I don’t read the Wall Street Journal as regularly as I should, but, courtesy of the recycling bin on the elevator landing of our apartment building, I chanced upon a recent Peggy Noonan column. It’s a masterpiece of Aesopian apostasy.

The column tries to disguise itself as yet another right-wing attack on the Journal’s default punching bag, President Obama. Under a pugnacious headline and subhead—

THE ANTI-CONFIDENCE MAN

Just when America needs a boost, we’re stuck with Dr. Doom in the White House

—Noonan takes some mock-mournful jabs at the President (he’s “aloof,” his efforts are “cosmetic,” he “speaks constantly, endlessly, but always seems to be withholding his true thoughts and plans”), at what she calls “the mood of his governance” (“full of warnings, threats, cliffs and ceilings, full of words like suffering and punishment and sacrifice”), and at “the President’s people” (their “whole approach” is “stoke and scare—stoke resentment and scare the vulnerable”). But her heresies are too big for such fig leaves, and they begin with her startling opening line:

It’s not a debt and deficit crisis, it’s a jobs crisis.

Say what? The biggest argument in Washington is about which is more urgent, the unemployment problem or the deficit and debt problem. Democrats say it’s unemployment and therefore advocate stimulus, which causes an increase in the deficit (though not necessarily in the long-term debt). Republicans say it’s the deficit/debt and therefore advocate austerity, which causes an increase in unemployment. (To be fair, Republicans are willing to swallow a bit of stimulus as long as it takes the dubious form of lowering taxes on the rich.)

Noonan, despite a quick “to be sure” aside in which she avers that things like deficits, regulations, and “the federal tax code” are “part of” the problem, is clear about which side she’s on:

But it’s a jobs crisis that’s the central thing. And you see it everywhere you look.

For Noonan, “everywhere you look” is a hotel she stayed at in Pittsburgh, which was so understaffed there was no bellhop to walk her up to her room in case a criminal was lurking. Nevertheless, about “the central thing,” she, like Paul Krugman, is right (i.e., left).

She’s also right about what Obama should have done about it:

He should have seen unemployment entering a crisis stage four years ago, and he did not. At that time I was certain he’d go for public-works projects, which could give training to the young and jobs to the experienced underemployed, would create jobs in the private sector and, in the end, yield up something needed—a bridge, a strengthened power grid. He instead gave his first term to health care.

Here’s where I started getting dizzy. Noonan is describing exactly what Obama did do. He did see a jobs crisis four years ago. As a major part of his eight-hundred-billion-dollar stimulus package (which he pursued in addition to, not instead of, health care), he did go for public-works projects, specifically including bridges and a strengthened power grid. The only opposition to all that bridge-building and grid-strengthening came from Noonan’s party. In the House, zero Republicans voted yes. In the Senate, three did. Afterwards, Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter jumped from the G.O.P. before he was pushed. (Repackaging himself as a Democrat did not keep him from landing with a splat.) Olympia Snowe, citing hyperpartisanship and legislative dysfunction, retired. Her Maine colleague Susan Collins, the last RINO in the Senate zoo, may or may not seek a fourth term.

From Peggy’s peroration:

Mr. Obama is making the same mistake he made four years ago. We are in a jobs crisis and he does not see it…. But the real question is whether the American people will be able to have jobs. Once they do, so much will follow—deficits go down a little as fewer need help, revenues go up as more pay taxes. Confidence and trust in the future will grow. People will be happier.

Noonan is with Obama, or Obama is with Noonan, on the substance of jobs vs. deficits. “We don’t have an immediate crisis in terms of debt,” the President said last week in an interview on ABC, adding: “My goal is how do we grow the economy, put people back to work, and if we do that we’re going to be bringing in more revenue.” I guess she has to say it’s all Obama’s fault. It’s the Wall Street Journal. It’s Chinatown.

Photograph: William B. Plowman/NBC/Getty