Peggy Noonan Outraged Barack Obama Invited That Fake Sign Language Guy To Mandela's Memorial

Peggy Noonan is concerned, kids. She is concerned and worried. She is very concerned, worried, and quite frankly, not just a little fretful. About incompetence. Whose incompetence? Why, the incompetence of the entire Obama administration, as evinced especially by that one mentally ill sign language guy. And it's not just Peggy Noonan who is worried, concerned, and fretful:

One reason I worry is that I frequently speak with people who interact with the White House, and when I say, “That place just doesn’t seem to work,” they don’t defend it, they offer off-the-record examples of how poorly the government is run. One thing that’s clear this holiday season: New York’s Democrats, to the degree they ever loved the president, don’t love him anymore, and have moved on. They are not thinking about what progress he might make in Washington next year, they’re talking about what Hillary might do the year after that.

This is very worrisome and concerning, especially the possibility that Hillary Clinton might coup the democratically elected president with two years left of his democratically elected term. Of course, like most people who profess to be "concerned," she's not so much worried as she is "delightedly pointing out problems." But only to be helpful, of course.

For Dame Peggy, the crowning moment of worry was the Mandela memorial,

where the United States Secret Service allowed the president of the United States to stand for 19 minutes next to the famous sign-language interpreter who, it was quickly revealed, was not only a fraud but a schizophrenic con man who is now said to have been involved in two deaths.

True, the President was in a foreign land, and the Secret Service "wasn't strictly in charge," but it looked to Peggy Noonan as if there was no one in charge, no one asking the hard questions about whether the sign language guy was a "mentally ill criminal," and this leaves Peggy Noonan very concerned indeed.

"It all looks so lax, so loosey-goosey." Oh, Dame Peggy...this is why we cannot quit you. For you generate piles of loosey-goosey hooey like this every week, and you then gripe that the Obama White House is focused too much on appearances, rather than on getting anything done. After all, they had all that time to set up a website, but it was glitchy for a couple of months, and then it was never fixed, except that it has been, but Peggy can't quite bring herself to admit that, so instead she deploys a fact-based comparison:

One reason this scandal isn’t Katrina is that Katrina had a beginning and an end. The storm came, the storm left, the cleanup commenced and failed and then continued and succeeded. At some point it was over. ObamaCare will never be over. It’s going to poison the rest of the administration. It’s the story that won’t go away because it will continue to produce disorder.

Yes. And when Katrina was over, more than 1800 people were dead and tens of thousands were dislocated, while Obamacare has killed and evicted no one -- but it has left many on hold or forced them to come back to the website later. The suffering, however, is exactly the same.

Just in case she hasn't made it clear that she is worried, Peggy Noonan shares this thought:

I’m worried, finally, that lines of traditionally assumed competence are being dropped. The past few weeks I can’t shake from my head this picture: The man with the football—the military aide who carries the U.S. nuclear codes, and who travels with the president—is carrying the wrong code. He’s carrying last month’s code, or the one from December 2012. And there’s a crisis—a series of dots on a radar screen traveling toward the continental U.S.—and the president is alerted. He’s in the holding room at a fundraiser out west. The man with the football is called in and he fumbles around in his briefcase and gets the code but wait, the date on the code is wrong. He scrambles, remembers there’s a file on his phone, but the phone ran out on the plane and he thought he could recharge in the holding room but there’s no electrical outlet. All eyes turn to him. “Wait—wait. No—uh—I don’t think that’s the code we use to launch against incoming from North Korea, I think that one takes out Paris!”

I have to say, I’ve never worried about this with any previous administration, ever.

Funny, that sounds pretty much like how the invasion of Grenada actually came off, with the Green Berets using tourist maps and the Navy radios that couldn't communicate with the Army radios. We hear that the services have gotten much better at avoiding those glitches since Peggy Noonan worked in the White House.

She saves her best worrying for the end, of course, pointing out that unlike go-getter presidents who ran businesses, no one in the Obama administration is a doer: "They have a background in communicating, not doing."

It is rather worrisome to see that insight coming from a former speechwriter who worked for a retired actor, isn't it?

[ WSJ ]