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Peggy Noonan Seemingly Forgets About Her Role
In The Reagan Administration

By Sean Fenley

14 August, 2010
Countercurrents.org

Where was Peggy Noonan in the 1980s? Because that’s what I was left wondering after reading her recent column in the Murdoch penny dreadful, the Wall Street Journal. The man whose syntax she penned, was perhaps the most integral player in our current state of national disrepair. If you crush the unions, eschew “low value” manufacturing jobs, pursue military Keynesianism, gut regulations of every sort and variety, redistribute wealth upward, and in general get the referees out of the way for the Fortune 500 and private enterprise; what result do you expect to get from that sort of a scenario? Ms. Noonan I hope you didn’t believe all that tripe that old Ronnie spewed to the American public. Don’t you know that was just for the benefit of all of those special interests, and profoundly corrupted individuals and organizations that raised him up there as their spokesperson? I would have thought you were in on the hoodwinking? The wool-over-the-eye-pulling? One of the principle players in the “illustrious” flimflam? Apparently the joke was on you though, Ms. Noonan, because I’m not sure what you thought “Reaganosophy” was all about.

But from your perch, obviously kicking back in a gated community somewhere — safe behind some concrete barriers and armed security personnel somewhere — free from the “cultural Balkanization” and the cities developing English as a second language in “your” America, it’s probably kind of fun to observe the mess that Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan have created. Even if the joke is on you, it doesn’t hurt that much, when one is comfortably surrounded by an ostentatious bubble. I’d think you’d have some shame for what your old communicator/politico/actor crony has wrought for the rest of us, but Republicans seem to be a species for which shame is a concept that is almost entirely foreign.

After your profoundly flawed philosophy, wholly crashed the economy; I didn’t discern even the eensiest tiniest bit of reassessment, soul searching or self-reflection, post the Bushian unparalleled collapse. And we’ve watched the shock troops of your side out there with images of the president with bones through his nose, and standing beside the likes of Hitler or Stalin — a more apropos position for your friend Ronnie — considering his Central American scorched earth policies and numerous other sordid acts and deeds. And what has been the legacy of this man who wasn’t there that Republicans and other card-carrying mythologizers of the right have invested such a bounty of time, wherewithal and resources in erecting?

Republicans that came to power post-Ronald Reagan said they would restore “family-values and families”, and their program was tax cuts, public service cuts, and all manner of government deregulatory scheming. The economics profession — for the most part — even went along for the joyride. “Scientifically”, “proving”, that the aforementioned agenda, along with outsourcing, and huge federal and foreign trade deficits would be for the ultimate benefit of all. Not so now, says Peggy Noonan, and, of course, she blames the “liberals” and “the leftist elitists”, universities and people of color; but it was her and her compatriots, who brought us all to this near tipping point. I can only hope Ms. Noonan that your gated community isn’t one of the ones that’s still left standing, when the people rise up and forever reject the Reaganism of the right, and the Reaganism with a human face of the current incarnation of the Barack Obama led Democratic Party. It will certainly be fitting, if those of you who have embraced this Machiavellian, self-interested and shortsighted ideology; get what you all have coming to you — as karma would portend.

Sean Fenley is an independent progressive, who would like to see some sanity brought to the creation and implementation, of current and future, U.S. military, economic, foreign and domestic policies. He has been published by a number of websites, and publications throughout the alternative media.

[email protected]