If there comes a time when a panel convenes to rate ridiculous advice  columnist have offered Presidents of the United States, the suggestions contained in Peggy Noonan’s recent column in the Wall Street Journal entitled, Pull the Plug on Obama Care” will certainly be right up there at the top of the list. The thrust of her suggestion is that the President should suspend his effort to have a health care plan and try it later.

She writes; In a more beautiful world, the whole health-care chapter could become, for the president, that helpful thing, the teachable moment. The president the past month has been taught a lot by the American people. It's all there in the polls. He could still step back, rethink, say it didn't work, promise to return with something better.

When presidents make clear, with modesty and even some chagrin, that they have made a mistake but that they've learned a lesson and won't be making it again, the American people tend to respond with sympathy. It is our tradition and our impulse.

Can you imagine the President capitulating to this fabricated opposition to health care reform which has been generated by the insurance companies spending reportedly $1.4 million a day with the complete support of the Republican Party and a myriad of other interest groups opposed to the groundbreaking legislation?  Can you hear the gloating, see the chest beating, and the bragging of how this phalanx were victorious in delivering Obama his first defeat, fulfilling the well publicized stated goal of Senator DeMint saying,  “if Republicans and conservatives stop Obama on health care reform, it will “break him” and be Obama’s “Waterloo.

What President Obama should have learned is that his pursuit of bipartisanship has been an exercise in futility that the Republicans have used to stall and distort his message, which has obviously influenced the polls. He should use the “nuclear option,” the reconciliation measure that allows for a 51 simple majority in the Senate and ram that bill through. There is nothing that succeeds like success and there is nothing like failure to energize the opposition.

There is not a single sign that suspending this effort now and attempting it later would increase its chances of passage or Republican cooperation. President Obama is much to wise to go for that ruse.

Ms. Noonan has been on a persistent campaign against the Obama Presidency focusing lately on the President’s health care reform effort. Her columns reflect an increasingly  desperate tone with reason being an early casualty. Up until now, I don’t believe Ms. Noonan has been known for writing comedy. But her latest column has revealed some newly discovered comedic talent for some real LOL (laughing out loud) material.

Noonan refers to the following historical event as an example of how her suggested capitulation was successful in the past, only to expose either her faulty reasoning or her brazen salesmanship, reminding one of that timeless joke. “What’s the difference between rape and romance? Answer, salesmanship.

Here’s her pitch with the historical reference; “Such admissions are not a sign of weakness. John F. Kennedy knew this after the Bay of Pigs. He didn't blame his Republican predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, or the agencies that had begun the invasion's tentative planning under Ike. JFK made it clear he'd learned a great deal, which increased confidence in his leadership. His personal popularity rose so high that he later wryly noted that the more mistakes he made, the more popular he became.”

The comparison that Noonan comes up with is nothing short of bizarre. She is equating a botched invasion attempt of a foreign country in which the President has no choice but to accept the responsibility, to a legislative process in the works in which this President has a majority of his party in the House and Senate? This kind of tortured logic reaches a level of twisted reasoning that exposes the author to well deserved ridicule and scorn.

Nevertheless, she does herself one better in the selective memory department exposing a disposition to ignore facts if they get in the way of making a self serving point. The much heralded “I screwed up” admission of President Obama as a result of the bungled Tom Daschle nomination for Secretary of Health and Human Service in his first hundred days in office is conveniently “misremembered” by Noonan in order to make the following assertion.

“Modern presidents are always afraid to show anything so human as modesty or doubt. They're afraid of the endless cable-news loop of "I think I was wrong, I think I misjudged, I didn't get it right." They're afraid of death by sound bite. Which is understandable. But they should get over it, especially when it comes to a bit of self-criticism, and even a bit of self-doubt…”

So much for the “Modern President being afraid to say he was wrong, if only Peggy Noonan would take her own advice and admit that she’s got it all wrong.