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Noonan: Be Thankful We Don't See This

There's no apocalypse out there

By Kevin Spak, Newser Staff

Posted Nov 28, 2008 1:10 PM CST

(Newser) – This Thanksgiving, Peggy Noonan is thankful for what she’s not seeing. Despite the relentless glut of negative economic news, “everything looks the same,” she writes in the Wall Street Journal. There is no one selling pencils in the street, no children lining up in bread lines. “It’s as if the news is full of floods, but we haven’t seen it rain.”

We can be thankful, too, that we have a wise, steady president-elect, who’s done nothing short of start his first hundred days early, and an incumbent who has contritely stepped aside. Every time Noonan flies, she prays, “Dear God, put your big hands under this plane.” Many people likely feel the same way about America right now. Praying, “Lord, thank you for our previous safety, and get us through this turbulence.”

[Images (2)]

[Quotes (3)]

President-elect Barack Obama listens to a reporter's question during a news conference in Chicago, Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2008. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

In this March 23, 1932, file photo, three unemployed men start a fire for cooking in this vacant lot in New York City, where they live when they are not searching for work. (AP Photo/File)

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One of the weirdest, most perceptually jarring things about the economic crisis is that everything looks the same. - Peggy Noonan

Mr. Obama's preternatural steadiness continues. It's been a while since anyone called him Bambi or compared him to the ambivalent, self-torturing Adlai Stevenson. - Peggy Noonan

I am thankful that more than half the country is happy, and that the 46% who voted the other way accepted the outcome as America always has, peacefully and with good-natured resentment. - Peggy Noonan

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Noonan: Be Thankful We Don't See This