Teaparties of the Rich and Famous

Shorter Peggy Noonan: "The chatter's of holding our breath until we go Galt."

Failure: the Great Teacher

Shorter Peggy Noonan: "Nine-eleven was my kind of schoolhouse indoctrination!"

Dark Side of the Noonan

Shorter Peggy Noonan: "Americans are from Earth, Barack Obama is from Pluto."

Burn, Baby, Burn!

Shorter Peggy Noonan: "Lefty terrorists* are making the teabaggers crazy."

*Verbatim Noonan: "You are terrifying us." Also, approvingly, on the teabaggers' townhall conniptions: "This is democracy's great barbaric yawp." Peg can only hope the "unnecessarily and unhelpfully divisive and provocative [bombthrowers on the left, who are] mocking and menacing concerned citizens" at healthcare townhalls, don't cause things there to "get too hot, or get out of hand."

Attica! Atticaaa!!@! Or something.

Spirit of '76

Shorter Peggy Noonan: "Gin! Methinks they'll tax gin!"

"your an elitist snob"

That line pretty neatly sums up reaction among the Freeper-types dominating comment to Peggy Noonan's column on Sarah Palin this morning over at the Wall Street Journal. So you can skip the comments (as enjoyable as they are if you have the time and inclination), but do not miss the column.

Teaser line:

In another age it might not have been terrible, but here and now it was actually rather horrifying.

That is not a "Shorter," folks. That's the genuine Noonan. From there she gets up close and personal with a whole cast of GOP charlatans and mythmakers like John Fund and Russ Douthat.

Thank you, John McCain. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

A Legend in Her Own Mind

Peggy Noonan has devised a word game for her readers this morning. It's weak cover for an attempt to sustain the GOP meme that Obama is Just. Trying. To Do. Too. Much. But, what the hell, it could be fun to play along.

Peggy's idea, taken from a line Clare Boothe Luce claims to have spoken to JFK, is that "'a great man is one sentence.'" Peggy gives us, "He preserved the union and freed the slaves," and, "He lifted us out of a great depression and helped to win a World War," for Lincoln and FDR. A WSJ web commenter chimes in imaginatively for the Gipper with, "He defeated communism and presided over America's greatest economic expansion." Her commenters aren't nearly so kind to Obama, but Peggy, ever striving to roll the meme up the hill, gives us, "He brought America back from economic collapse and kept us strong and secure in the age of terror," as sufficient change she can believe in.

But what about the Shrub? Hasn't Peggy a line for Mission Accomplished, the Decider, With Us or Against Us? Seems like it could write itself. How about:

He fucked up the world yet got re-elected.

But maybe that says more about the age than the man.

Please feel free to play Peggy's game in comments. Let the Supreme Court's discretion in Bush v. Gore be your guide to the rules.

Update: Or maybe Noonan's done waiting for history's judgment on 43 and we're all in agreement after all that he was one ungreat prez. I find it hard to keep up.

[I made two small corrections.]

ePiphany

Shorter Peggy Noonan: "Our base is baser than their base."

Only the Republican Statue is Smiling

Shorter Peggy Noonan (in the Capitol rotunda for the Reagan statue dedication): "Goddamn Dem pretenders and Pelosi's frozen smile. Could we maybe term-limit 'em out?"

QOTD: EmotiCon Edition

Three for your money today, and we open the bidding with Peggy Noonan's errant stab at defining the concept of empathy:

(Maybe that's what they mean by empathy: Where you come from enters you, and you bring it with you as you rise. But if that's what they mean, then we're all empathetic. We're the most fluid society in human history, but no one ever leaves their zip code in America, we all take it with us. It's part of our pride. And it's not bad, it's good. [parenthesis unclosed in original]

Shaper of recent American domestic history Michael Gerson, fresh from his hometown of Oblivious, shows the limits of Noonan's parochialism with a classic line:

Just imagine the frustration and anger of standing before a federal judge who is predisposed against your claims for racial reasons of any sort.

It's classic because Gerson is speaking here primarily in defense of (and in empathy with) his fellow lily-white American citizens of Ricci v. DeStefano, who are like Gerson, of course, members of the least (by several orders of magnitude) racially-persecuted group in the nation. He really does have to imagine.

From there to David Brooks, who this morning has up one of his weirdly fairly-sensible columns:

...[E]motions are an inherent part of decision-making. Emotions are the processes we use to assign value to different possibilities. Emotions move us toward things and ideas that produce pleasure and away from things and ideas that produce pain.

