The reaction to this will be fun to watch:
“The elites hate her.” The elites made her. It was the elites of the party, the McCain campaign and the conservative media that picked her and pushed her. The base barely knew who she was. It was the elites, from party operatives to public intellectuals, who advanced her and attacked those who said she lacked heft. She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon.
“She makes the Republican Party look inclusive.” She makes the party look stupid, a party of the easily manipulated.
“She shows our ingenuous interest in all classes.” She shows your cynicism.
“Now she can prepare herself for higher office by studying up, reading in, boning up on the issues.” Mrs. Palin’s supporters have been ordering her to spend the next two years reflecting and pondering. But she is a ponder-free zone. She can memorize the names of the presidents of Pakistan, but she is not going to be able to know how to think about Pakistan. Why do her supporters not see this? Maybe they think “not thoughtful” is a working-class trope!
“The media did her in.” Her lack of any appropriate modesty did her in. Actually, it’s arguable that membership in the self-esteem generation harmed her. For 30 years the self-esteem movement told the young they’re perfect in every way. It’s yielding something new in history: an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy.
Just walk on by, Peggy. Walk on by.
4tehlulz
Really Peggy? Perhaps you should share how this would happen, preferably with the FBI.
OriGuy
Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter is a closet RINO! Also!
/Palinista
beltane
“No proper sense of inadequacy” is the most unintentionally funny thing I’ve read in ages. Maybe we need inadequacy training in our schools; Palin and Bush would have failed that, too.
margarita
So it was McCain what confected this bonbon, but … Kids These Days!
Nevermind, nothing to see here; just keep walking.
4tehlulz
@beltane: If you fail at failing, does that make you a success or the ultimate failure?
MattF
Palin was the modern Republican establishment’s desperate attempt at mass politics. When you’ve got a couple of unpopular wars, when you’re BFFs with Wall Street, when you’ve tried to destroy Social Security, when you’ve inherited the full measure of Southern racism, chauvinism, and fundamentalism– it’s time for a little Real American ™ know-how.
ricky
While awaiting the aftershocks to produce winger treasures, we must feast on nourishing nuggets of Noonan.
Before anyone could pick up the obscure bloggers who questioned the parentage of her youngest child, Palin was parading around the pregnancy of her oldest daughter to prove the youngest was indeed hers. Neither the left or the press attacked any of her children to speak of during the campaign.
The Raven
This, changing two pronouns, describes Hitler. I don’t think she’s stupid, the way W. Bush wasn’t stupid. She’s just narrow. Krawk!
General Winfield Stuck
Frankenpalin lives. Bwaa haa haa!
maya
I don’t think he is eligible to be President.
KC
Okay, I hate to give Nooners any credit, but this line is supremely quotable:
“no proper sense of inadequacy”
That applies to soooooooo many people holding public office.
geg6
Ruh-roh. Nooners is goin’ rogue.
Aaron S. Veenstra
“Ingenuous”? Really? “Genuine” wasn’t good enough?
bhagamu
Hypocrite… Noonan criticizing another generation for having no “proper sense of inadequacy”.
…
and thinking about it, wtf does a proper sense of inadequacy entail, does she mean humility or what
blogenfreude
Peggy needs to admit that she helped St. Ronnie lay the groundwork for this shit. Reagan, among other things, made up stories about having liberated a concentration camp.
linda
let us savor…..
couldn’t resist nooner’s earlier admonition to her readers:
“The Democrats have lost their leader in the Senate, Tom Daschle. I do not know what the Democratic Party spent, in toto, on the 2004 election, but what they seem to have gotten for it is Barack Obama. Let us savor. “
patrick
She’s authentically ignorant.
joe from Lowell
I don’t like it when Republicans demonstrate brains and objectivity, like Noonan does here.
A party like that has a chance of winning something in the next decade or two.
MoeLarryAndJesus
I appreciate parts of Noonan’s column, but I won’t forget that it’s not too long ago that she was penning odes to Dumbya’s testicles. Literally, his testicles.
Her notion of what “the best” is can’t be trusted, and she should acknowledge that.
Thomas Levenson
Truly, for someone whose resume consists of having wordsmithed the phrase “a thousand points of light,” Peggy has a grasp of what should underpin a proper sense of inadequacy.
ricky
Slurping more Nooonan noodle soup:
Pundits who psychoanalize individual politicians are bad enough. Spare me the pundits masquerading as Psychiatrist General who can analyze an entire generation.
Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we had a Self Hatred Movement that produced a whole generation of self doubters? It must be possible if the opposite can be true.
Cat Lady
More careful sowers of discord, please.
Oh, and Peggy, I can see into your sinuses from here.
Brian J
You really have to love how, no matter what happens, no matter what Palin says or does, no matter her ideological comrades say or do, it’s somehow the fault of liberals. No matter how deep into their anal cavities they have to find some sort of excuse for her, they manage to do it.
It’s arguable that her membership in the self-esteem generation did her in? Well, I guess it is, in the same way that it’s arguable that Peggy Noonan’s pretty face, usually less repulsive demeanor (at least compared to similar blond trolls like Ingraham and Coulter), and inane commentary made her a perfect fit for a conservative opinion slot for all these years.
I’d like Noonan to consider just one alternative: it’s mostly her fault, but it’s also your party’s fault. She came into the spotlight as a bellicose ignoramus and, instead of being cast aside as she stumbled, she was made into a martyr by a group of similarly shallow, nasty, lightweight thinkers whose inability to recognize any opposing viewpoints and whose false sense of victimization made the American people rather bluntly tell them to sit the next few years on the sidelines. Your thoughts, Peggy?
Face
Her hotmail.com account just became her hatemail.com account.
Zippity
I just went and read some of the comments on her piece. I really cannot understand the people who can listen to her talk, and come away thinking that she’s intellegent. There are all kinds of people (come to think of it, they were all men) stating how intellegent they were, and how they knew that Sarah would run and win the presidency in 2012. These are the same people that listen to President Obama and come away convinced that he is an idiot. Is there some kind of filter that these guys have imbedded that makes things mean the opposite of what they really are?
I know, reality has a liberal bias, right?
NonyNony
@bhagamu:
A sense of inadequacy means knowing your limitations – knowing when you’ve reached the point where you don’t actually know what you’re doing and taking a step back.
As far as blaming that on the “self-esteem movement” – that’s a load of crap. Humanity has long been full of idiots who don’t know that they don’t understand crap. It’s one of our defining traits. I think Plato or one of the other Greek philosophers complained about it. The only reason Nooners is picking on Palin over this is because she’s a “commoner” who doesn’t understand her own limitations – Nooners would NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS have ever written something like this about George W Bush who has the EXACT same character trait as Palin of not knowing when he doesn’t know shit about something.
On the Republican side of the aisle there’s a rampant bit of classism regarding Palin – folks who would never dream in a million years of criticizing the scion of a wealthy family for being an idiot are perfectly willing to heap scorn on Palin. If she were the third generation daughter of a rich aristocratic family they wouldn’t dare to say this shit they say about her even if it were equally true. It’s just that she’s white trash who doesn’t know here place and has risen above her station that they feel like they can criticize her. Classist bastards – Noonan is one of the worst. The fact that I agree with Noonan about Palin being a moron doesn’t make Noonan’s obvious classist biases any better.
patrick
Man, the comments over there are brimming with win.
