Peggy Noonan has awoken from a vodka coma to discover that the economy is bad and that leaders in Washington don’t seem to care very much about the fact that wages stink and millions of people are out of work. So far, so good. It’s not a particularly novel observation, but it’s better than magic dolphins.
What’s the solution? Believe it or not, the main problem is not the foreclosure crisis or the trade deficit or any of those things, the problem is illegal immigration. You see, if we just closed the damn border, everyone would feel better and, at the same time, there would be such a tremendous labor crisis that we’d have to pass some kind of immigration bill so that the crops would be picked.
The title of the piece is brilliant: “America Is at Risk of Boiling Over”. How do I know it’s brilliant? Because this is the title of a legendary Noonan piece from 1994 and she’s bringing it back again to show just how bad things are. It’s not my place to tell Peggy Noonan what to do with her columns but wouldn’t it be better just to use “America Is at Risk of Boiling Over” as a category she could tag columns with?
Update. Link fixed. Sorry about that.
freelancer
DougJ,
I don’t know how you do it, week in and week out. File also under “I read
thisthese morons so you don’t have to”.Omnes Omnibus
Going with Steely Dan tonight, are we?
JCT
I’m thinking toilet paper would be a great use for her, umm, “essays” or whatever the hell she thinks they are.
What a waste of protoplasm.
General Stuck
Cool title and song. Steely Dan should be a treasure trove of thread titles.
stuckinred
@Omnes Omnibus: I saw your picture
General Stuck
@stuckinred: It was favorite foreign movie.
i’ll get it right
stuckinred
@General Stuck: you sure about that?
Mark S.
Ha! I’m obviously the only idiot to click the link. It goes to Paul Krugman’s column, which is much better.
Mary G
Yeah, the link doesn’t go to Peggy. There are two of us idiots.
Keith G
Maybe if we just deregulated the border everything would be reasonable and there would be truckloads of beer for everyone!!
General Stuck
@stuckinred: nope, was dong it from memory, should be It’s your favorite foreign movie.
Bob Loblaw
@freelancer:
We just spent 12 hours with E.D. Kain. I think that’s enough punishment for one day.
stuckinred
@General Stuck: yep
stuckinred
Ever see the Funny Misheard Lyrics site?
THE MISHEARD:
Its your favorite porno movie
Real Lyric Its your favorite foreign movie
Tom Hilton
Peggy looks an awful lot like Paul Krugman. She’s also making much more sense than she usually does. What was your complaint again?
Tom Hilton
@stuckinred: my second favorite moment in Adventureland is when it turns out the sleazy musician guy thinks Satellite of Love is called “Shed a Light on Love”.
My favorite moment, of course, is when Jesse Eisenberg finally gets to sack-whack Frigo.
Mark S.
Jesus, Peggy, have you ever talked to any actual teabaggers? Remember how they screamed about amnesty a couple of years ago? Or how they are now talking about amending the 14th Amendment to get rid of anchor babies? You are a mother fucking idiot if you think they wouldn’t put sobbing children in buses back to Mexico.
(here’s the link)
Corner Stone
This site is dying under the ad servers.
jetan
I knew when I saw the Noonan headline yesterday that, no matter how many American institutions might fail me, Balloon Juice would come through.
Jay B.
This actually gives me hope. It was right around 1994 when we started a giant economic expansion after a very important tax increase I believe, which helped cost the Democrats the House. Conservative everwrongness is an unmistakable indicator that we’re headed for better times.
jeffreyw
I guess it’ll have to be me as what steps up with a kitteh picture.
stuckinred
@Tom Hilton: Is that the prequel to Hot Tub Time Machine? :)
stuckinred
@jeffreyw: Cat scratch fever?
Frank
@Mark S.:
Yup. A few weeks ago some right-wing nut jobs in Salt Lake City released a list of people that they claimed were illegal immigrants. They sent it to the media among others. The list included names and social security numbers. Hell, it included the due date for a poor woman who was pregnant.
These selfish, racist nut jobs could give a rats ass about human suffering etc. Where the heck has Noonan been the last 18 months after FoxNews started sponsoring these hypocritical whack jobs?
jeffreyw
@stuckinred:
I’m gonna have to admit that I saw Ted play in a college town bar back in ’70 or so. He could smoke them strings.
Kat
Well, it’s not like Noonan’s column is difficult to find. Google’s got over 10 pages of links to it for anyone who’s a real glutton for punishment..
Mike G
Which was pretty much the goal of the cheap-labor Reaganism she enthusiastically propagandized for years.
Anton Sirius
@Mark S.:
I think Peggy’s right on this one. They wouldn’t put sobbing children on buses and send them back to Mexico.
They’d put sobbing children on buses that they claimed were headed to Mexico, without mentioning that the ‘Mexico’ in question was actually the Gulf of Mexico.
stuckinred
@jeffreyw</a>: I saw him at the Kickapoo Creek Rock Festival, memorial day 70 and goddamn if there isn’t a documentary on it! Thanks
Litlebritdifrnt
OT – but I would be ever so grateful if you guys who have blogs could make this BBC piece go viral, it is very important, and needs to be see by the people in the US. Thanks
Muslim group Minhaj ul-Quran runs ‘anti-terrorism’ camp
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10900478
Mary G
I read her column, threw up in my mouth a little, then read a couple of pages of comments and now I need a shower.
4tehlulz
Since we’re replaying the 1990s, this means we are about a year away from some gov’t office building with a day care center being bombed into oblivion.
Omnes Omnibus
@4tehlulz: Does that surprise you? I expect it to happen any day now.
pablo
Flame is the game
The game we call gaslighting Peggy.
“It’s not my place to tell Peggy Noonan what to do with her columns”
I’ll take that responsibility Stick em up your ass, Peg!
