Maybe the Jingo Ate Your Baby

Peggy Noonan is having a parade all by her lonesome this morning over at the WSJ. It's as apparent to her as it is to the rest of us that her man can't win on the issues -- she actually proposes that the GOP build McCain a custom little tortured veteran-accessible podium that he can carry around the country to look bigger and better behind. So Peggy acts out, donning her ill-fitting Dolly Madison suit and taking it for a limp around the block.
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Peggy's theme is -- [hoo boy] -- Old America vs. New America. As tediously and as predictably as anyone possibly could, Peggy finds that everything about her straw man Old America -- God, love of country, hatred of government, etc. -- is far far better than and, surprise! pretty much the opposite of everything about the straw man New America. Her comparisons include, of course, straw presidential candidates.

Peggy's conclusion is a shocker:

I weigh this in favor of the Old America. Hard not to, for I remember it, and its sterling virtues. Maybe if you are 25 years old, your sense of the Old and New is different....

Or maybe if you are an utter rightwing tool, you can convince yourself that the miserable failures of movement conservatism over the past 25 years never happened. But happen they did, Peggy. And from here in the wreckage your flashbacks look an awful lot like hallucinations.