Peggy Noonan No Longer Finds Chris Christie A Caring And Attentive Lover, Thanks Obama!

She had known heartbreak, had Peggy Noonan. Oh yes, the beloved Sister of Our Lady of the Bottomless Julep had known the glorious touch of a lover sullied by the pain of betrayal when it was withheld. She had loved fully, ravenously, had taken up the cup Eros set before her, touched her lips to the rim of this magic goblet and drunk deeply of the nectar within. And it had been good, at least through election season. Until the nectar curdled in her belly and her lover left her bereft, wandering her penthouse with only her memories and her portraits of good Republican men to keep her company. There had been a place for him too, her love, in her Hall of Heroes. Even now an empty frame hung on the wall, awaiting only the day when she would commission a portraitist to take his brush to canvas and commit her lover's image to immortality, a bulwark against the void of obscurity, gracelessness, and publicly funded teachers pensions.

And then - O tempora! O mores! - the swift realization that he was like the others of his age, a self-centered politician only looking out for Number One. She had thought him better than that. "Oh Peggy," she crooned softly as she stared mournfully at the empty gilded frame, ice clinking against the glass she swirled in her hand. "Help me mend my broken heart...and let me live agaaaaaiiiiiinnnnn...."

Chris Christie's problem isn't that he's a bully, it's that he's selfish. Barack Obama isn't stupid and therefore the maker of mayhem, he's selfish.

Mark the date, people. On January 17, 2014, five years into his presidency, Barack Obama finally convinced Peggy Noonan he is not stupid. That's an accomplishment, we guess. The president should frame this column and hang it in the "Venal Sociopathic Republicans" wing of his future library.

But the odd thing, the destabilizing thing as you think about it, is that we're in a crisis. We've been in it since at least 2008 and the crash, and the wars.

Yes, the wars, begun in 2001 under a Republican president. Your concern trolling is about twelve years too late, Pegs.

We are in unprecedented trouble. Citizens know this. It's why they buy guns. They see unfixable America around them, they think it's all going to fall apart. In Washington (and New York) they huff and puff their disapproval: Those Americans with their guns, they're causing a lot of trouble. But Americans think they're in trouble because their leaders are too selfish to face challenges that will do us in.

Americans, at least some of them, buy guns because they are paranoid lunatics who think all black teenagers are up to no good, or they are angry at people who text in movies, or because they are convinced Obama is going to send the 82nd Airborne to round them all up and send them to FEMA camps before turning the country over to the UN to implement Agenda 21. And in case you haven't noticed, it is a bunch of morons in Washington who are stopping any efforts to pass any national gun control laws while a few states have actually managed to muscle some (fairly toothless) restrictions through their legislatures. Peggy, you should really subscribe to a newspaper or something.

What's this? AAOOOOGA! COLLISION ALARM! OBAMACARE SLAM DIRECTLY AHEAD!

There's an increasing sense in our political life that in both parties politicians call themselves public servants but act like bosses who think the voters work for them...Politicians who jerk around doctors, nurses and health systems call themselves servants, when of course they look more like little kings and queens instructing the grudging peasants in how to arrange their affairs.

By duly passing a bill with a majority vote after a year of debate and combining versions written by no less than five legislative committees of Congress. You know, the sort of thing we elect legislators to do .

The president's health-insurance reform had to be breathtaking, mind-bending, historic. It had to be a Democratic Party initiative only. It required a few major lies to gain passage, but what the heck [...]

It was political selfishness that blew up the American health-care system.

Yeah, why couldn't the president be totally honest and upfront with the American people about the arms he was selling to Iran to fund right-wing death squads in Central America...oops, we mean trying to get more of his countrymen access to health insurance. Sorry, our bad.

Every Peggy Noonan column is special in its own way, but it takes a special kind of cluelessness, self-absorption and moral blindness to link the governor of New Jersey closing a bridge solely to punish a town headed by a political enemy with a national effort to open up America's health insurance industry to even the poorest and sickest and most vulnerable of society. An effort that asks us all to be a little more responsible about our health care even if the trade-off is that the rapacious insurance companies do not see a shrinkage of their profit margins because heaven forfend their stockholders be asked to suffer. We think fighting that responsibility every inch of the way is the real selfishness, but we are not nearly as full of wisdom and gin as Dame Peggy.

[ WSJ ]