Also.
The Moar You Know
For the first and likely last time, Peggy Noonan has got something entirely right.
geg6
Much as I hate to do it, I have to stick up for ol’ Nooners on the “proper sense of inadequacy” quote. Maybe I’m getting old and cranky, but she’s absolutely right. The whole self-esteem movement stuff is a bunch of crap and it’s logical conclusion is people like Palin, who for no discernible reason believe that they are entitled simply because they are the “special” people that they are. I never once in my life thought I was special and never, while growing up, did anyone tell me that I was. Just the opposite, in fact. Any time I began to think a bit too much of myself, my parents and siblings shot me down faster than anything. It is because of that that I always have worked hard, never accepted “good enough” in place of excellence, and boned up on things I don’t know in order to discuss them intelligently. I find it appalling when students with 2.0 GPAs walk into my office demanding to know why they didn’t get a scholarship. Or wanna-be athletes with little talent and not enough work ethic to come to practice complain to the chancellor because the basketball coach won’t let them have playing time. Palin is just like them and for the same reason. They all have some sort of inflated idea that they are special simply by existing.
Sorry, but neither they nor Palin are special. They are the lowest common denominator, underachievers, and willfully ignorant with giant, undeserved sense of entitlement. And it is a huge problem among young people. It makes me fear for them, especially in this economic climate. And want to imprison the entire self-esteem industry and their parents for child abuse.
Brian J
It’s much easier to simply call the other side stupid rather than address the core values behind their arguments. It’s also easy to agree with someone who shares your ideological values, even if she expresses them in a haphazard, incoherent way, especially if she has a pretty face.
cleek
i really love that phrase. it sounds like it could be a line from a Smiths song.
neill
Jeebus Fookin’ Kerrist!
I wonder if High Noon, took a big swill a gin, closed her eyes and pushed “Send”
but as for the “self-esteem generation” or whatever — oh, puhl-ease! there are plenty of old geezer assholes who make St Sarah look like Big Mama Teresa in comparison to their very own special narcissism…
ricky
Bannoonan nut bread, anyone?
a) For all Noonan knows Palin could have read the complete works of Ayn Rand nand hung on every word of Michelle Malkin’s blog.
b) When the reaction to her comments to K. Couric on this topic came in, neither Palin nor what passes for the Republican intellectual elite showed a lack of concern at the time, they tried to act as if the fact the question was asked was a sign of media bias at best and disrespect for Palin at worst.
Molly
There are times, as she said, “bon-bons,” where I unexpectedly nod when I read Peggy Noonan.
I also have had the horrible, horrible sensation of agreeing with George Will occasionally during the campaign.
It’s always a pleasant surprise. Soon negated, but a pleasant surprise.
And I can honestly say I have never once been able to agree with Bill Bennett on anything.
jrg
The WSJ comments are hilarious. Every comment questioning Palin’s abilities (after she lost the election and resigned as Governor) are met with cries of “ACORN”! Completely. Fucking. Clueless.
Sly
I like this. Not only does it eschew any responsibility the conservative movement has had in dumbing-down a generation of our local, regional, and national discourse, it places that responsibility on people like Mr. Rogers.
August J. Pollak
Shorter Noonan: There is but one Reagan and I am His prophet.
ellaesther
I often enjoy Peggy Noonan, and I liked this. She thinks, and she writes so well. Of course she sometimes over-reaches — people often do, especially if they’re trying to express themselves daily — and I often don’t agree with the conclusions she draws about the world. I am, after all, a flaming liberal.
However, I have two bones to pick with this, which are bones that I often find I have to pick with Noonan (and other writers, no doubt me included): In amidst some good thinking and honest criticism and nice writing — laziness! Lazy ass thinking and leaning on cultural tropes because they move the sentence forward.
To wit, #1: “an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy.” Really? All of them? The entire kit-n-kaboodle? I keep reading this notion and honest to God, I don’t know what they’re talking about. I imagine that there are some people who were told that they were perfect all the time, and that some of them believed it. But that has always been so, and I’d like to start seeing some rigorous social science in support of this particular “kids these days!” trope, or I’d like people to shut up. (I’m 44, by the way, I have a right to shake my cane at people).
and #2: “The world is a dangerous place. It has never been more so, or more complicated, more straining of the reasoning powers….” Really? Never more dangerous, complicated, or “straining of the reasoning powers…”? Not when we stood on the brink of mutual nuclear annihilation with the Soviet Union? Not when Hitler was cutting Europe into pieces? Not during the Black Plague? Not when the Mongols swept out of Central Asia and slaughtered millions upon millions of people, literally decimating the population of places like Persia for centuries thereafter?
Sigh. Don’t mind me, I’ll be at my desk, not making nearly as much money as Peggy Noonan, or having any impact on the world. And feeling bitter, probably.
Perry Como
Pullin’ a Palin
ricky
geg6 @ 29
That’s the trouble with today’s blog commenters! In my generation we carefully place the carbon paper behind the main sheet…
mistermix
@The Moar You Know:
Bullshit.
This “self-esteem movement ruined our kids” crap is just another replay of “back in my day we walked to school six miles in a blizzard, and it was uphill both ways”.
I have teenage daughter, and she and her friends are challenged continuously to excel in school, sports and at home. They’re doing way more than I ever did at their age, and they’re also more respectful and polite with each other than my peers were. They’re going to graduate from high school smarter, harder-working and more pleasant than the last generation — and they had better, considering the fucked-up USA that they’re inheriting.
truculentandunreliable
This is lovely:
Is Nooners coming to the realization that Sarah Palin is the culmination of the strategy (or should I say “Southern Strategy”?) that the Republican party has pursued for the last 40 or so years?
Baby steps, Noons. You don’t want to have an aneurysm when the full weight of what you’ve been participating in hits you.
Bill In OH
I see what she did there. I guess we’re all just youngsters to Nooners. I’m the same age as Palin and I’m in no way part of the “self-esteem generation”. We still had grades, competitions, winners and losers and all the other stuff that was supposed to ruin our little psyches while I was in school. Unless Wasilla (or whatever, too lazy to look it up) was radically different from my upper middle class school system, which seems unlikely, she’s not part of it either. I remember starting to hear about that trend from my friends who were teachers, starting after college.
However one may feel about school policies designed to promote the self-esteem of students (and I’m not necessarily a fan), it has absolutely nothing to do with the train wreck that is Sarah Palin. Nice try Peg, but the Repubs have no one to blame but themselves for that mess.
gnomedad
@geg6:
As I’ve proposed before, this should be described as “going Cole”.
/meme whoring
inkadu
Jesus H Christ, I go to read Peggy Noonan’s article and there, jumping out at me, is the list of top rated WSJ articles. Number One on the list:
By… wait for it… Karl Rove.
Fuck this. No more blogging for a while. I am opening a bottle of wine and watching the health care hearings.
