"A Nation Of Willie Lomans"
It's pretty rare that I read something I wish I'd written. The first part of this column qualifies.
posted by The Cunning Realist at Friday, April 25, 2008
AN OASIS IN A WORLD OF HACKS, HUSTLERS, AND HIRED SPIN
posted by The Cunning Realist at Friday, April 25, 2008
18 Comments:
I have to agree with you CR. It's odd to me that anything the Pegster would write might resonate with me, and there are parts of this article I could pick apart, but overall it's the most solid thing I have seen from her, ever.
...and I remember when she was still swooning over Commander Codpiece as being a RealMan™.
Not to worry. She is getting the hots of McCain. They all will.
Meanwhile the Treasury is about to send out $130 billion or so in checks. Sadly they have no money in the account. China, the ECB and assorted Arab princes are going to have to fund some huge auctions the next two weeks. If they do and rates don't back up too much then The Ministry of Truth will have tons of fodder to spew about how wonderful it is that the banks and the people are so flush with cash now. They are already spewing the tale of how higher rates the last two weeks prove the economy is recovering. No mention that the Treasury supply is outstripping the demand at these absurdly low rates.
I urge everyone to take their money in cash. Don't give it too the banks.
The first part is good--but wait, is she whining? I thought only liberals did that. And is she complaining about America? I thought only liberals did that.
The second part is pure crap. The Democrat hates America, blah, blah, blah. Heard it a thousand times. So tired. Let's face it, the GOP hates a lot more Americans and hates them a lot stronger.
Oh, and the whining that "the normal are not in control, that common sense is yesterday"? Number One Culprit? George W. Bush with his gangsters who openly mocked the "reality-based community." And let's remember how Peggy thought of him just 5 years ago:
"A steady hand on the helm in high seas, a knowledge of where we must go and why, a resolve to achieve safe harbor. More and more this presidency is feeling like a gift." Heckuva job, Noonie!
"Another thing: It reduces the status of that ancestral arbiter and leader of society, the middle-aged woman. In the new fairness, she is treated like everyone, without respect, like the loud ruffian and the vulgar girl on the phone. The middle-aged woman is the one spread-eagled over there in the delicate shell beneath the removed jacket, praying nothing on her body goes beep and makes people look."
Welcome to the club, Peg.
Interesting. It's like a sandwich, the first and last part pretty much hitting it on the button (yeah, I'd gladly rip Peggy a new one about the Reagan romanticism, but the point about Bush's detachment from the mess he spawned remains), while the middle is, to put it scientifically, horseshit.
Look for a lot more of this 'conservative apostasy' over the next six months. For the past 7 years Ms. Noonan and her fellow Media Village Idiots have been swooning over Dubya, the C-Plus Augustus, and insisting that anyone who didn't share their enthusiasm was at least "elitist" and at worst "unpatriotic". Now that the bills for all of Dubya's Big Adventures are coming due -- now that the Treasury's been stripped, our nation's joint resources plundered, and our international standing reduced to a dirty joke -- Noonan and the rest of Cheney's courtiers are desperate to find someone other than themselves to take the blame. "Look! That dark-complected Obama guy isn't *sufficiently* patriotic! And Bush -- Bush is a terrible, TERRIBLE disappointment! But that doesn't mean that all you moronic voters shouldn't vote for Old John McSame, er, McCain, Reagan's Natural Son(tm)!"
Horse pucky. Bush is a creature of the Old Nixonites' making, and Peggy Noonan was there to play cheerleader when Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Buchanan, and all the rest of Watergate's unindicted co-conspirators pawned King George II off on a hapless nation, with a little help from the Rehnquist/Scalia/Thomas SC and a lot of help from the Saudi Royal Family, I mean, Osama bin Forgotten. Her name will not be widely remembered, but when America's Twenty-First Roll of Shame is engraved, she will still appear on the wrong side of the ledger. And I only hope that she, and I, will survive long enough to see the reign of the current Oval Office occupant made as much a laughingstock here as it is in the rest of the world.
I'm usually in lock-step with you on most things, TCR, but I have to take issue with this one.
Noonan is from the fringe sycophancy who are always looking for the next white knight to save the republic. Bush was their man for quite a while-- too long really-- and now he is utterly indefensible. Ha! Many of us knew he was a baboon in 2000, 1999, heck, even 1989.
She spends the first few paragraphs whining about all the detritus of our police state which was allowed to happen under the obsequious and fearful advocacy of the right. Cheney was permitted to steal our nation right out from under our noses, and now his legions have the nerve to complain?!.
Nothing is even quote-worthy in Noonan's despicable piece. Her typewriter should be confiscated along with my antiperspirant and hair gel. The entire lot of these morons should be handed rifles and strapped to Humvees and forced to patrol the streets of Baghdad that they have allowed to decline into chaos. They can serve not as citizens of the USA but as employees of Blackwater of some other stateless brigade of nogoodniks.
My only question is why is she even being read anymore?
Actually, it's classic Noonan, because as usual she just can't grok what she's whining about, or follow through with the implications of what's right in front of her eyes.
For one thing, she's closer to the mark than she realizes with her "Willy Loman" remark. Loman was a saleman, a guy who's skill amounted to schmoozing people into parting with their money in exchange for -- it didn't matter. There are some unpleasant implications about market fundamentalism in there, but the Pegster's internal censor isn't gonna let her get within a light-year of those.
But the core of her piece is the standard stream-of-consciousness twaddle that made Noonan the right-wing Dowd. Does anyone outside of the WSJ op-ed room give a flying fuck about whether Obama wears a flag pin? I suspect that if they think about it at all, it's in this context: What kind of pinhead even worries about this horseshit? What is the problem with these media clowns? And then they go back to wondering how much the value of their dollars is going to dwindle....
