Peggy Noonan Is So Sad Government She's Been Working Her Whole Career To Break Is Now Broken

A new week broke in New York, but for Peggy Noonan, the depression that had invaded her soul like a column of Norman knights landing at Waterford kept her sluggish and listless as she moped about her chastely appointed apartment safe above the teeming hordes of Manhattan. Perhaps it was the long and brutal winter that had caused Hippocrates's black bile to snuggle itself around her heart like a highly polished brown cordovan around the foot of history's greatest president. Perhaps it was the encroaching doom she sensed coming at her from the city's new Communist mayor ensconced in the Politburo in City Hall Park, where he was consolidating his power and plotting the destruction of New York's better (and, needless to say, wealthier) citizens. Everywhere she rambled in the apartment she felt small, insignificant, alone. Even the portrait of Robert Taft had gone silent, refusing to share its advice for the Tea Party about how to play nice with others or what could be done about the Blackamoor who still occupied her beloved Ronnie's old house down in the nation's capital.

Speaking of the brutish and arrogant tyrant, he would be giving his yearly State of the Union on Tuesday, a spectacle Peggy had been dreading for days. She supposed she would tune in and watch anyway. After all, her snippy little broadsides at the man were what kept the mortgage paid and the liquor cabinet stocked.

The State of the Union was a spectacle of delusion and self-congratulation in which a Congress nobody likes rose to cheer a president nobody really likes.

That's her opening sentence. And it's the column's high point. There are still unplumbed depths for it to sink to. Also, screw you, Peggy. Some of us still like the president just fine.

No matter how bland and banal [government officials] may look, they do have the power to destroy your life—to declare the house you just built as in violation of EPA wetland regulations, to pull your kid's school placement, to define your medical coverage out of existence. So by all means attention must be paid and faces seen.

You are talking about managing resources (environmental, health care, the precious precious children) which is something we elect a government to do. The fact we keep electing incompetent egomaniacs, nitwits and carnival barkers is our fault, not theirs.

It is no accident that in the national imagination Washington is the shallow and corrupt capital in "The Hunger Games," the celebrity-clogged White House Correspondents' Dinner, "Scandal" and the green room at MSNBC. It is the chattering capital of a nation it less represents than dominates.

Says a woman who regularly appears on the Sunday chat shows in that very city. This is the worst thing we've read since her last column.

 Meanwhile, back in America , the Little Sisters of the Poor...have, quite cruelly, been told they must comply with the ObamaCare mandate that all insurance coverage include contraceptives, sterilization procedures, morning-after pills[...]

It [the mandate] also is a violation of traditional civic courtesy, sympathy and spaciousness. The state doesn't tell serious religious groups to do it their way or they'll be ruined. You don't make the Little Sisters bow down to you.

Yr Wonkette has great respect for anyone, Catholic nun or otherwise, who devotes her life to caring for the poor and needy. But this case drives us up the wall. Freedom of religion means you can't be persecuted for your beliefs, but it also means you can't force someone else to live under the dictates of your religious dogma either. Every American schoolkid learns this in about the first grade. Or they did, back before every person in this country decided they were a goddamned special snowflake who should be allowed an exemption from ever participating in civil society if doing so meant angering their invisible sky god or seeing their children learn the devil's science. Speaking of which...

 Meanwhile, back in America , disadvantaged parents in Louisiana—people who could never afford to live in places like McLean, Va., or Chevy Chase, Md.—...

Peggy Noonan, champion of the poor and downtrodden.

...continue to wait to see what will happen with the state's successful school voucher program. It lets poor kids get out of failed public schools and go to private schools on state scholarships. What a great thing. But the Obama Justice Department filed suit in August...Is it possible the Justice Department has taken its action because a major benefactor of the president's party is the teachers unions, which do not like vouchers because their existence suggests real failures in the public schools they run?

Actually it's possible that the private schools those kids were going to were creationist indoctrination camps, and using taxpayer dollars to send kids to unregulated religious madrasas of any type, be they Muslim or Catholic or Pastafarian, is a huge no-no. See the above paragraph about the nuns if you need a refresher about the intersection of religion and public policy in America.

 Meanwhile, back in America , conservatives targeted and harassed by the Internal Revenue Service...

Yeah, we're not even going to bother with this one, other than to tell Cleta Mitchell, attorney for some conservative groups, that part of the IRS's revenue collection duties includes determining whether applicants claiming to be social-welfare organizations in order to get tax-exempt status are actually political action groups. It is ridiculous that the IRS is charged with doing this, but you can blame the conservative Supreme Court and its terrible campaign finance rulings for unleashing a flood of grifters. You're not all goddamn special snowflakes exempted from the rules simply because you think you should be. See the nuns and the schoolkids of Louisiana if you're still confused.

[A]ll these things have the effect of breaking bonds of trust between government and the people. They make citizens see Washington as an alien and hostile power.

You worked for Ronald Freaking Reagan. Turning government into something to be hated was his entire reason for being! The conservative movement of which you have been a part has been dedicated to breaking government for thirty years. If the bonds of trust between government and citizens is no more, modern conservatism has won. And you have the gall to bow your head and weep giant crocodile tears over it?

Peggy, help yr Wonkette out and take a week off. We need the extra time to clean up all the stupid you've sprayed everywhere.

[ WSJ ]