Max Peck
@Thomas Levenson:
I love ‘thousand points of light’. It’s easily switched to ‘thousand points of distraction (or dismissal depending on…). Which is of course the true strategy.
Wasn’t Nooners caught on tape back during the campaign saying how dumb Palin is?
Brian J
@geg6:
I can understand where you’re coming from, but I don’t think the idea behind giving people some hope and some positive reinforcement in the form of better self-esteem is worthless. In fact, I’d say there’s a lot to be gained from it, as long as it’s counteracted by not allowing them to skate by when they don’t deserve it. Like everything, the key is balance.
In Palin’s case, no balance was provided during her political career, at least not by her party when she came on the national scene.
Tsulagi
British understatement.
Wonder if the quitter is a Promise Keeper like Ensign and Sanford. Would fit.
Molly
I rarely read the comments to an article when a Repub goes rogue. They’re disgusting.
Having read them for Peggy’s article, I am both sickened and have a deep belief that should these idiots be the ones in charge of the Republican party, we don’t have to worry about them taking over again.
truculentandunreliable
They are all nuts over there, by the way. I’m sure everyone knew that, though.
I still cannot get over the fact that they think that McCain lost because he “wasn’t conservative enough.” These “real Americans” have absolutely no understanding of what Americans actually think.
Max Peck
Maybe she finally got around to watching Fight Club…
Full quote..
Brick Oven Bill
Peggy Noonan is jealous.
Brian J
Something tells me there are two pretty different audiences for the news pages of the paper and for the editorial page. I have a hard time believing that the readership of The Journal, which represents the wealthiest and/or most elite demographic this country has to offer, believes the majority of the garbage that’s on it. Some of it, sure, because it’s not all bad, but there’s enough nonsense to make you spit out your coffee each morning.
NickM
This line will provoke a lot of fireworks; this is an asset, not a liability, with the current GOP.
ricky
You too can cook like Noonan. Show your self esteem
by adding your own ingredients, like this:
Ronald Reagan’s death gives Republicans a new opportunity to see him plain—to review the bidding, see his strengths, acknowledge his limits, and let go of his myth. It is an opportunity they should take. They mean to rebuild a great party. They need to do it on solid ground.
JK
Congrats to Noonan for her column on Palin, but don’t forget this is the same Noonan who wrote the following passage questioning Obama’s patriotism
h/t Two Top Columnists Question Obama’s DNA and “Full-blooded” Americanism http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-mitchell/two-top-columnists-questi_b_102308.html
forked tongue
The win/fail ratio in this piece is about 80/20, possibly a career high for Dolphins. But sometime I’d like to ask her, given her remark here that GWB “fractured” the Republican party, and her remark on an earlier occasion that he’d “broken” it, and given her much-self-ballyhooed hiatus from column-writing in ’96 to help with the Bush campaign, whether she considers herself to have contributed to the fracturing and breaking of the Republican party.
colleeniem
Yes, can I get an Amen from the peanut gallery pushing back on the “self-esteem” meme? First of all, as a person not quite 30 (6 mos tho, yikes!) I am under no delusion, as a child of the 80’s, that I’m the most super-specialist ever. I know I got where I am by some hard work, some innate talent, and some luck, and I am loathe to speculate how much credit should be apportioned to each. People figure out if there are winners and losers, I’m pretty sure high school sees to that. No amount of hand-holding/trophy giving can negate it.
So yeah, Peggy “Walk on by” Noonington wants to say that some backwoods, lying, evita peron wanna-be is all the evidence one needs to prove that several generations are doomed to their selfish fate.
By the by, her generation is not the one that came out in droves to vote actively for more collective action–mine is.
Suck it, Peggy.
ricky
And BOB is today channelling Ann Coulter. Wait for Ann to attack Peggy’s looks.
Michael
Y’know, I’ve never pictured Nooners as a Scotch Neat binger until now.
This article has all kinds of drunken “oh fuck it, I’ll click on ‘send'” written all over it.
forked tongue
Oh, and BTW, if you ever read a piece like this and start to get anxious that maybe Republicans are beginning to wise up, just go read the comments. Instant relief!
JGabriel
beltane:
Yeah, as soon as I saw that line I thought, “Oh, Peggy, don’t you know that’ll just goad Palin on?”
.
lotus
Peggy saith, “The era we face, that is soon upon us, will require a great deal from our leaders. They had better be sturdy. They will have to be gifted. There will be many who cannot, and should not, make the cut. Now is the time to look for those who can. … We are going to need the best.”
Ooogie boogie, looking at y’all’s track record and stable, Peg, you gotcha a real recruitment problem.
Morbo
“The most qualified? No. I think they went for the–excuse me–political bullshit about narratives.”
forked tongue
Here’s how one of the commentators–who brags about his degrees from the “Ivies” and being in Mensa–responds to this:
gnomedad
@JK:
That’s exactly it; there is a level of self-deception that even Peggy Noonan cannot sustain. The rest of the Goopers are more, um, adaptable.
DBrown
@Brian J: You think?
Zandar
Once again, Peggy Noonan accusing Sarah Palin of being a vapid anti-intellectual know-nothing is very much like Rush Limbaugh accusing Jupiter of being a giant bloated ball of gas.
inkadu
For those who enjoyed Kucinich’s grilling of Dr. Gratzer during the health care hearings, the link for the whole thing, as noted, previously, is here on CPSAN.
Gratzer starts at 37:30.
gnomedad
@Michael:
lolz, thanks for that image; it made my day.
Brick Oven Bill
Peggy still hasn’t recovered from going to that lunch with the President and then writing positive articles about him. This will damage her reputation going forward, and the cranky attitude seems to reflect an awareness of this situation.
Despite the seemingly heterosexual nature of these two women, this could be a very good cat fight. Snarl.
I would not put Ann Coulter in Sarah’s corner. It is far more likely that Sarah will pick Michelle Malkin.
gnomedad
@Zandar:
Q. What the difference between Rush Limbaugh and the Hindenberg?
A. One is a giant, flaming, Nazi gasbag, and the other is a dirigible.
/ oldie but goodie
El Cid
It’s the right wing which hates the actual working class and imagines that the more stupid, snotty, vapid, proudly ignorant, incompetent, and corrupt one is, the more ‘working class’ one is.
kid bitzer
noonan gets no more credit than a blind squirrel here.
she sold us reagan and both bushes. she glorified w’s lack of intellect. the elites made palin? yeah: noonan made palin.
fact is, palin is just reagan with an up-do.
oh, wait–reagan had an up-do. also.
JK
OT
Obama isn’t religious enough for Bill O’Reilly
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/09/bill-oreilly-slams-obamas_n_229179.html
Excerpt from O’Reilly’s Talking Points: The USA has become the strongest nation on earth largely because of its Judeo-Christian traditions. Someone remind Obama.
binzinerator
Hey Peggy whaddaya mean ‘look’? The people in your party are stupid and easily manipulated.
And Nooners did a fair amount of that manipulating herself, and she counted on her party’s base being too stupid to catch on.
