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Tuesday, April 29, 2008 12:00 AM

Brian Williams nominates Peggy Noonan for a Pulitzer Prize

The WSJ column hailed by the NBC anchor as "a splendid piece of journalism" has to be read to be believed.

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  • Tuesday, April 29, 2008 11:42 AM

    @Reilly

    sitting in church ... you might be thinking about playing the ponies or how that woman in the third pew would look with her dress pulled up over her head or what a droning bore the pastor is

    Listen, I only go to church once every twenty years or so. It isn't polite for you to sit there in the row behind me reading my mind.

    Seriously, is there any episode (this one is still an intro, it's been a commercial and a trailer, but I suspect it's about to blossom into an episode and maybe a mini-series) that reveals more fully how manufactured is the 'suspicion' and 'outrage' ordinary people allegedly feel about Obama, with whom they 'cannot connect', than this whole thing about whether he does or does not sufficiently love America?

    I think this one is top of the charts, even beyond all the other silliness about his name, his alleged madrassah education, flag pins, bowling scores and Wright, because either a) those have insubstantive novelty value, which does play in a news cycle, or b) they aren't manufactured by the media, only passed on slavishly upon receipt from their overlords. Obama does or doesn't love America enough? Are you serious?

    If Noonan actually talked to some of those fine folk at Gate 14, representative or no, she would probably find quite a few who, at the moment, do not sufficiently love America either, at least insofar as the test is written by her. There are a lot of people who are pissed off, for a dizzying array of reasons; in fact, anyone who isn't pissed off is not paying attention.

    Those people ... like a lot of us ... would probably be very receptive to a message that acknowledged that they aren't just imagining things, that they might have reasons to be pissed off and those reasons are not things that are occuring for the first time in our history; it's about the least likely time in human memory that people are going to be reaching for their LovesUsSomeAmerica meters and taking the speaker's stats.

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