4tehlulz
@Omnes Omnibus: I expect them to change a few dates around, at least.
Omnes Omnibus
@4tehlulz: Nah, they have certain dates carved into their minds because of their cosmic significance. I would prefer that April 19 go back to being the anniversary of Lexington/Concord and the Boston Marathon, but no…
Cat Lady
This is what the wingnuts I know believe is the #1 problem in America. The illegals caused Wall Street to collapse, the schools to fail, the unemployment problem, and is the number one threat to this country’s white heritage. Yeah. I don’t socialize with those people any more, because when I mentioned that I assumed that they weren’t talking about the illegal Irish which are probably the largest undocumented group here in Boston, they stammered around that unconvincingly. White privilege is not going to be given up without a big ugly fight, and I don’t think we’re near the bottom of that cesspool yet.
Restrung
here’s what grabbed my attention in Peggy’s thing: “our thought leaders”
Read Krugman, dumass. “Our thought leaders” in Peggy’s mind are oh, umm, what? Who? Depends on the meaning of “our.” She takes herself out of the equation, as she writes an op-ed in the WSJ. Way to think. What a whiner. If only “we” were better. How do you spell pffffttt!.
SoINeedAName
Peg, Peg, Peg – we’d probably all agree that Life truly can be “mysterious” – so …
flukebucket
I was watching Blitzer this afternoon and they had a piece about how the Republicans were hearkening back to “it is morning in America” again. They said the plan is to mix the optimism of Reagan with the anger of Gingrich in order to take back the country. So I am not surprised that Noonan pulled some old shit out of her closet.
It made me sick watching it. If Americans actually think that the fucking Republicans can right this ship then to hell with it. If 2000-2008 was not enough to fill our guts then there is not a hell of a lot that can be done for us.
Albatrossity
If you don’t want to (or can’t stand to) read the real Pegster, Tengrain over at Mock, Paper, Scissors has channeled her perfectly.
General Stuck
Now the title is gone.
celticdragonchick
Not much I can disagree with there.
I may not go with some of her causation, but she has been writing warnings for several years that the public mood and social anxieties were going off the track, which I cannot say about any of the other conservative columnist crowd.
This one in particular I cited in a paper I wrote on the election of Barack Obama a couple of semesters ago:
Peggy Noonan, A Separate Peace (The Wall Street Journal Opinion Archives, http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110007460) Oct 27, 2005
mclaren
Damn! I was betting the solution was more Reaganite tax cuts for the rich.
I had a bet going that when Noonan finally spoke about the economy, she’d identify tax cuts and deregulation as the culprits for insufficient economic growth.
Oh well. Illegal immigrants — close, but no cigar…
celticdragonchick
@Mary G:
I had to laugh when I read this one:
freelancer
@General Stuck:
LOL, on the prev thread it says “Next Post”.
Bootlegger
I wonder about the assumption that every American for two hundred years wanted a better life for their children. I’m sure this was true for some, but in many place still today a child that wants to better their self is considered an outsider, someone who rejects the good life of their parents, neighborhood and church. Hell, there are churches here in Kentucky that preach that shit (or so I’ve been told). For most people, most of the time, America has been a backwater, backwards, wasteland of people struggling to get by while a few elites churned the masses for riches. The insidious part is that they convinced the prols that this is exactly what they were suppose to be doing.
sloan
I’ve had this in my brain for two hours now.
It just won’t go away.
Mike G
The problem is
ObamidiotsReagan-bots like Peggy Noonan who fell for this snake oil salesman’s palaver. I’m still waiting for her to apologize for what she helped to inflict on this nation.Fixed.
DPirate
Palaver. Content, yet full of sparks. Beneath action, unease. Imagined Lincolnian darkness. She’s still writing speeches. Most of the column is just telling the American Joe that he is smarter and more steady than his elected officials; she is informing us that we are stoics, while our government personnel are bumbling fools that like the limelight any way it comes.
Then of course she makes her point, that immigration is bad, of course. BUT WAIT, it is also necessary! Necessary because we are so wonderfully caring about children!
Why did you make me read this shit?
Still, the last thing we need now is more immigrants. There aren’t enough jobs for citizens. It is also an unfair labor market when wages are depressed by illegal workers.
Whatever one may think of my motive here, I submit that illegal workers and guest workers are as much a detriment to our economy as outsourcing or our trade deficits. All the profit is leaving the country in each case. America leaks money like a sieve.
Mrs. Noonan wants to call the benefits we’ve enjoyed recently as The Abundance (I capitalize for her since I’m sure she wished to but lacked the confidence). Does she realize that it was all basically just a result of debt? Everybody has a good time when Sugar Daddy is catering the party, and she shares the blame. Sure, speechwriting for Reagan was a great gig, I’ll bet, and a hell of a boost to her career. She may even have believed in the trickle down back then. It’s no excuse.
How many old wives have to spit their tales before we think there may be something to those old saws about paying the piper. She must have heard somewhere how mass is conserved, or that actions have reactions. But no, she wants to sell me another bill of goods about how long-suffering I am while she plays lickspittle to the rich welfare queens that are bending us over.
She’s not all wet, but 1000 words of flattery and self-aggrandizement just to shift blame to one small part of the problem in a veiled attempt at convincing me that I ought to embrace my destruction just galls the fuck out of me.
Brick Oven Bill
She obviously plagiarized the article from the one written by Hayowentha back in the mid 1700’s.
Pug
So, excuse me. I have to go pay Santiago for laying tile in my apartment building and Pedro needs his check for mowing the lawn. Adios, motherfuckers.
And Peggy can fuck off. She wouldn’t even know how to do something productive like tile an apartment. Santiago is worth ten Peggy Noonans. He works for a living.