Noonan's Reinforcements

She gets it, my core argument for the relocation of the theatre and our greatest source of untapped potential in these dismal days:

And people want to belong to something. If you’re a vibrant member of a church in America, or a casual member of a vibrant church, you’re part of something. If you’re a member of a family that’s together, you are part of something. A lot of Americans do not have these two things.

But she also seems to exhibit a typical conservative, irrational revision of history:

There’s something else going on, a new or renewed sense of national shame. Or communal responsibility. Or a sense of reckoning. Whatever it is it’s a reaction to the excesses of the O’s, a reaction against the ways of those who caused the mess on Wall Street and Main Street. It is a reassertion that there actually are rules, and that it is embarrassing to break them in a way so colorfully damaging and destructive to everyone else.

Ahem.

Pardon me, Ms. Noonan, but were you not part of the Reagan Administration that brought us this mess through the castration of effective government as a market motivator and regulator? The "rules" she cites are the very same "rules" that the Reaganites worked to remove or neuter.

The task at hand now is to revive government as an effective tool in motivating people to make the changes in their lifestyle necessary to ensure our survival; that means a smarter, larger and more demonstrably results-driven Washington.

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