Nooners helped make the republican party into what it is today. Stupid and easily manipulated was a feature, not a bug.
Joshua Norton
You mean that the Twitter Quitter is really a Paris Hilton (cough) publicity whore (cough) Wolverine instead of a Ronald Reagan Wolverine?
Gee. I could have told you that 30 seconds after the McCain crew decided to name her as their Veep.
I’m just saying….
JGabriel
Tsulagi:
Not possible. Promise Keepers is a No Girls Allowed zone.
.
ricky
Lotus @ 62
I was savoring that quote as the main course. Simple. Declarative. Sentences. Make. Reaganesque. Rhetoric.
Using complex, compound sentences, on the other hand,
makes difficult reading for geezers used to the teleprompter.
I myself am savoring the salavation that will be brought by those sturdy, gifted leaders who will save us from the faint glimmers of actual secessionist movements being fanned in the open by, say, the longest serving Republican Governor in the nation whose reelection is backed by Sarah Palin.
qwerty42
@Brick Oven Bill: BOB: OT, but — whatever happened to the rattlesnake in the garage?
Cyrus
So close, yet so far away…
Bad news, Noonan: it’s not just Palin, and it’s not just a look.
Comrade Jake
I love this comment:
I mean, really? Palin can’t lie effortlessly? We’re talking about the Governor of Alaska, right? The lady who was McCain’s VP candidate? Because I’m pretty sure the ONLY thing she does is lie effortlessly.
Brick Oven Bill
As a little league player, I was a good pitcher. On the night of the rattlesnake, I wound up with a AAA battery and got him with a direct broadside shot that made a big ‘thud’. The snake hissed at that battery for an hour, went away, and hasn’t been back. Thanks for asking qwerty42.
Back on topic, Peggy very likely has a crush on Todd.
Ash
I wish The Noonster would walk right by and off a cliff. Her schtick is exhausting.
@Comrade Jake:
Yeah, she lies A LOT, however, effective liars don’t generally get caught. And Palin has been caught in basically every lie she’s ever told.
Molly
@Brick Oven Bill:
BOB, you know, I think I’d miss you if the snake had won the battle. In some odd, twisted way, you’re part of the landscape here.
Punchy
@patrick: Wow, aint this the truth. More nuts and loose lips than a gay porn video.
I even learned a new “slam”: ObamACORN. How……uh…clever.
ricky
Ash, surely you are not suggesting Pointe du Hoc?
JK
Weekly Standard douchebag Matthew Continetti gives Sarah Palin a Big, Wet, Sloppy Kiss
http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/708gpxia.asp?pg=1
Continetti’s book The Persecution of Sarah Palin will be published by Penguin Sentinel in 2010.
Brick Oven Bill
That was very nice of you to say Molly. I appreciate the posting privileges and enjoy the debate. Here is to hoping that the Sarah-Peggy confrontation will be far less civil that our Balloon Juice discussions.
gex
@ricky: Amen, brother! How can the young people these days both be shiftless, lazy, slacker/losers and over-confident ambitious strivers? It doesn’t matter. The problem is always the kids these days.
IndieTarheel
@JK: And THAT is why Nooners can gnaw on a pot full of d*cks. She’s only castigating Palin because recognizing her as the buffoon she clearly is has now become sport for the pundit class (and a national IQ test for the electorate).
Joshua Norton
Yes, but sometimes she may be unaware that she’s lying. She’s just using magical thinking based on the fantasy movie about her life that’s playing in her head.
Lying to cover your ass is one thing. People who convince themselves to believe their own lies are just plain bat shit crazy.
ellaesther
@Cyrus: Well, yes, there is that! Also.
Ah, to have a functioning opposition party. A girl can dream….
KG
@81: is it really a lie if you believe it to be true? I’m thinking Palin, out of sheer ignorance and/or stupidity, believes that what she says is true.
Demo Woman
Real Americans believe Sarah.
The Moar You Know
Took a trip over to the WSJ comments section. That is some feces-throwing monkey action over there.
@mistermix: I didn’t mean kids the age of yours. That generation, the one after mine, is incredibly savvy. I meant Palin’s/mine. I had nothing but that self-actualization “everyone’s a winner” crap thrown at me through my entire elementary/junior high/high school/college tenure, and most of my peers turned out just like the Wasallia idiot; stupid as fuck while thinking they’re some of the best and brightest EVAR.
gex
This might make sense if the party who scoffs at the idea of trying to give kids self esteem wasn’t also the party that has spent the same last 30 years decrying elitism, highly educated, qualified expertise in the areas of governing and policy. But if you promote the idea that “nice guy to have a beer with” as a reasonable measure of a president, I’d say you have to accept some responsibility for the Palin phenomenon.
celticdragon
I think it is a swipe at schools that hand out trophies for 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th place, etc.
The current meme of kids who get out of college and demand a mid level job because they have been told for years that they are special has some basis in fact, although Palin is too old to be in that actual group. Peggy Noonan is not the first person to point out that Sarah has a vastly overinflated ego and sense of accomplishment based on nothing remotely tangible.
I get a kick out of this reply to a Wall Street piece on “trophy” Millennials
http://www.cnbc.com/id/27358685?__source=RSS*tag*&par=RSS
NickM
gex @ 96
Great point.
Comrade Jake
I’m sure some of the rest of you goofballs (and I use that term affectionately) caught this, but Sully posted a link to a bloggingheads between Lowry and Brink Lindsey on Palin.
Lindsey points out that righties think Palin is great because the left finds her despicable. The logic fail is that they never considered the possibility that she might actually be despicable. The rant is kind of awesome.
Joshua Norton
Geez. That just about describes the entire lower tier working class base of the Repug party. Rummaging through the marked-down ham bin at Walmart while dreaming about how they’re going to order their servants around when their investment in Scratchers finally pays off.
Why else would a $12,000 a year drone actually worry about “death tax” and the tax rate for the richest 1%?
Punchy
So the Democratic party is a vagina?
lotus
Here we go: This is their problem in one beeyootiful image.
celticdragon
Reagan had actual time on office and some record of accomplishments before running for President. Whether you like him or not (and I did), he actually did things, and he wasn’t a pathological liar. (All Presidents lie about something, and Reagan just looked sad and old when Iran/contra blew up…Palin would have smirked and used it to attack teh gays or bloggers, etc)
Reagan actually had an ability to lead, and other people went with him. On the whole, I think we were far better off than had we stuck with the ineffectual Carter. That being said…Palin is no Reagan. Smarmy, ignorant, incurious, vindictive…I could go on. The worst parts of W, but smoking crack at the same time.
lawnorder
I think it’s pure self preservation. If Palin and her ilk win the fight, Noonan and anyone remotely intellectual will be pushed out of the party or made to babble like Palin for life. While being under deep suspicion of being a RINO.
It’s her or Palin.
celticdragon
Win.
DonnaInMichigan
There is a great article in the Alaskan Dispatch, written by Don Mitchell.
Here is the link….
http://alaskadispatch.com/palin-watch/1283-palin-how-she-gained-control-and-then-lost-it#top-toolbar-article
Seems Palin has a history of quitting, and blaming it on other’s, when she knows she is over her head.
