Normal People

by digby

You know the wingnuts are back in business when Peggy Noonan stops opining about how we should avert our eyes from the past and gets back to unctuously defending Real Americans (who she personally avoids like the plague.) Here she is at her lugubrious worst:

What the town-hall meetings represent is a feeling of rebellion, an uprising against change they do not believe in. And the Democratic response has been stunningly crude and aggressive. It has been to attack. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the United States House of Representatives, accused the people at the meetings of “carrying swastikas and symbols like that.” (Apparently one protester held a hand-lettered sign with a “no” slash over a swastika.) But they are not Nazis, they’re Americans. Some of them looked like they’d actually spent some time fighting Nazis. Then came the Democratic Party charge that the people at the meetings were suspiciously well-dressed, in jackets and ties from Brooks Brothers. They must be Republican rent-a-mobs. Sen. Barbara Boxer said on MSNBC’s “Hardball” that people are “storming these town hall meetings,” that they were “well dressed,” that “this is all organized,” “all planned,” to “hurt our president.” Here she was projecting. For normal people, it’s not all about Barack Obama.

Noonan is just lying about the Nazi imagery. She is surely aware that the tea baggers have been showing up at events with Hitler on their minds for months, and there’s been plenty of it at the Town Halls as well. And you don’t have to wonder where it’s coming from:

According to Noonan, the people who believe that sort of thing are the “normal people.”

Noonan says that the real danger lies with Democrats claiming these protests are organized by the Republican party and Big Business which does damage to our civility and political tradition. And Charlie Cook seems to agree with her, although he does grant that the Republicans haven’t been helpful either. Here he was on MSNBC earlier:

Monica Somebody Novotny: So independents, we hear now, are more likely to believe Obama has made progress in changing Washington that they think he should have. How big of a problem is that?

Charlie Cook: I think it’s two different things. Independents early on were very supportive of anything and everything Obama wanted to do. And they’ve been souring overall on his overall approval on just about any question they want to ask. A lot of independents have lost faith in president Obama. And you see it on this question as well.

This problem of the poisonous partisanship that you see in Washington, it wasn’t created overnight, it’s not going to end overnight. But to use a cliche, it takes two to tango and I don’t think either side is making much of an effort.

The president is talking the talk but not so much walking the walk and the Democrats in the House and Senate, there’s not a lot of bipartisanship there and the Republicans aren’t either. So I’d say both sides are at fault here.

Monica: So you don’t think that one party then is more to blame than the other? Just loking at some of the numbers here on tone and civility. Since April many more Americans say the tone of civility between Republicans and Democrats has gotten worse, from 24% to 35%.

Cook: That’s the view from out there. But the view from having lived in Washington since 1972, this kind of partisanship started getting ugly an in the mid 80s and it’s gotten worse and worse worse since the mid-80s and it doesn’t matter whether Democrats or Republicans are in charge it’s just a long spiral downward.

Right Charlie. “Out here” we see that there is one party that has gone apeshit insane and has unleashed a bunch of bloodsucking zombies all over the country and another party that even with the best interpretation available, is so ineffectual it can’t hit water if it falls out of a fucking boat. I guess you can say that they are both to blame, but I don’t think my solution to that problem would be to his liking.

Cook believes that if only Obama had only reached out to these people who think he’s a Nazi/Commie/foreign usurper, they would have responded in kind. It takes two to tango — and the Republicans apparently love to dance. (Well, maybe not. Isn’t the tango an illegal alien dance?)

Cook went on to explain what really went wrong:

Cook:The thing is you have a non-bipartisan approach it’s like waving an empty gun around, an empty threat they really can’t do it.

But the bottom line is that they’re going to end up having to compromise to the point where if they’d started off dealing with Republicans in the very beginning, will probably end up in the same place, but they will have lost a lot of altitude in the process.

Since the Republicans want total failure, that’s obviously what he thinks we’ll get.

I’m not convinced of that. We’re in crazy August where sharks and swift boaters rule the airwaves. But I can’t say that these mobs aren’t going to have an effect. The zombie right is flexing its muscle and since the villagers still think these nuts are Real Americans — or as Noonan calls them “normal people” — they affect the media narrative and that affects public opinion. We’re already seeing it.

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