The Right in the US has gone nuts - Part Whatever

Noonan: His Terms Are Always Hostile Ones - WSJ.com

Peggy Noonan, who I don't read all that often, but who has seemed at times to represent moderate Republicanism reasonably well,  has well and truly decided she's on side with the nutty Tea Party wing of the Republicans after all:

President Obama has been using the days and weeks leading up to his inauguration to show the depth of his disdain for the leaders of the other major party and, by inference, that party's voters, which is to say more or less half the country. He has been spending his time alienating instead of summoning. It has left the political air more sour and estranged. 

As a presidential style this is something strange and new. That has to be said again: It is new, and does not augur well. 

 What was remarkable about the president's news conference Monday is that he didn't seem to think he had to mask his partisan rancor or be large-spirited. He bristled with unashamed hostility for Republicans on the Hill.  They are holding the economy "ransom," they are using the threat of "crashing the American economy" as "leverage," some are "absolutist" while others are "consumed with partisan brinkmanship." They are holding "a gun at the head of the American people." And what is "motivating and propelling" them is not a desire for debt reduction, as they claim. They are "suspicious about government's commitment . . . to make sure that seniors have decent health care as they get older. They have suspicions about Social Security. They have suspicions about whether government should make sure that kids in poverty are getting enough to eat, or whether we should be spending money on medical research." 

And yet, "when I'm over here at the congressional picnic and folks are coming up and taking pictures with their family, I promise you, Michelle and I are very nice to them."

You're nice to them? To people who'd take food from the mouths of babes? 

Then, grimly: "But it doesn't prevent them from going onto the floor of the House and blasting me for being a big-spending socialist." Conservative media outlets "demonize" the president, he complained, and so Republican legislators fear standing near him.

If Richard Nixon talked like that, they'd have called him paranoid and self-pitying. Oh wait . . .

 I'm happy to allow that Obama is not, and never was, the Messiah.  He may have a big streak of vanity for all I know.

But  Noonan's shock and outrage that Obama is telling Republicans that he doesn't think they are acting in good faith and criticising their 4 years of over-the-topic hyperbole and crank theories - that is ridiculous in the extreme.   Republicans have been absurd in the way they have argued under Obama - everything is "socialism", "death panels" (you don't need links for those, surely), "treason", deserving impeachment; even when the ideas under discussion are ones that Republicans at the State level have implemented and only now being expanded to the Federal level (Romney and health care; the contraceptive mandate in many States, Republicans in the New York Senate on gun control.)  The hypocrisy and hyperbole of the Republicans over the last 4 years has been breathtaking.

And as for the President's recommendations on gun control - Noonan thinks they are OK, but still has to struggle to find a way to criticise him:

His gun-control recommendations themselves seemed, on balance, reasonable and moderate. I don't remember that the Second Amendment died when Bill Clinton banned assault rifles; it seemed to thrive, and good, too. That ban shouldn't have been allowed to expire in 2004.

What was offensive about the president's recommendations is what they excluded. He had nothing to say about America's culture of violence—its movies, TV shows and videogames. Excuse me, there will be a study of videogames; they are going to do "research" on whether seeing 10,000 heads explode on video screens every day might lead unstable young men to think about making heads explode. You'll need a real genius to figure that out.

The president at one point asked congressmen in traditionally gun-supporting districts to take a chance, do the right thing and support some limits. But when it comes to challenging Hollywood—where he traditionally gets support, and from which he has taken great amounts of money for past campaigns and no doubt will for future libraries—he doesn't seem to think he has to do the right thing. He doesn't even have to talk about it. It wouldn't be good to have Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino running around shouting "First Amendment, slippery slope!" or have various powerful and admired actors worrying their brows, to the extent their brows can be worried.

What, pray tell, does Noonan think a President can do, exactly, about cinema violence?  (And putting Steven Spielberg in there as if his movies have been groundbreaking in the gratuitous gun violence stakes is ridiculous.   The trend was really started by Right wing Hollywood figures, if you ask me.)

Noonan's commentary has therefore officially become nuts.  The list of moderate Right wing commentary worth reading has become vanishingly small.