CalD
I actually think there could be something to that part about the self-esteem movement.
celticdragon
Palin is a Klingon...
Palin is obsessed with firearms and edged weapons…
Klingons are obsessed with phazers and edged weapons…
Palin shoots at animals from a helicopter…
Klingons shoot at satellites from a Bird of Prey…
Palin is deeply resentful and paranoid of the liberal media…
Klingons are deeply resentful and paranoid of the liberal Federation…
Palin has a distinctive sense of fashion which leads others to have fetishistic fantasies…
Klingons have a distinctive sense of fashion that is right out of a fetishistic fantasy…
Palin has real big hair…and the intelligence of a Neanderthal
Klingons have real big hair…and the brow ridges of a Neanderthal…
My joke for the day… ;)
The Moar You Know
@celticdragon: While I violently disagree with you on the nature and accomplishments of the Jesus of the Republican Party (I think the nation would have been immeasurably better off had Reagan been tossed into a vat of concrete sometime in the early 1970s) it’s funny that we have the exact same opinion of Sarah Palin.
Politics can indeed make strange bedfellows.
Demo Woman
@DonnaInMichigan: The opinion piece was interesting and thank you for linking to it.
IMO, I just find Sarah boring.
JosieJ
@4tehlulz:
From Noonan’s column:
What, like most of that isn’t already happening?
Brachiator
@Michael:
It is so fun to watch Republicans eating their own. This is going to be nasty.
Nooners kicks the conservative elite in the teeth, “the party operatives [and] public intellectuals,” who pushed Palin. You know she is talking about Bill Kristol (prep school – The Collegiate School; college – Harvard) and Ross Duthat (prep school – Hamden Hall; college – Harvard).
But wait there’s more. Noonan goes out of her way to distinguish Palin from being working class by dismissing her as a middle class cupcake whose parents are members of the petite bourgeoise — father a teacher, mother a secretary. Apparently, these types don’t do any actual work, but loll around in their drawing rooms watching TV and filling their children with … gasp … self-esteem.
Why Noonan works so hard to make a distinction between the working class and the middle class is unclear. Oddly enough, it is not easy to find much reference to Noonan’s own parents in various bios, but finally you do come across this (Meeting Peggy Noonan):
Noonan, of course, unloads on the evil mainstream media, not for hating Palin, but for loving her. What devious bastards!
Strangely, she reserves the biggest bitchslap for fundamentalists – by not mentioning them at all. They are just lumped in with the other suckers who have fallen from this GOP conspiracy to fob a brainless snowbilly beauty queen off on the country.
The blowback on this is going to be nasty. Sit back and enjoy it.
Mike G
I find it difficult to accept that a professional Repig propagandist who shilled for the semi-senile Reagan and the fully retarded GW Bush, and wrote of “magical dolphins” rescuing Repig political pawn Elian Gonzales from the Florida Strait, can complain of another’s “proper sense of inadequacy” and “lack of appropriate modesty”, no matter how justified in this case. This is woman who dutifully praised Palin to a TV audience and then was recorded on an open mike trashing her seconds later. Noonan, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, has much to be modest about.
Interrobang
The problem with people who grow up stupid and entitled isn’t because of self-esteem training in schools, it’s because of the parents. The overprotective parents who get all flustered when the entire world isn’t Kid Safe and Mommy-Approved™ create kids who’ve never been exposed to any of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. The shit inevitably hits the fan sometime around when the artifact child gets out from behind the parental shield, like when they hit college and wind up getting a grade that hurts their poor precious fee-fees. (Any postsecondary instructor whose ever had a run-in with helicopter parents irate over Slacker Student’s grades knows just how nasty that is.)
Also, since there is no greater social sin in modern day America than making someone uncomfortable, naturally order must be restored.
Speaking as someone who grew up with abusive parents, I sure could have used some self-esteem training. It might have prevented me from actually believing my father when he repeatedly told me I was fat, lazy, stupid, and useless, and I probably could have gotten a three-year head start on my career…
celticdragon
Uh, are you calling for a list of my Seconds, and pistols or rapiers at dawn, or something???
I know it’s a figure of speech and all, but violently disagree?! Sheesh!
Tony J
WTF?
Noonan would make fond feelings about Henry fucking Ford a litmus test for true, American patriotism?
And what kind of ‘patriotism’ would that be, Peggy? The kind you find yourself desperately embarassed about now that it’s all you’ve got left at the voting-booth?
Henry Ford, yuck.
JK
@Brachiator:
Thanks for linking to that background info on Peggy Noonan. The more I see of her, the more I dislike her. Given a choice between Noonan and Palin, I say “a pox on both of their houses”
binzinerator
@ellaesther:
Nooners was counting on most of her readers to be stupid enough not to figure that out. Why else would she write that? Besides being stupid herself, that is.
Gee, ya think she might be trying to manipulate the party of the easily manipulated?
gnomedad
@gex:
Heh, indeed. One way of looking at wingnuttia is as a vast self-esteem con in which, in return for hatin’ on librul DFHs and licking aristocrat boots, you are assured you are a patriotic Real American and the salt of the earth.
The Moar You Know
@celticdragon: Yes. A list of your Seconds will be needed. However, there is one problem; I’m a DFH. So the only form of violence I shall accept is a pot smoking contest at dawn. The first one to fall down or start coughing uncontrollably loses.
I await, sir, your reply.
aww
wooooo doggie. check out them thar comments at the WSJ. one would think they all just fell off a NRO cruise or something.
El Cid
From Blue Texan at FireDogLake in “Noonan Blasts Palin as a Talented Lightweight, Praised Same Qualities in George W. Bush“.
LD50
@geg6: Knowing her, it won’t last long.
gex
@The Moar You Know:
How do you separate the correlation from the causation? Lots of people turn out to be idiots, independent of anyone trying to give them self esteem. The human psyche is remarkably good at finding itself to be the center of the universe and the be all end all of awesomeness.
kay
I think Sarah Palin quit because Alaska is tanking and she doesn’t want to be around for that.
It was fun handing out checks. Now that she has to be an unpopular governor (and nearly every governor with a tanking economy is unpopular) she isn’t interested.
Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon)
I don’t take this to be connected with the self esteem movement, but instead with the Ignorant and Proud Of It Movement, which has seen exponential growth as of late.
bago
Peggy Noonington perfectly captures the aura of of being chastised by a childless aunt admonishing you with gin-stained breath in the morning, waving her cigarette to and fro. Continually yammering on about the old days, and the grave sacrifices they had to make, as the rising sunbeams cut through the sinewy plume of smoke emanating from the cigarette in her nicotene stained fingertips, creating a scene straight out of Sin City.
You say to yourself “Oh, much good can come from this”, and then you just keep walking.
Ron
@OriGuy:
I love when life imitates mockery. From the comments on the article in the WSJ:
“And how is it that ole Peggy thinks she can tell the Republican Party what is right for it? She was wetting herself over ObamACORN.”
