Peggy Noonan is terribly unhappy with President Obama for not being nice enough to Mitt Romney while on the campaign trail and for campaigning right now at all for that matter, because everyone knows it would be so much better for him to just allow Mitt Romney to go out there and lie constantly about him without ever responding.
Steve Benen took note of Noonan's complaints in her column at the Wall Street Journal this Friday and it appears she continued with the carping right into the panel segment on ABC's This Week. Here's more from Steve.
One of the overarching problems with Paul Ryan's House Republican budget plan, approved by 95% of the GOP caucus last week, is that it's hard to know where to start with its flaws. It is, after all, less a budget plan and more a right-wing fantasy. [...]
Paul Krugman takes a crack at this challenge today, arguing that you can learn everything you need to know about Ryan's House Republican budget "by understanding two numbers: $4.6 trillion and 14 million." [...]
I mention of all of this, not to rehash just how offensive Ryan's vision really is, but because two prominent pundits -- the New York Times' David Brooks and the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan -- complain in their columns today that President Obama was a big meanie when he criticized the Ryan plan, backed enthusiastically by Mitt Romney, in a speech this week. For the conservative media figures, Obama should have been more accepting of the Ayn Rand acolyte's extremism, instead of rejecting the Ryan plan so forcefully.
The columnists didn't say Obama's remarks were inaccurate, but rather, Brooks and Noonan believe it was impolite for the president to make these accurate observations out loud.
And here she was again on This Week:
TAPPER: What did you hear as you listened to the candidates?
NOONAN: I heard the beginning of what is going to be a tough and maybe even brutal campaign. We were talking in the green room about something feels funny this year. Something feels unsatisfying, but also sort of negative I think is an obvious word.
The president -- first of all, I wasn't that aware that Mr. Romney has started his campaign, but boy, it's obvious that Mr. Obama has. He was tough. He was stark. He was dividing and labeling. Normally at this point, a candidate for the presidency, an incumbent candidate, will take a more benign, embracing tone. There was none of that. It was stark, dividing, us versus them, and that suggests brutal days ahead for the next seven months, I think.