People without emotions cannot make sensible decisions because they don't know how much anything is worth. People without social emotions like empathy are not objective decision-makers. They are sociopaths who sometimes end up on death row.

Or at the Washington Post or, heck, in the White House.

(Cheap shot? Sure. But in a world of Noonans and Gersons, Bushes and Cheneys, I'm afraid my empathy extends only so far.)

Party Like It's 1999

Peggy Noonan:

There were potential benefits in a change in leadership, one being that the Democrats would now share authority and responsibility for the age and its difficulties. They'd get the daily raw threat file, they'd apply their view of the world and do their best. A primary virtue of that: On the day something bad happened—and that day will come, and no one in the entire U.S. intelligence community will tell you otherwise—we would as a nation be spared, as we got through it, the added burden of the terrible, cleaving, partisan divisiveness of 2000-08. This would help hold us together in a hard time.

Yes, Peggy, that day will be a real tea party.

9/11 Changed Everything

Even, according to Peggy Noonan, the presidential administration presiding on 9/11:

...The Bush administration made a great point of saying, when they were explaining what U.S. intelligence is up against, that the challenges are constant and we only have to be wrong once, fail once, for the consequences to be deeply painful. What the Bush administration was doing, in part, was admitting that they might be in charge when something happened....

September 11? Osama? Jet planes? Bygones. The GOP takes a mulligan, thankyouverymuch. Which is another case that nobody but nobody could have predicted...

Success Story

Shorter Peggy Noonan: "Americans are fearful, and fearful is what Republicans do best."

Mr. Freud Comes to Washington

Peggy on the Stimulus Bill:

What was needed? Not pork, not payoffs, not eccentric base-pleasing, group-greasing forays into birth control as stimulus, as the speaker of the House dizzily put it before being told to remove it.

I don't know who this Bill guy is, but his shtick appears to be working.

Beating a Retreat

Peggy Noonan, her former joy in politics apparently now all gone, has been reading. And reading and reading and reading. And she's sure reading is about to catch on:

...It is a relatively inexpensive (libraries, Kindle, Amazon), peaceful and enriching activity. And we're about to enter an age of greater quiet. More people will be home, not traveling as much to business meetings or rushing out to the new jobsite. A lot of adults are going to be more in search of guidance and inspiration. The past quarter century we've had other diversions, often expensive ones—movies, DVDs, Xboxes. Books will fit the quieter future.

Peg's politics have provided us with expensive diversions too, of course. But somehow she neglects to mention Iran-Contra, impeachment, stolen elections, stupid wars, drowned cities, wrecked economies, etc., etc., etc. Our coming "age of greater quiet" is really just another in this series. And likewise, for what purpose does Peggy suppose people might now seek "guidance and inspiration" but to extricate themselves from the devastation that is the culmination of her politics?

But politics are the furthest thing from Peggy's mind nowadays, honestly. She reads for guidance and inspiration. But who knows that a miracle does not wait amidst the wreckage? Take this line she draws from a book about the life of Mother Teresa:

You must find your own Calcutta. You don't have to go to India. Calcutta is all around you.

May the heavens have mercy on us all...

From Goldwater to Freakwater*

Peggy Noonan:

Obama and the Runaway Train
The race, the case, a hope for grace.

The case for Barack Obama, in broad strokes:

He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief. He climbed steep stairs, born off the continent with no father to guide, a dreamy, abandoning mother, mixed race, no connections. He rose with guts and gifts. He is steady, calm, and, in terms of the execution of his political ascent, still the primary and almost only area in which his executive abilities can be discerned, he shows good judgment in terms of whom to hire and consult, what steps to take and moves to make. We witnessed from him this year something unique in American politics: He took down a political machine without raising his voice.

[blah blah blah]

But let's be frank. 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.[...]

Eras end, and begin. "God is in charge of history." And so my beautiful election ends.

Woody Guthrie:

Little Black Train

There's a little black train a-comin'
Better set your business right
There's a little black train a-comin'
And it may be here tonight

Go tell that ballroom lady
All dressed in the worldly pride
That death's dark train is coming
Prepare to take a ride
More...
God sent to Hezekiah
A message from on high
You better set your house in order
For you must surely die

He turned to the wall in weeping
We see and hear his tears
He got his business fixed all right
God spared him fifteen years

We see that train with engine
And one small baggage car
Your idle thoughts and wicked deeds
Will stop at the judgment bar

That poor young man in darkness
Cares not for the gospel light
Til suddenly he hears the whistle blow
And the little black train in sight

Have mercy on me Lord
Please come and set me right
Before he got his business fixed
The train rolled in that night

Sing, it G.O.P.!