LD50
This sounds to me EXACTLY like just another cranky aging bore whining about how Goddamn These Young Punks Think They Know Everything, It Wasn’t Like That In My Day, grumble, mutter, blah, blah, blah. In other words, she’s getting old, society isn’t all swimming in the direction *she* wants, and it’s pissing her off.
Something tells me if she’s able to make these kind of inane sweeping generalizations she can probably count the number of ‘young people’ she knows on one hand with room left.
geg6
@The Moar You Know:
Well, I have no idea how old either you or how old mistermix’s kids are, but I can pinpoint from my own experience in higher ed when the “self-esteem” generation began and it’s likely end. I can tell you that I began experiencing the “the world owes me everything because I’m super duper special” attitude with students born in the 1980s. Now that we have most of our incoming students being born in the 1990s, I don’t see it as much.
Pop quiz:
Hmmmm…what could have been happening in the 1980s that wasn’t happening in the 1990s?
And what connection does that have with Peggy Noonan?
Republiecan
I’m still trying to imagine history being “rehearsed”.
kay
@LD50:
My father’s really old and he tells me people were always horrible. Always :)
The Greatest Generation? Load of crap, according to him, and he’s a member.
He likes the generation who are in their twenties now. He thinks they’re great.
kay
Isn’t this just another excuse for Sarah Palin?
Everyone who is 45 isn’t horrible and self-centered. She is, but why put it in a broader context, unless it’s to let her off the hook?
Why can’t Mrs. Noonan ever accept responsibility for the errors of conservatism?
General Winfield Stuck
@The Moar You Know:
Vw love bus race to Woodstock and back in yer birthday suits..
ricky
aww @ 122
I do believe that is precisely how Bill Kristol “discovered”
Sarah Palin.
Elie
I believe that Noonan picks up the mood of our transformational period pretty well. I disagree with her crepe hanging but believe that all the “elite” in the MSM and political arena are feeling the winds of change and missing a landscape that is so neatly referenced and tied to their past comfort zones. Her fear is exactly what I exalt!
She wants serious Republican candidates who can reanchor the exhausted and degenerate raison d’etre of the Republicans — that the rich should get richer at the expense of the priorities of the rest of us; that freedom means only lack of government and regulation of the rich and powerful, not about responsibility and committment to each other and the benefits to the whole society. She believes (and the Republicans) in the nobility of entitlement — for the landed gentry that is.
I am THRILLED to make that all gone and to work to make it stay gone. I believe that their era is gone forever — not that we won’t have to battle the excesses of human nature such as greed and megelomania, but that never again will power be so concentrated in so few not only in this country but globally. We have seen their failure over the past year and they will not fully every recapture their bliss any time soon – if ever the same way. The changing dynamics of our economy with the ongoing restrictions of our changing ecological and biological reality will energize putting a lot of old regimes and morbid ideologies into the mothballs of history…Iran is just the beginning…we will be our own Iran in time
Palin is just a proxy for their futility and flaccidity in the real face of challenge– especially as she retains her popularity with these sad sacks..Peggy rightfully picks that up. But she misses the most important part…change has begun and there will be no new corporist era as she has known it ever again…
Will
Damn. When Noonan is on, she is ON.
LD50
I’m 46, and ‘my generation’ is nothing to brag about — the fucking ‘Alex Keaton generation’. People who worshipped Reagan and never got the fuck over it. The fucking Limbaugh generation. I acknowledge they’re not all like this, but this is my generation’s main ‘cultural contribution’, godhelpus.
I personally am pretty impressed with the people in their 20s I’ve known — they’re a lot less pretentious and narcissistic than many Americans. Tho considering the shit that they’re inheriting from their elders, maybe this is inevitable. I know that it’s a LOT more economically fucked up to be a 21-year-old now than it was 25-30 years ago.
And from knowing an increasing number of teenagers I can also state that us middle aged people have no idea how sweeping the cultural changes regarding sex are going to be in the next 10-20 years. Attitudes toward sex among teenagers now are *nothing* like they were in the 70s. And no amount of people like Peggy trying to Stand Athwart is going to change that one bit.
demimondian
@LD50: : I don’t dislike our generation — after all, Barack Obama was born less than a year after I was and less than three years before you, and I think he’s pretty cool. For that matter, Rahm Emmanuel’s no loser, either.
By way of contrast, Howard Dean is from the next notch up from us, and Darcy Burner, Markos Moulitsas, and John Cole are from the next notch down…
kay
@LD50:
I like that generation too. They don’t take themselves overly seriously.
My father is sort of harsh, in the sense that he doesn’t clean things up, even his own generation, which is basically revered. He was there, he remembers, and he’s just not buying any revisionist history, is his attitude.
ricky
My generation hoped we’d die before we got old. That’s what thinking of yourselves in generational terms gets you.
The Raven
celticdragon, #109: heee. Sarah Palin, barbarian hero.
Robertdsc-iphone
I wonder what an old hand like David Gergen thinks of La Belle Palin. That’s what I think of when I see Nooners, another old hand, write something like this.
LD50
I agree. As I said here a month or so ago, I’m thrilled that the first president of my generation is Obama and not some reactionary clown like Palin. But I tend to think that Palin’s politics are a lot more typical of politicians my age than Obama’s are.
There *is* a difference — my wife is 9 years older than me, and when you compare her old high school acquaintances with mine, almost none of hers are wingnuts now, and a really distressing number of mine are. Something about ‘reacting against the hippies’, I guess. Jeez, even Michael J. Fox outgrew that shit, tho he did get to enjoy the spectacle of Limbaugh ridiculing his Parkinson’s tremors on live TV when he ‘became disloyal’.
LD50
Certainly an admirable attitude, especially considering how comforting it would be to buy all the hype.
kay
@ricky:
I don’t like that either, really.
Peggy Noonan is just cranky because she can’t find the Republican Party that exists only in her head. She exploited this Real America theme worse than anyone, she and David Brooks.
Don’t they read their own columns? They managed to convince themselves that a third generation politician and member of America’s Gentry was a Texas brush clearer.
And she’s making fun of Palin supporters? How was she stupid enough to fall for the Bush marketing?
Cat Lady
Peggy Noonan is desperately trying to remind everyone how special and elite she is, and she wants the elites like her to stop pretending they’re not elite. It’s troubling her that her own kind are essentially selling her and her carefully built career as an elitist down the Palin river. She’s saying, in that upturned nose way of hers, “I’m special, dammit, and elite, and we must stop pretending we’re not special and elite to appeal to the Sarah loving rubes.” She wants the Rockefeller wing of the party back and to put the genie back in the bottle that she helped to coax out. Fuck her.
jenniebee
Noonan is what would be called in the lit world an “unreliable narrator.” She has a fair grasp of a rose-ish colored reality, but don’t be fooled into thinking that what she writes is her honest opinion. It’s always crafted for her audience – fellow Republicans – and her audience is made up of people whom she realizes aren’t all reality-based.
