The Smell Downwind

A number of people have linked to Peggy Noonan’s WSJ blog post, Incompetence, while simultaneously noting that Noonan, herself, was incompetent at recognizing the ideology of the man who is now our president. (More on incompetence: whoever is maintaining Noonan’s blog needs to fix the post. But since it has been broken for two days, I suspect that it is Noonan who maintains it. A low-level worker bee would never let a post look like that for this long.)

The following admission by Noonan is, well, mockable:

I would add that in recent weeks I have begun to worry about the basic competency of the administration, its ability to perform the most fundamental duties of executive management.

And it has gone well-mocked by those of us who discerned Barack Obama’s political intentions from the beginning. However, one of the problems with mockery is that the mockers tend to miss things like the following hair-raising and on-target scenario generated by Noonan’s imagination:

I’m worried, finally, that lines of traditionally assumed competence are being dropped. The past few weeks I can’t shake from my head this picture: The man with the football—the military aide who carries the U.S. nuclear codes, and who travels with the president—is carrying the wrong code. He’s carrying last month’s code, or the one from December 2012. And there’s a crisis—a series of dots on a radar screen traveling toward the continental U.S.—and the president is alerted. He’s in the holding room at a fundraiser out west. The man with the football is called in and he fumbles around in his briefcase and gets the code but wait, the date on the code is wrong. He scrambles, remembers there’s a file on his phone, but the phone ran out on the plane and he thought he could recharge in the holding room but there’s no electrical outlet. All eyes turn to him. “Wait—wait. No—uh—I don’t think that’s the code we use to launch against incoming from North Korea, I think that one takes out Paris!”

I have to say, I’ve never worried about this with any previous administration, ever.

At my old blog, I coined a term: the Coconut Treatment—cut a coconut in half, scrape out the meat, fill the halves with some vile substance, then glue the halves back together, and continue calling the object a coconut. That description is the best way I can find to describe what is being perpetrated on our country and its previously solid and substantive institutions.

That Noonan is only beginning to wake up to this ongoing process tells me that blindness is often willful. However, it also tells me that blindness can also be caused by the type of proximity that Noonan has had with the Washington DC establishment. Indeed, she is part of it and has been since she wrote speeches for Ronald Reagan.

I would say, “Welcome to the party, pal,” but with all the clusterf**kery that had been endemic in the Obama administration since January 2009—culminating in the farce that is the ACA website--Noonan may have merely gotten around to putting a finger up and finally determined which way the wind was blowing.

(Thanks to American Digest)