Huh!?

I used to really love Peggy Noonan's work, but we started to grow apart during this last election... I felt like in the last year she started to officially declare herself a part of that old fuddy-duddy conservative elite that has been such a barrier to the necessary evolution of our party.

A goofy sort of Huey Long-style populism has begun to infect Peggy's faction of the party (you hear it in Mike Huckabee's speeches too) and I find she's in this weird place now where, after 40 years of arguing otherwise, government has begun to seem like a good place to go looking for the solutions to everyday problems big and small. It's kind of hard to believe that Peggy was once a devoted disciple of the man who said the ten scariest words in the English language are "I'm from the Government and I'm here to help you."

Now, check out this paragraph from her current piece in the WSJ.

"People talk of the incoming administration's announced plans for infrastructure spending that will "save or create" 2.5 million jobs. Everything old is new again. I suspect public support for WPA-like endeavors will be high, and not only because of the promise of job creation. Not even only because people want something new, a sense of vigor and focus—a sense that there's a plan—from the federal government. There's also, I think, a sense that it would be good to do something as a nation, together, something like the old Mercury and Apollo space programs, something that draws people together. Something that is both literally and metaphorically concrete."

Look when people talk about job creation, they're not talking about jobs... they're talking about careers. The kind of long-term opportunities for the educated or the skilled that only the private sector can produce. No one, Obama included, jumps up and down when McDonald's announces they're adding 300 new fry cook positions to the nations' job rolls.

So why should I jump up and down because the President wants to create a bunch of jobs digging holes? This rush to start "infrastructure" projects will, at best, create temporary, ephemeral positions where Americans can spend six months or a year digging a hole and filling it with cement... just to say they did something other than sit on the couch and watch Oprah all day.

This is not what Americans should aspire to.

And to compare that to the Apollo Project is not just laughable, but represents a jaw-on-the-floor level of stupidity. The space race gave us amazing technologies and career opportunities that inspired a whole generation of Americans to get an edcuation and literally reach for the stars. It proved we are capable of miracles even if it had to be done as part of an emergency crash course... or perhaps pecisely because it DID have to be done that way.

All we're going to get from Obama's plan is a bunch of roads.

I've seen roads.

If you're looking for a grand national project, I find the idea of a new bridge from this side of a river to that side less than awe-inspiring...

How about we go to Mars? Now THAT would be something.

And then there's this head-dunker....

"For a generation we've been tapping on plastic keyboards, entering data into databases, inventing financial instruments that are abstract, complex and unconnected to any seeable reality. Fortunes were made in the ether, almost no one knows how; there's a sense that this was perhaps part of the problem. Workers tapped on keyboards and produced work they cannot see, touch or necessarily admire. They'd like to make their country better, and stronger, in a way they can see."

What!?!?

Ugh, come on grandma... I've heard this line before. "I had to walk to school, uphill, both ways."

Yeah right.

Look just because you look nostalgically back on the days when your Dad could kick the tires of the Buicks he built down at the factory and say "See that Peggy? I built that. That's man's work.", doesn't mean that's what I want out of my life.

You don't have to kick the tires of something tangible to be proud of your work.

And I don't need Obama to get me a job digging a ditch in order to feel like a productive American.