*Freakwater is a band that covers this Guthrie song as well as it can be done.

QOTD: Heart of the Matter Edition

Peggy Noonan:

Democrats in the end speak most of, and seem to hold the most sympathy for, the beset-upon single mother without medical coverage for her children, and the soldier back from the war who needs more help with post-traumatic stress disorder. They express the most sympathy for the needy, the yearning, the marginalized and unwell. For those, in short, who need more help from the government, meaning from the government's treasury, meaning the money got from taxpayers.

Who happen, also, to be a generally beset-upon group.

More...

Democrats show little expressed sympathy for those who work to make the money the government taxes to help the beset-upon mother and the soldier and the kids. They express little sympathy for the middle-aged woman who owns a small dry cleaner and employs six people and is, actually, day to day, stressed and depressed from the burden of state, local and federal taxes, and regulations, and lawsuits, and meetings with the accountant, and complaints as to insufficient or incorrect efforts to meet guidelines regarding various employee/employer rules and regulations. At Republican conventions they express sympathy for this woman, as they do for those who are entrepreneurial, who start businesses and create jobs and build things. Republicans have, that is, sympathy for taxpayers. But they don't dwell all that much, or show much expressed sympathy for, the sick mother with the uninsured kids, and the soldier with the shot nerves.

Neither party ever gets it quite right, the balance between the taxed and the needy, the suffering of one sort and the suffering of another. You might say that in this both parties are equally cold and equally warm, only to two different classes of citizens.

If they couldn't call us baby-killers, I guess they'd have no morals at all.

Lyrica Madness

Shorter Peggy Noonan: "Does anybody really know what time it is?"

Update: Added link to song lyrics, for posterity's sake.

She's Baaa-ack...

Peggy Noonan, back from vacation today, spends nearly her entire column talking about Barack Obama, "a young black man from nowhere." She actually describes him at another point with the phrase, "There is no there there" [italics hers].

More...

After wondering if Obama will ever manage to live up to our usual American presidential measuring stick--Winston Churchill--Pegster delivers the money shot:

There's a thing that's out there and it's big, and latent, and somehow always taken into account and always ignored, and political professionals always assume they understand it. It has been called many things the past 50 years, "the silent center," "the silent majority," "the coalition," "the base." The idea of it has evolved as its composition has evolved, but the fact that it's big, and relatively silent, and somehow always latent, maintains. And watching that McCain event [the Sturgis Harley rally]—vroom vroom—one got the sense it is perhaps beginning to pay attention to the campaign. I see it as the old America, and if and when it reasserts itself, the campaign will shift indeed, and in ways you can even see from 10,000 feet.

In other words, as usual they'll take it any way they can get it, lizard brain included. But America may not be quite as "old" or as reptilian this time as they need it to be. And wouldn't that be something?

Let the Good Times Roll

Shorter Peggy Noonan: "John McCain must unleash his inner asshole."

Quoting Mark Leibovich in the New York Times, Peg gives us a taste:
More...

"[McCain] volunteered that Brooke Buchanan, his spokeswoman who was seated nearby and rolling her eyes, 'has a lot of her money hidden in the Cayman Islands' and that she earned it by 'dealing drugs.' Previously, Mr. McCain had identified Ms. Buchanan as 'Pat Buchanan's illegitimate daughter,' 'bipolar,' 'a drunk,' 'someone with a lot of boyfriends,' and 'just out of Betty Ford.'"

[Peggy:] That's my boy. That's the McCain his friends love, McCain unplugged. The fall will be dead serious. At this point why not be himself, be human? Let him refind his inner rebel, the famous irreverent maverick, let the tiger out of the cage....

And so on. Then, out of the comic relief period will come a dramatic climax:

The race has a subtext, a historic encounter between the Old America and the New, and suddenly the Old America—those who are literally old, who married a guy who fought at the Chosin Reservoir, and those not so old who yet remember, and cherish, the special glories of the Old—will rise, and join in, and make themselves heard. They will not leave without a fight. And on that day John McCain will suddenly make it a race, as if moved by them and wanting to come through for them one last time. And then on down to the wire. And then . . .

"The race has a subtext," and vice versa. And then...and thennn... [drum roll, please] ... and theeeeennnnnnnnn... Barack Obama will trounce the old fool.

Mark it down, Peggy.

[Sorry for my recent scarcity, but I have a significant arm injury.]


Update: Christ Almighty, why do I bother? Just go read roy.