Letters to the Editor
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Noonan's critique
Does the current President match any of her criteria?
As for Noonan herself, she makes Chris Matthews seem like a Rhodes scholar. How has someone so filled with empty rhetoric gone so far in life?
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The Revenge of Ted Knight
The chattering class do okay when they merely have to read the news, but when they veer off into providing analysis and opinion their inane and insipid callowness is exposed. They are talking heads, albiet empty ones.
They were chosen because they were telegenic, not for their intelligence. They have no apparent knowledge of history or life outside the beltway. Everything they encounter they try to force into predetermined narratives.
It’s the ascendancy of the Ted Knight school of journalism.
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I'm convinced
That in the same manner that humans are programed to learn their natice language at age 2, and aquire their religious convictions at age seven, they aquire their many of their social strategies at around age 12.
This also goes for those among us who DON"T resort to calling candidates faggots or needling our opponents as those who would provide terrorists "therapy and understanding".
The Jr High school tactics are stuck to because unfortunately they are effective. Pointing out that the people who engage in such tactics share the same maturity level as Hannah Montana fans is fortunately ALSO effective.
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Baby Doll Drivel
Noonan has always made my skin crawl...and watching her on television is worse than merely reading her words on paper, as, in speaking, she compounds the reflexive inanity of her commentary with a breathy, overly earnest, baby-doll delivery that I imagine she feels conveys deep conviction, but which reveals her to be a transparently phony simpleton.
James Wolcott does a conclusively devastating takedown of Noonan in his ATTACK POODLES: And Other Media Mutants.
Pegs...a tip...if you're going to pretend to be anything other than the cynical propagandist you are, you've gotta be a better actor...and smarter.
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for the love of...
Why in hell do folks still listen to or read the writings of these people? I think they're scared of Edwards quite frankly. He has broad appeal with his economic message and the spell over the lemmings in the Republican party is breaking (see Huckster). I think it is possible that if Edwards makes the general his message becomes a mass movement on his way to the WH. That scares the hell out of vapid soulless folks like Noonan. Eeek! People with pitchforks! Oh, and I love how they all talk about his hair and his mansion when they tell us he is inauthentic with his "Two Americas" message. Well all the other candidates are rich too and they aren't talking about these issues! So give me Edwards!
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Robert1014:
Noonan has always made my skin crawl...and watching her on television is worse than merely reading her words on paper, as, in speaking, she compounds the reflexive inanity of her commentary with a breathy, overly earnest, baby-doll delivery that I imagine she feels conveys deep conviction, but which reveals her to be a transparently phony simpleton.
She also, as much as anyone this side of David Brooks and David Broder, oozes that most repulsive pundit belief: that as she spits out her media-group-think idiocies, she is the Representative for the Average Person, the Common Man, the Real American, so in tune to what "they" want and think that she can just project her own biases and moronic conclusions onto them and assert that it's what "they" believe, for no reason other than that she believes it.
That's what leads to stuff like this, from her column in 2004:
Mr. Bush is the triumph of the seemingly average American man. He's normal. He thinks in a sort of common-sense way. He speaks the language of business and sports and politics. You know him. He's not exotic. But if there’s a fire on the block, he’ll run out and help. He’ll help direct the rig to the right house and count the kids coming out and say, 'Where's Sally?'
He's responsible. He’s not an intellectual. Intellectuals start all the trouble in the world. And then when the fire comes they say, 'I warned Joe about that furnace.' And, 'Does Joe have children?’ And ‘I saw a fire once' ...
Bush ain't that guy. Republicans love the guy who ain't that guy. Americans love the guy who ain't that guy.
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High Noonan
Noonan is of course as unserious as anyone could be. But she is also a disgrace. This was established to my content with her outrageous column in the aftermath of the killing of U.S. contractors in Fallujah.
Peggy's message to Fallujah was as follows:
We know what the men and boys who did the atrocity of Fallujah look like; they posed for the cameras. We know exactly what they did--again, the cameras. We know they massed on a bridge and raised their guns triumphantly. It's all there on film. It would be good not only for elemental justice but for Iraq and its future if a large force of coalition troops led by U.S. Marines would go into Fallujah, find the young men, arrest them or kill them, and, to make sure the point isn't lost on them, blow up the bridge.
The atrocity she referred to was not the murder of the American "contractors", but the dismemberment and desecration of the corpses. The attackers had long since fled, according to all reports, leaving a crowd of what has been referred to in press accounts as "townspeople" or "residents" who proceeded to dismember and set fire to the corpses.
There are two things that were striking about Noonan's "Message to Fallujah." First, she refers to the townspeople as being armed - she claims to have seen it on film. However, none of the photographs I've viewed includes a single armed Iraqi among the crowd. The WSJ's own news coverage of the event indicates that these were unarmed civilians:
"Residents in Fallujah said insurgents attacked the contractors with small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. After the attack, a jubilant crowd of civilians, none of whom appeared to be armed, gathered to celebrate, dragging the bodies through the street and hanging two of them from the bridge. Many of those in the crowd were excited young boys who shouted slogans in front of television cameras."
Presumably, Noonan felt it necessary to put guns in the hands of these people so that she could advocate killing them. DEven if Noonan could find a gun somewhere in the films or photos of this event, the vast, vast majority of these people were unquestionably unarmed civilians. Yet Noonan believes we should "arrest them or kill them" for desecrating four American corpses.
Peggy Noonan is a disgrace.