smart move, CNN.
CalD
But Nooners! What kind of person doesn’t like puppies?
demo woman
Is it wrong of me to wish Sarah and Peggy would mud wrestle until only one is left? That’s an admission ticket that I’d pay for.
jl
David Brooks has a typically pointless column at the NY Times, which IMHO continues his effort to flak for the powers that be. No link, but people can find it.
The column makes some good points, but most of those seem to be copied from a Malcom Gladwell article Brooks references late in the column.
This sentence in Brooks’ column made me angry (which is silly, I know, what else did I expect, but I am human)
“…engineers were compelled to make a series of decisions: what sort of well-casing to use; how long to circulate and when to remove the heavy drilling fluid or “mud” from the hole; how to interpret various tests.”
Oh the humanity! Oh the complexity!
On the other hand, the engineering expert I heard on 60 minutes who has investigated several big accidents said that the BOP was clearly damaged, and half it was known to be nonfunctional for months, and no one did anything about it. He characterized BP’s and the contractors’ behavior as gross negligence, like some one trying to continue on walking when one of his legs was not there. How is that ‘enginneers were compelled’ to ignore that?
It is unbelievable to me that these hacks will mount a campaing of obfuscation and BS to hide the obvious truth about the accident. But these people know no limits to intellectual depravity, if it helps their paymasters.
Mr. Wonderful
@Joe Lisboa:
And no blindfold, either. Try making them goo-goo eyes at the firing squad, Pegs. Talk about directly-to-You-Tube…
jl
I cannot edit my comment, for some reason, so to correct a mistatement:
On the other hand, the engineering expert I heard on 60 minutes who has investigated several big accidents said that the BOP was clearly damaged, and half it was known to be nonfunctional for months, and no one did anything about it.
should read, I if memory serves,
On the other hand, the engineering expert I heard on 60 minutes who has investigated several big accidents said that the BOP was clearly damaged, and that ONE of its two power sources was known to be nonfunctional for months, and no one did anything about it.
So the BOP was functional, but one of its two redundant power sources was not working.
Anyway, the engineering expert on 60 minutes said in his opinion, not doing something about it was a very egregious decision. I do not see how that was forced on the engineers, except the BP brass wanted to pinch pennies.
debbie
@jl:
The guy speaking on the 60 Minutes report I saw (and maybe it was the engineer you mention) said that bits of the rubber seal started coming up in the drilling fluid a full 4 weeks before the explosion, and the BP rep said it was no big dea.
debbie
Excuse me. That last word should be deal.
SiubhanDuinne
@bemused #40:
Didn’t watch Tweety, but (just guessing) might this be the Famous and Much-Anticipated Weekend of the Great Competing Family Weddings?
bemused
@SiubhanDuinne:
I have no idea what the story is about competing family weddings. I’m too lazy to look it up & sure I don’t care enough to anyway. Tweety repeat is on now so I will learn something about the Quinn family that no one cares about except the DC elite.
SiubhanDuinne
@bemused: Well, her son’s wedding was scheduled for the same date as her husband’s granddaughter’s wedding, and the column describing the internecine angst was what ultinmately got her column pulled.
Kyle
Yes, it was a laundry list, but the kind that that gives an impression of comprehensive government action.
Yes, because what is most important when a city is destroyed and 2000 people drown is giving the ‘correct’ impression. Like Drownie taking time out from his Baton Rouge restaurant tour to email all FEMA personnel to instruct them to roll their sleeves up so they look purposeful. Reaganist Repig ‘governance’ down to its essence.
Peggy, fuck you and the magic dolphin you rode in on.
Mnemosyne
@Kyle:
There were people here last night who were claiming that Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” stunt was an example of leadership because it looked really cool.
I wish I was kidding.
JenJen
You know what other Noonan column I just eat with a spoon? This one. Where she says that nobody loves Obama. Definitely not in the way they loved Clinton. Or Dubya. And certainly not in the way they really, really really really loved Reagan.
I swear, this daffy bitch is totally my guilty pleasure.
And Another Thing...
@bemused: Quinn’s column was probably the most clueless, classless things I’ve ever read. It’s worth reading. Afterwards, you’ll walk around in a golden glow so grateful that you do not know her and are not related to her. It’s really kind a masterpiece of bad.
She makes Nooners look benign.
DougJ
@jl:
Yeah, one of MY’s stand-ins detailed the similarities with Gladwell. What a lame column.
Jrod, Slayer of Phoenix
Say what you want about the Chinese government, but at least they can keep their bankers in line. Here in the US, we fetishize the free market so much that it’s a point of pride that we allow our big banks to rape and pillage the land.
It’s sad that our choices in this world are either to get fucked by the government, or get fucked by corporations.
As for Noonan… uh, she’s still alive? How about that. [wanders off]
DougJ
@JenJen:
You think she meant that as a put down?
JenJen
@DougJ: Actually, I think it might have made her get a little tickle in the unspeakable region.
“But…. Hitler. May we march behind his caisson in our black veils, with heads heavy and… with…. ever-reaching… hearts. When I pause between my words, it. Makes. Me. Sound…. profound.”
debbie
@JenJen:
The first column I ever read of hers was years ago, and it was of her and her thoughts as she cradled one of Ronald Reagan’s shoes in her hands. There was more reverence in that column than in all of Rome.