I will grant Noonan one thing: She's goddam right that when a worm like her "wonders" about the patriotism of those of us who saw Bush as an empty suit, and then a menace, early on, we get angry. Because the ONLY thing that ought to be coming out of that no-talent bitch's mouth is, "I'm sorry, I'll shut up, and henceforth I will try to make amends for the damage that I helped create."
All this capped by Noonan's transparent attempt to distance herself from the inevitable result of her empty-headed crush on Daddy Ronnie. Bush betrayed the movement! Wah!! Look, Bush gave the right-wingers EXACTLY what they craved, and he didn't veer a millimeter from the Reagan program. It's way too late for Noonan to wash her hands of it now.
-- sglover
No shortage of irony here. Noonan herself, along with Malkin and Coulter, are the midwives and handmaidens of this militarized national security state which, in spite of the small government rhetoric of 'movement conservatives' has been a central feature of the agenda. Their standard response has been "if you don't have anything to hide why should you be bothered." These extraordinary moralists have unwittingly created that which they've fought against their entire political careers without imagining that their Frankenstein government might turn on them.
Indeed, 'unwitting' might describe the entire lot.
More schadenfruede, please.
Surprised by your approbation. She was party, a willing cheerleader, to bringing us to this point. Talk is cheap, execution is their failure. Agree with the sentiments of previous comments.
Now if you would have called her out ;-)
It basically seems like Ms. Noonan has gotten a taste of what a large swath of America has been dealing with for years. Now she can feel solidarity with the black kid who's constantly hassled by police because he "looks like a criminal". It doesn't feel good to be treated like a criminal, does it? It doesn't make you trust authority, does it?
As others have said, welcome to the new American police state. Unless most Americans realize that freedom is more important than security, it will only get worse. Or maybe if most Americans realize that the terrorist threat is mostly fabricated. But that is an even higher bar to clear.
Yes, Peggy, now you are potential threat, just like the rest of us. Though you don't realize it, this is what you have been asking for.
Actually I think there is a very crucial difference -- a huge chasm -- between TCR's sentiments and Peggy Noonan's sentiments.
(Usually people hate it when I put words in their mouths. So if this offends TCR, or Peggy Noonan, then you have my apologies in advance. If it offends anyone else, take a number.)
But even though Noonan's column doesn't specifically touch on this subject, I am going to make some conjectures -- based on the past history of TCR and of Noonan:
TCR is frustrated with the random airline security because it's inefficient and ineffective -- most past bombings and hijackings were accomplished by either real or fake airport employees, and even when considering passengers, the authorities have better luck when they're permitted to pursue certain non-racial markers, e.g. "paid with cash at last minute" or "dressed with hat/sunglasses etc. to conceal identity".
Peggy Noonan, on the other hand, is frustrated with random searches because why the hell don't we just lock up every male with swarthy skin who is young-to-middle-aged and then all us real Americans will be safe and live happily ever after. And since we have to lock 'em up anyway, why not take the opportunity to behead them and then convert them to Christianity?
Oh, the aching conservative heart!
Perhaps if conservatives didn't perpetuate nostalgia for an America that never existed, perhaps Peggy wouldn't feel so disappointed about the here and now at Gate 14.
"He [Barack Obama] has been tagged as a snooty lefty, as the glamorous, ambivalent candidate from Men's Vogue, the candidate who loves America because of the great progress it has made in terms of racial fairness. Fine, good. But has he ever gotten misty-eyed over . . . the Wright Brothers and what kind of country allowed them to go off on their own and change everything? How about D-Day, or George Washington, or Henry Ford, or the losers and brigands who flocked to Sutter's Mill, who pushed their way west because there was gold in them thar hills? There's gold in that history.
John McCain carries it in his bones. Mr. McCain learned it in school, in the Naval Academy, and, literally, at grandpa's knee. Mrs. Clinton learned at least its importance in her long slog through Arkansas, circa 1977-92."
Obama's vision of America is not one given to illusions; his unique status of African-American-American frustrates any attempt at self-deception regarding the history of this great country. Obama realizes that America's greatness is her ability to tell the story of human endeavor in all its unsavory accuracy, a story that includes oppression as well as privilege, imprisonment as well as liberty, inequality as well as social justice.
Does John McCain get misty-eyed when confronted with the tortured anguish of the Negro spiritual, or when reading the dissenting opinion of Plessy vs. Ferguson?
The conservative heart aches for the same reason the conservative mind finds Obama's patiotism so "ambivalent" - because they choose to make it so
replace "snooty" with the word "uppity" and you get where Peggy's going with this.
Of course she was writing articles like this one in 2005. Bush is a bit too unpopular to touch now so...why not make our paychecks bashing Bush now. LOL...please, no more links to Noonan articles...I beg of you.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110006252
Both seemed eager not to agree with Ted Kennedy's recent "Iraq is Vietnam" statements, which more and more seem not just stupid but scandalously so. Absent endorsing radical defeatism, however, Mr. Reid and Ms. Pelosi had little to say. They made Important Sounds. Neither seemed sincere or serious. The president seemed both.
Does she really think that the typical airline passenger at Gate 14 is demographically a cross section of America (Perhaps that was the gate heading for Cabo for spring break)? Has she ever even been to a Greyhound Bus station to see how those Americans live, and what they are concerned about? I kind of doubt she thinks anyone making less than her what - ~ $1M/year - can count as a real American, since everyone she knows thinks the same thing. Pretty language does not a logical argument make, although it apparently fools lots of people. (Brian Williams was similarly so smitten with Ms. Noonan's soaring poetry that he kind of forgot to think about whether any of it made sense, or whether anything she does professionally is ever anything other than political.)
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