Amused Cynic

Nope, not writing about Sarah Palin. I’m writing about the supposed great one herself, Ms. Peggy Noonan.

A while back, I wrote this about Peggy Noonan:

Noonan, for someone of such talent, has in recent years transmogrified from aging, pixie-esque wise elder to a caricature—resembling at times a pixie-esque wise elder, but also, at times, an articulate, possibly visionary but possibly daft, street person. The kind you meet late at night on the subway, and can’t decide if they’re crazy or brilliant. And then they’re gone, muttering into the mist, so it doesn’t much matter anyway.

I want to revise and extend those remarks; Peggy Noonan has become a raving loon, and it’s about time more people said so. She’s the crazy old aunt in the attic, the one who sometimes escapes and goes on “Hardball,” where she dresses up as Katherine Graham and calls Chris Matthews “Christopher.” I also imagine her as a mad, menopausal Mary Richards, waltzing through the streets of Manhattan in her pea coat, spewing catchy phrases until she closes by whirling around and throwing her Tam-o-Shanter cap in the air, grinning and laughing at the wonderfullness of it all…[freeze frame]

Everyone slows down a little as they age, and for some, it’s an opportunity to become even more thoughtful and creative. Others seem to meander slowly into dementia; I’m thinking David Gergen, Maureen Dowd, Governor Mark Sanford, Barry Goldwater, Bruce Springsteen, and yes, Peggy Noonan.

Why does Peggy Noonan’s latest column have my knickers in such a knot this morning? Here’s a summary of she said about Barack Obama, to whom she threw her support, in apologizing to fellow Republicans for having supported and voted for him:

He was hungry, loved politics, had charm and energy, loved walking onto the stage, waving and doing the stump speech. All good. But he was not thoughtful. He was a gifted retail politician who displayed the disadvantages of being born into a point of view (in his case a form of conservatism; elsewhere and in other circumstances, it could have been a form of liberalism) and swallowing it whole: He never learned how the other sides think, or why…

…He experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because he could see no truth in any of it…his presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. “I’m not wired that way,” “I’m not a quitter,” “I’m standing up for our values.” I’m, I’m, I’m. In another age it might not have been terrible, but here and now it was actually rather horrifying…What he is, is a seemingly very nice middle-class guy with ambition, appetite and no sense of personal limits…America doesn’t need Barack Obama to prove it was, and is, a nation of unprecedented fluidity.

OK, as you probably know, I’m just having my little joke with you. Peggy, loyal Republican, wrote those words about Sarah Palin. Let us continue now with her helpful remarks:

The elites made her. It was the elites of the party, the McCain campaign and the conservative media that picked her and pushed her. The base barely knew who she was. It was the elites, from party operatives to public intellectuals, who advanced her and attacked those who said she lacked heft. She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon…

She makes the party look stupid, a party of the easily manipulated…She shows your cynicism…she is a ponder-free zone. She can memorize the names of the presidents of Pakistan, but she is not going to be able to know how to think about Pakistan. Why do her supporters not see this? Maybe they think “not thoughtful” is a working-class trope!…

Her lack of any appropriate modesty did her in. Actually, it’s arguable that membership in the self-esteem generation harmed her. For 30 years the self-esteem movement told the young they’re perfect in every way. It’s yielding something new in history: an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy…

She hurts, as they say, the Republican brand, with her mess and her rhetorical jabberwocky and her careless causing of division. Really, she is the most careless sower of discord since George W. Bush, who fractured the party and the movement that made him. Why wouldn’t the media want to keep that going?

But here’s where she really gets me, this person who helped drag the socialist Trojan Horse cabal that now controls the federal government through the city gates, this chattering socialite masquerading as a great Republican strategist who, with others of her turncoat ilk, helped install the child-king upon his throne in D.C.:

Here’s why all this matters. The world is a dangerous place. It has never been more so, or more complicated, more straining of the reasoning powers of those with actual genius and true judgment. This is a time for conservative leaders who know how to think.

Here are a few examples of what we may face in the next 10 years: a profound and prolonged American crash, with the admission of bankruptcy and the spread of deep social unrest; one or more American cities getting hit with weapons of mass destruction from an unknown source; faint glimmers of actual secessionist movements as Americans for various reasons and in various areas decide the burdens and assumptions of the federal government are no longer attractive or legitimate.

The era we face, that is soon upon us, will require a great deal from our leaders. They had better be sturdy. They will have to be gifted. There will be many who cannot, and should not, make the cut. Now is the time to look for those who can. And so the Republican party should get serious, as serious as the age, because that is what a grown-up, responsible party—a party that deserves to lead—would do.

It’s not a time to be frivolous, or to feel the temptation of resentment, or the temptation of thinking next year will be more or less like last year, and the assumptions of our childhoods will more or less reign in our future. It won’t be that way.

Yes, the only sensible words in the whole piece are the ones that really tick me off, because despite obviously understanding the gravity of our national situation, her blind dislike of someone she considers to be her inferior led her to support a far more dangerous political neophyte. And she seems to remain foggily unaware of what she has done, and what is coming down the pike. Time to put the crazy old aunt back in the attic. I don’t care how cleverly she coins catch-phrases.

RELATED: I think it’s time for a careful re-reading of T. Coddington Van Voorhees VII, don’t you?