Noonan, immune to winks and starbursts, thought that Palin was bad news for the party pretty much from day one of Palin’s candidacy. She sees now a moment of vulnerability in Palin, and she’s striking at Palin’s support within the Republican party. She wraps it up with enough “I hates the librul meedya an’ these yunguns with their hippin and their hoppin and their bippin and their boppin, they don’t know what the jazz is all about, see?” conservative cred bites to choke a goat, to make her message more palatable to her audience.
grendelkhan
I know it’s all over, but damn, I’m going to be kept busy for quite some time savoring just how wacky people got over her. And I quote.
Delicious.
LD50
@Cat Lady: Peggy’s freaked out that the spiritual heir to George Wallace may well be the future of her beloved GOP.
I agree, fuck her.
Elie
grendelkhan….
Ah yes — the fantasy that the Pegster now sees but that she helped create when she promoted the Bush idiot dynasty…I bet she thought that the core of the party truly WAS regular nice people instead of the smelly trolls and bottom feeders that ended up crawling up from the depths…
When you go trolling in the dark waters of hate, resentment and oppression, you shouldnt be surprised when you pull up a monster that will eat your world. Faust found out about those tricky little deals with the Big Red One…
LD50
I do believe there is a movie about that exact scenario.
jenniebee
@grendelkhan:
well, see, a nation of 300 million Barack Obamas would probably go ahead and legalize gay marriage and make the best of a totally hawt situation. A nation of 300 Sarah Palins would never do that – they’d concentrate on, you know, abstinence. Which brings us to the whole “finger on the button” thing…
Elie
Seriously @ LD50!!!!
Idiocracy! Idiocracy!
I have to get my hands on that movie somehow!!!! Yuk,yuk,yuk!!!
Perfect!
LD50
@Elie: Further proving my point, the woman at 1:21 is obviously the Snowbilly Princess herself.
Well, she did get to pass on a lot of her DNA…
passerby
This is O/T but sorta related along the line of smug conservatives.
@inkadu:
Thanks for the heads up on that health bill committee inkadu. I just finished watching the hearing and two things stood out for me:
1) I was very pleased to see and hear from RNs, both on the panel and on the committee–nothing speaks louder than the voice of experience. The nurses in this country bear the brunt of healthcare delivery and are in the best position to provide sober commentary.
and
2) Good god a’mighty. I have never, ever seen someone as smug and as smarmy as Dr. Gratzy. This guy–an MD no less–gave a very clear impression that the only thing he’s concerned with is his own self importance. Who on earth invited him to speak?
inkadu
I was just reviewing some of Ms. Noonan’s article, and she has been trying to save the Republican party from the Base for a while, even as she blew the base kisses.
From a WSJ editorial dated October 2006:
[blockquotewordpresssucks]The administration tries to get around this [changing the definition of conservative],to quiet the unease, with things like the Republican National Committee ad in which Islamic terrorists plot to kill America.
They do want to kill America, and all the grownups know it. But this is a nation of sophisticates, and every Republican sipping a Bud at a bar in Chilicothe, Ill., who looks up and sees that ad thinks: They’re trying to scare the base to increase turnout. Turnout’s the key.
Here’s a thing about American politics. Nobody sees himself as the base. They see themselves as individuals. And they’re not dumb. They get it all. They know when you’re trying to manipulate. They’ll even tell you, with a lovely detachment, if you’re doing a good job. (An unreported story this year is the lack of imagination, seriousness and respect in the work of political consultants on both sides. They have got to catch up with American brightness.) [/blockquotewordpresssucksballs]
Palin is bringing out that bright, sophisticated, Bud-chugging base. Snort.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Pop quiz:
Hmmmm…what could have been happening in the 1980s that wasn’t happening in the 1990s?
The Death of Disco?
Yearly NFC domination in the Super Bowl?
Big Hair in states that don’t rhyme with the word “ass”?
What? – come on man give it up, the suspense is killing me.
HyperIon
When a colleague from the English department stated that anyone who showed up and participated was deserving of a B-, I realized that I would never make it at this particular catholic women’s college.
I cannot tell you how many of my colleagues there told me that giving a student a C would be a severe blow to her self-esteem. The folks in charge made it clear that students were to be praised whenever possible but that criticism should be avoided….just too hurtful.
So these kids fork over big bucks in tuition and then some time after graduating, they discover that they don’t really know anything. How is that good for women? No one could ever explain that to me.
So I don’t agree that only parents bought into this bullshit.
inkadu
Ah, one more Noonan link. Everyone has been talking about how Palin is the populist Frankenstein monster created by Noonan and her ilk. Here are the lightning rod and tesla coils:
Via GlennGreenwald.
You know, I have spent a lot of time with intellectuals, I have never heard any of them talk about fire like exploding syrup. Intellectuals see fire more as chocolate sauce. WTF.
LD50
Peggers wants the mouthbreathers to line up to reliably vote GOP, but also to keep their mouths shut and exert no influence on the party. Probably not exactly realistic.
Brachiator
@JK:
You know, reading the puff piece on her, I get this image of Noonan perhaps unconsciously flirting with her son’s friends, trying to entice them into a little Mrs. Robinson MILF action:
She was only married for four years. How fulfilling can those sophisticated dinner parties she attends really be for her?
jenniebee — Noonan is what would be called in the lit world an “unreliable narrator.” She has a fair grasp of a rose-ish colored reality, but don’t be fooled into thinking that what she writes is her honest opinion. It’s always crafted for her audience – fellow Republicans – and her audience is made up of people whom she realizes aren’t all reality-based.
I agree that Noonan isn’t necessarily writing her honest opinion, but not because her audience is not reality-based (whatever that means). I think that she is sending smoke signals to other GOP grandees, the people who will be instrumental in pushing the party’s presidential nominee in the future. And I think that she — and the Wall Street Journal — are testing the waters, to see what the reaction might be if the organization tries to distance itself from Palin.
inkadu
Last one I promise.
Noonan then:
Ok. So established: Bush is, despite his privileges, wore a white shirt and grew up with prostitutes. Working class.
Palin, on the other hand?
Palin’s solidly middle class because her dad was a track coach and her mom was a secretary… heck, if she and George Bush were growing up around the same time, Bushie wouldn’t allowed to sit at Palin’s table. Palin could have watched George mowing her lawn while she practiced on her baby grand. Palin would have been splashing mud on George Bush with her Mercedes Benz on the way to school.
It’s all clear now.
Blue Raven
@The Moar You Know:
I’m three years younger than Palin and had precisely ZERO “everyone’s a winner” crap thrown at me in school. I remember being vaguely disgusted to find out when I moved to CA that not only did the school I transferred to not belong to the National Honor Society, but refused to recognize honors-level classes I’d taken as meaning a damn thing. The special-ed kids could qualify for the same rosette on their diploma as the kids taking three AP prep courses. They still encouraged achievement, but it was a bit fluffy-bunny unless you had a teacher who drove you harder than the default state of affairs. Even there, no “everyone’s a winner.” Not in college, either, and I went to one of the most leftie schools ever.
inkadu
@passerby:
Did you see that smug bastard during the most passionate speech by a legislator? The congressman is saying, “There was a 31-year-old man who lost his job, and worked several part time jobs to try to pay his medical bills. He couldn’t. And he died in his shower. And when the mother saw her dead son on the gurney, she had a heart attack. It cost the family $60,000 for the mother to get better from the heart attack, and the father had to borrow $8,000 to pay for his own son’s funerals. Somebody asked the father if he was angry at God for taking his son away. Do you know what the father said? He said, “I’m not angry at God. God made a special place for my son. I am angry at the government, for not having the courage to change a system that let my son die.” (or something along those lines)
Mr. Canadian Doctor’s reaction? During this very moving story, he takes out his cell phone and checks to see if he has any messages. What an unbelievable tool.
