How much reality does a President need? As Barack Obama nurses an upper lip with 12 stitches from a flying elbow in a basketball scrimmage, Wall Street Journal doyenne Peggy Noonan advises him to escape the White House bubble by hiring “a special assistant for reality” to “advocate for the average, a representative for the normal.”
Whose normal? The full text, which Rupert Murdoch did not hide behind a pay wall this weekend, is a frequent business flyer’s screed against air terminal patdowns that ends with a call for firing Janet Napolitano.
At the same time, the President is telling Barbara Walters, “We are going to have work on the problem” of security screenings:
“I understand people’s frustrations with it, but I also know that if there was an explosion in the air that killed a couple of hundred people…and it turned out that we could have prevented it possibly… that would be something that would be pretty upsetting to most of us–including me.”
But Noonan, who put Clint Eastwood’s “Read my lips” into Bush I’s no-new-tax pledge, wants Obama to know that “every businessman in America already thinks you’ve been grabbing his gonads.”
To that end, she evokes John Wayne passing through a scanner to see a TSA person “walking toward him, snapping his rubber gloves. Guy gets up close to Wayne, starts feeling his waist and hips. Wayne says, Touch the jewels, Pilgrim, and I’ll knock you into tomorrow.'”
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