This was, as you know, the theme of the National Topsider’s exclusive January conference at the private Breakers Club in Nassau where I hosted a veritable murderer’s row of top tory thinkers to diagnose the troubles with conservatism. Dame Peggy Noonan was there, of course, along with Kathleen Parker, Douglas Kmiec, and those two mighty Davids of conservative intellect, Brooks and Frum. But enough of the namedropping. The order of the day, after mixed badminton doubles, was to formulate an Rx for our ailing patient. In this regard we were in surprising accord: in order to survive, conservativism simply must start appealing to a better class of people. The sad fact of the matter, as we noted, is that one no longer finds admitted conservatives in any of America’s prestige zip codes nor the faculty redoubts of her selective academies. During our Bahamian summit many gambits were proposed to win back America’s elite electoral precincts from the left; sponsoring various hip hop colloquia at the better Ivies, supporting integration of gays into Nascar, endorsing state ownership of the means of production. Rod Dreher, whose sensational exegesis “Crunchy Cons” sold well over 200 copies last year, recommended a full embrace of the environmental movement, which as I understand is quite the rage among youthful voters and the trendsetting thespians of Hollywood. Good and bold ideas all, and necessary steps to get the movement started again. But there remains a daunting obstacle – namely, the benighted rubes who constitute so much of our so-called “base,” and whose existence make it nigh on impossible to recruit their social betters.

UPDATE: I am somewhat surprised that more people aren’t commenting on Noonan’s warped viciousness, but perhaps I shouldn’t be; I think there is a great deal of credence in Rosslyn Smith’s excellent American Thinker piece on the crowd-control exercised by bullies.

“Bullying and name calling passing as humor, on the other hand, is all about exerting control over the audience. The schoolyard bully determines the social order. His targets are shunned both by those who are in the in clique and those who fear becoming the next target of scorn. The comedian-cum-bully has a secondary target as well. In addition to exerting control over the political landscape, he seeks to instill self doubt in his target. For in the realm of the bully, people come to believe that the targets did something to bring it on themselves. This is especially true when the target doesn’t effectively fight back.”

I commented further on this phenomenon here.

Another American Thinker writer, George Joyce weighed in on Noonan today:

Noonan is twisting a very troubling knife here. Instead of recognizing that Palin might have been motivated to help save her beloved country from Obama’s socialist revolution, Noonan drifts off into pop sociology.

Think about it. On Iran, Palin would have vocally supported the Iranian demonstrators. On Honduras, she would have defended the Honduran people and their constitution instead of the thug Zelaya. She would have talked tough on North Korea. She would have thrown Sonia Sotomayor’s application into a dumpster marked “racist.” She would have stared down Nancy Pelosi on socialism, unchecked federal power, and the massive debt our children are destined to inherit.

UPDATE: (7/12/09) This is the kind of blogging I want to do when I grow up. Sheesh. Just brilliant.

Peggy Noonan used her Friday column in the Wall Street Journal to throw some dirt on Sarah Palin’s grave. It’s vintage Noonan: airheaded, dripping with condescension, and completely missing the point. No serious conservative needs to hear anything from Noonan except her groveling apology for being so horribly wrong about Barack Obama, who she energetically supported for president. However, it’s worth picking through the flotsam and jetsam of this embarrassing column, to appreciate the kind of intellectual fat that conservatives need to trim from the Republican Party.
[...]
Noonan is symptomatic of a defeated, collaborative wing of the GOP that wants nothing more than to be thought well of by the Left, which they believe has decisively won the political and cultural battles of the twentieth century. Their idea of a “conservative” is someone who can eke out a small discount on the price tag of mammoth liberal programs. Their goal in 2012 is to find a bland, pleasant, “moderate” Republican, who can win the approval of the media mullahs as a “serious candidate,” then lose gracefully and give America’s First Black President his second term. The idea of serious conservative reform terrifies them: radical overhaul of the tax system, dramatic reduction in the size of government, a system that compels Congress to live like humble servants of the people instead of Renaissance royalty… Who will throw those wonderful cocktail parties in Washington, if the conservatives burn half the city down? Who will tell Peggy bedtime stories of dashing social engineers with titanic government schemes? Where will she find hip, exciting statists she can celebrate with schoolgirl treacle, like this nonsense from her 2008 endorsement of Obama: “Something new is happening in America. It is the imminent arrival of a new liberal moment. History happens, it makes its turns, you hold on for dear life. Life moves.” She was on to something with that last bit. Obama has made a lot of American businesses think about moving.

In her conclusion, Noonan writes, “And so the Republican Party should get serious, as serious as the age, because that is what a grown-up, responsible party—a party that deserves to lead—would do.” This is frothy, delusional milk, sprayed on top of a long, boring latte of condescension. Nothing could be less serious than fawning over a hollow President, who wastes his citizens’ time with absurd fantasies about multi-trillion-dollar health care takeovers, piled on top of an already astronomical national debt. The latest polls suggest the public is becoming impatient with the infantile antics of the party Noonan thought should control both houses of Congress, and the presidency. If Peggy wants to see what an unserious, immature party looks like, she should watch video of Nancy Pelosi stammering about how the CIA lied to her, or leaf through the avalanche of scandals engulfing nearly every major Democrat. She could complete her education by dropping by to watch Al Franken squatting in his brand-new Senate seat.

I have a suggestion for the Wall Street Journal: make this Peggy Noonan’s farewell column, and hire Sarah Palin to take her place. Peggy could head over to the Huffington Post, where she’d be received as a martyred hero. The Journal’s circulation would skyrocket. This economy needs a success story.