The Pollyanna Has Been Drinking (Not Me)

The old gal is back on the sauce (via the New Yorker):

NOONAN GOES ALL KRUGMAN ON US Posted by Hendrik Hertzberg 

...

Noonan, despite a quick “to be sure” aside in which she avers that things like deficits, regulations, and “the federal tax code” are “part of” the problem, is clear about which side she’s on:

But it’s a jobs crisis that’s the central thing. And you see it everywhere you look.

For Noonan, “everywhere you look” is a hotel she stayed at in Pittsburgh, which was so understaffed there was no bellhop to walk her up to her room in case a criminal was lurking. Nevertheless, about “the central thing,” she, like Paul Krugman, is right (i.e., left). 

She’s also right about what Obama should have done about it:

He should have seen unemployment entering a crisis stage four years ago, and he did not. At that time I was certain he’d go for public-works projects, which could give training to the young and jobs to the experienced underemployed, would create jobs in the private sector and, in the end, yield up something needed—a bridge, a strengthened power grid. He instead gave his first term to health care.

Here’s where I started getting dizzy. Noonan is describing exactly what Obama did do. He did see a jobs crisis four years ago. As a major part of his eight-hundred-billion-dollar stimulus package (which he pursued in addition to, not instead of, health care), he did go for public-works projects, specifically including bridges and a strengthened power grid. The only opposition to all that bridge-building and grid-strengthening came from Noonan’s party. In the House, zero Republicans voted yes. In the Senate, three did. Afterwards, Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter jumped from the G.O.P. before he was pushed. (Repackaging himself as a Democrat did not keep him from landing with a splat.) Olympia Snowe, citing hyperpartisanship and legislative dysfunction, retired. Her Maine colleague Susan Collins, the last RINO in the Senate zoo, may or may not seek a fourth term...

Lesson: Eventually, the bottle drinks you...


'Cause the bouncer is a Sumo wrestler
Cream-puff Casper Milquetoast
And the owner is a mental midget
With the I.Q. of a fence-post...

(On behalf of the entire blogosphere, I'd like to once again eternal thank Tengrain at "Mock, Paper, Scissors"  for inventing the Noonan Genre virtually single-handed.  However many noobs like me who may now till that rich soil, never forget is was Tengrain who busted the sod, dug the irrigation ditches and built the railroad spur to take the harvest to market.)