When Words Collide

Sometimes, when dabbling around with blog posting mixology handbook, I get the weirdest elixirs.

For example, if you take One Part Andrew Sullivan critique of Peggington Noonington...

Peggy Noonan's Giuliani Syndrome

Just as Rudy Giuliani simply asserts that there were no terror attacks on the US under Bush, so Peggy Noonan gives us this view of Obama's first year. She argues that the only focus of Obama's attention was the health insurance reform bill which she says proves he is a leftist president, not a center-left president:

It was not worth it—not worth the town-hall uprisings and the bleeding of centrist support, not worth the rebranding of the president from center-left leader to leftist leader, not worth the proof it provided that the public's concerns and the administration's are not the same, not worth a wasted first year that should have been given to two things and two things only: economic matters and national security.... [Obama] had frittered his attention on issues that were secondary and tertiary—climate change, health care—while al Qaeda moved, and the system stuttered.

So Obama put health insurance reform before the economy and national security. She writes this in a newspaper. She states this as fact. But it is not fact. It is patently false in every single respect.

The following is indisputable. Obama's first act was increasing national security by ending the torture program, and pledging to remove the biggest recruitment tool for our enemies: Gitmo. His second focus was a stimulus package, which, according to AEI, added four points to economic growth. His third focus - how soon they forget - was on rescuing the banks. Before health insurance reform passed, he initiated and completed and implemented a total overhaul of the Afghanistan war. He maintained rendition and the Bush time-table for Iraq withdrawal. He tried (and failed) to restart the Israel peace-process but was stymied by Netanyahu. His policy toward Iran has seen the regime more vulnerable than at any point in its history. His success at finding and killing many Qaeda operatives, his dispatch of Somali pirates, his intense focus on drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan: these are also simply facts of history.

And the health insurance reform has no public option, pledges to cut Medicare, and will reduce the deficit, according to the CBO. It brought 30 million new clients for the private drug and insurance companies. This is leftist.

Noonan's column is a fantasy, a dream, a weird incantation of a thesis that is merely how she feels, without any substantive relati0nship to reality. Well, at least she understand that the GOP is offering nothing - nothing - substantive as an alternative except oil drilling and torture and more bellicose rhetoric toward the rest of the world because that worked out so well under Bush.
...

(Of couse, flensed all its fancy-dan alibi-words, what Mr. Sullivan is really talking about is that single, one-syllable Anglo-Saxon word that so many in the media have such trouble using. "Lie". Sully is deriding Conservatives who lie by dancing frantically on the heads of forests of linguistic pins to justify the unjustifiable and excuse the inexcusable.)

Then stir in One Part Andrew Sullivan's firing-for-incompetence threshold which he states unambiguously here, albeit from a regarding a different subject (with emphasis-added sprinkles):

I do not favor firing some random person. I favor firing those who failed to see the clear data in front of them and take appropriate action. Blaming the system if it fails while exonerating those who enabled and didn't challenge the system even when something this obvious, this well-flagged and this dangerous comes on the radar is a cop-out.

And you end up with this clear statement of principles which admits no other interpretation: that virtually every conservative and pusillanimous Villager/centrist journalist and pundit who has been presented with the brutal, ugly facts about Conservatism and has chosen to lie, obfuscate, or otherwise deliberately fan-dance around those facts (and in the process get almost everything spectacularly wrong) for the last 20 years should be be fired.

I could not agree more, and so, on on behalf of Liberals everywhere, I await word of his honorable resignation from "The Atlantic" as a trail-blazing demonstration of his willingness to lead by example and back up all of his clever words with a single, substantive deed.