Guess He Showed Us

by digby

Peggy Noonan is enjoying a little holiday cheer in the afternoons:

A deep and perhaps the deepest benefit of the speech was that a Democratic president asserted compellingly, and with a high degree of certitude and conviction, that the United States is and has been immersed in a long struggle with intractable enemies.

For eight years we heard this from Republicans. Halfway through those years people began to tune the president out: He was acting on a Republican obsession and approaching it with the usual Republican tear-jerking bellicosity. The Democrats for eight years had been removed from daily national responsibility—the party out of power always is—and in any case it’s always easier to question and criticize than to know and make a decision. But to have now a Democratic president surveying essentially the same history and data as his predecessor and coming to the same rough conclusion—we are in a real struggle with bad people, it will go a long time—was encouraging, and seemed to mark a two-party sharing of overall authority and investment.

Yes, it did. Sadly.

That said, it appears we’re seeing some things we’ve not seen before. The president of the United States gave a war speech, and the next day the nation didn’t seem to rally around him. This is not the way it’s gone in the past. Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, George W. Bush—when they addressed the nation about the wars they led, they received immediate support.

This is also the first time we’ve seen an American president declaring, or rather redeclaring, a war without a political base. Again, LBJ, Nixon, George W. Bush—they always had a base that would support them, on which they could rely and from which they could maneuver. But Mr. Obama’s base is not with him on this decision.

Ok, first of all there’s this:

Americans agree with the Afghanistan policy Barack Obama announced on Tuesday night at West Point in large measure because they agree with the arguments the president made in that speech, according to a new national poll.

In his prime time address at the U.S. Military Academy, where Obama spelled out his decision to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to the war, the president stressed that America’s safety and security are at stake in Afghanistan. A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation national survey released Sunday morning indicates 64 percent of Americans agree with the president, with one in three saying the country’s safety and security is not at stake in Afghanistan. According to the poll, 63 percent of people questioned also agree with Obama that the U.S. action in Afghanistan is morally justified.

“That’s one major way that Afghanistan is different from Iraq in the public’s mind,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “At the time of the Iraq surge in 2007, most Americans questioned whether that war was justified.”

Hookay, so Noonan is totally mistaken on all points. The public did “rally” to president Obama’s surge announcement and they didn’t actually rally to Bush when he announced his. And the idea that LBJs base was with him is just well … loopy. Noonan must have been nipping on the communion wine this week-end. She’s wrong about everything.

But she soldiers on:

Can a president fight a war without a base? Will the American people, on this issue, decide to become his base? In the end what they decide will likely determine the ultimate outcome in Afghanistan.

I guess that makes sense if you think the president’s current base is a) not American or b) not human. (Once again reinforcing the truism that wingnuts don’t believe liberals are Real Americans.)

Peggy was obviously too busy matching her pearls to her sweater sets back in the 1960s when this last came up to have noticed what was going on, but she needs to put down the eggnog and pick up a book. Support for this war among all Americans is about an inch deep. And no president can afford to lose his base.

But in the Village, the most important thing a president can do is punch the hippies, so Peggy is quite impressed with his willingness to do so.

She says all us liberals think West Point cadets are monstrous freaks and lectures us about how they aren’t any such thing (after which the strawman in her pants exploded into flame.) Then she tells us that Obama is an egomaniac, unlike Bush, who allegedly never used the word “I” in his speeches.

Right. Anyone remember this?:

And I will carry this: It is the police shield of a man named George Howard, who died at the World Trade Center trying to save others. It was given to me by his mom, Arlene, as a proud memorial to her son. This is my reminder of lives that ended, and a task that does not end.

I will not forget this wound to our country or those who inflicted it. I will not yield; I will not rest; I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people.

Finally, she complains that Obama was “faux-eloquent,” which makes people “want to gouge out their eyes and run screaming from the room.”

Ah yes. How well I know that feeling:

From the beginning it was a story marked by the miraculous. It was a miracle a six-year-old boy survived the storm at sea and floated safely in an inner tube for two days and nights toward shore; a miracle that when he tired and began to slip, the dolphins who surrounded him like a contingent of angels pushed him upward; a miracle that a fisherman saw him bobbing in the shark-infested waters and scooped him aboard on the morning of Nov. 25, 1999, the day celebrated in America, the country his mother died bringing him to, as Thanksgiving.

And of course this Saturday, in the darkness, came the nightmare: the battering ram, the gas, the masks, the guns, the threats, the shattered glass and smashed statue of the Blessed Mother, the blanket thrown over the sobbing child’s head as they tore him from the house like a hostage. And the last one in the house to hold him, trying desperately to protect him, was the fisherman who’d saved him from the sea–which seemed fitting as it was Eastertide, the time that marks the sacrifice and resurrection of the Big Fisherman…

Mr. Reagan would not have dismissed the story of the dolphins as Christian kitsch, but seen it as possible evidence of the reasonable assumption that God’s creatures had been commanded to protect one of God’s children. And most important, the idea that he would fear Mr. Castro, that he would be afraid of a tired old tyrant in faded fatigues, would actually have made him laugh. Mr. Reagan would fear only what kind of country we would be if we took the little boy and threw him over the side, into the rough sea of history.

urp

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