Rep. Hare’s statement here.
[Edit: The youtube video isn’t the CSPAN version with the cutaway of the phone-check. Drat.]
Nurses — I thought it was interesting the contrast in calm and speaking styles between the nurse and the doctors. She was clearly nervous, while the other guys were all like, “Yeah, this is just another day in the office for me…” I found it really interesting that so many people directed questions to her; I thought the other two could have made a stronger case. But there are more nurses, I am sure, in their districts than epidemiologists. So…
Phoebe
This only makes me madder at Noonan. She knew better about Palin all along and kept her mouth shut when there was actually a risk of Palin getting into power. Now that Palin’s toast, she states the obvious.
Screw Peggy Noonan, she’s part of the problem and gets no credit for this whatsoever. She knew better this whole time. Screw her.
bluehill
If Peggy just came to this conclusion, she’s dumber than I thought. If she realized this a long time ago, she’s no better than the people she criticizes.
I’m preaching to the converted here, but the cynicism and hypocrisy behind the whole “Country First” meme is infuriating. They haven’t cared about our country in long time.
inkadu
Gold. From the coments on WSJ:
chrome agnomen
noonan shouts “can’t you see?”, at a crowd of blind people, forgetting that she poked their eyes out during the reagan years.
Elie
bluehill:
“Country” for the Palinistas should be replaced with “Tribe”. THAT they do care about — white, all white and all that is…
No fureners and brown folks, no mus-lims — OUR tribe —
Grab your hood and join us down by the burning cross- – roads
bluehill
Elie – good point, although “Tribe” may sound too ethnicy. They may find “clan” more acceptable particularly if they see it spelled differently.
Phoebe
bago @128 – DAYum!
Uloborus
I am hampered interpreting this a bit because I know almost nothing about Noonan. I read right-wing opinion articles very rarely, because when I randomly run into them, they tend to fill me with ire.
Still, I’m actually impressed and fascinated. I think there’s no question that Noonan is an intellectual and is displaying an amazing amount of reasonableness and an ability to think and see reality for what it is. It’s amazing, because she’s also clearly doing this through the standard Republican filter.
I am convinced, and I suspect few of you would find it hard to accept, that the primary principle of the Republican Party right now is ‘Us vs. Them’. Now, that’s a basic property of human thinking. We’re all guilty of it, and I see plenty of liberals letting it cloud their thinking, and I’m sure I do it too. But it’s the PLATFORM of the GOP right now. It applies to everything. Atheists/muslims/blacks/liberalsliberalsliberals BAD, Real Americans GOOD. Sucking up to corporations, Christian conservative morality, libertarian economic lassaize-faire – these all get walk-on parts and have to compete with each other. But they are all, absolutely, subservient to the tribal ‘Us vs. Them’ principle.
And you can see Noonan wrestling with it. She wants to blame this bad thing on the liberals. She’s trying to define herself as part of the Republican Party in her head, the people who aren’t dumb enough to slavishly follow an obvious imbicile.
Which is why I admire this article. Her fellows are blindfolded, gagged, hogtied, yoked, and shackled by this principle. Noonan is obviously just as hampered, but she has seen through the fetters to a core truth that must be very difficult to accept. Not only is Palin incompetent, the Republican Party itself created her and made her the monster that she is today.
The ‘self-esteem’ generation is a minor point at best, her desire to shift blame struggling to overcome her epiphany. I think it’s an interesting idea, and as you can see there’s a lot of anecdotes for and against it. Like most sociology theories, you’re just guessing until the studies come back, and they can be hard to do.
kay
@chrome agnomen:
She’s still doing it. I started paying attention during the Reagan years. I remember what happened. I was there.
NOT all it was cracked up to be, not by a long shot.
Conservatives rewrote the Reagan Years in a way that would make their arch-enemy, “Soviet Russia” proud. I don’t recognize the era they describe, and that’s because that’s not what happened. They invented 10 years.
I don’t rewrite the Clinton years. I figure people were there.
celticdragon
LMAO! You win!
inkadu
@Uloborus: This is a fine example of good writing… you state your premise…
and then prove it…
Check out some of my posts directly above this one for background on Peggy. Once you’ve read some of her articles, you’ll see that Noonan’s articles are a soul-searching-free zone, and that she just says what people want to hear. In this instance, it’s interesting, because she is forced to pick sides in an internal battle; but she writes for the WSJ, not the Podunk times. She knows who HER base is.
gwangung
Hm. You know, I see very little of conservative principles in that…
Brachiator
@inkadu:
Here’s the thing. The Republicans don’t understand that even if this were true, even if this is how some Americans viewed Bush, Dubya threw it all away with his pathetic response to Hurrican Katrina. Here, Bush and his cronies revealed themselves to be poseurs, bumbling fools whose thin veneer of competence melted away as soon as they were put to a test.
And then they tried to push McCain as the steady old veteran who would make everything alright, but between McCain’s sour, erratic behavior, especially when the economy unraveled, and Palin’s pseudo-folksy gibberish, the majority of the country finally got fed up with a bunch of country club morons who could walk and chew gum at the same time.
Brachiator
@Brachiator:
I couldn’t go back an edit my previous post. The last part should have read as follows:
And then they tried to push McCain as the steady old veteran who would make everything alright, but between McCain’s sour, erratic behavior, especially when the economy unraveled, and Palin’s pseudo-folksy gibberish, the majority of the country finally got fed up with a bunch of country club morons who couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time.
I can’t post and chew gum and the same time.
TimB
Future Fox News Chyron – “Former Governor Sarah Palin (D-Alaska) Indicted”
LD50
@Brachiator:
That’s it. I’m fed up with you and refuse to vote for you.
LD50
To make the metaphor even more accurate, most of the aunt’s admonishments are about childrearing.
Mike G
You know Bush. He’s the arrogant asshole in your neighborhood. If there’s a fire on the block, he’ll wander out of his house drunk and immediately act like he’s in charge while doing jack squat. Maybe he’ll cut the fire hose as a joke to impress his sniggering buddies who were over watching football.
He’ll be disinterested in the people escaping the house but concerned about a blackened structure lowering property values on the street, and the runoff water damaging his lawn. He’ll bitch about the “overpaid” union firefighters and their “gold-plated” benefits. When one of the firefighters is injured, he’ll sneer “Well, he volunteered,” and bitch about the workman’s compensation bill that will come out of his property taxes he hasn’t paid on time again this year. When it’s all over, he’ll puff out his chest and proclaim, “I did a heckuva job!!”
Molly
@LD50:
Gen X here. We’re finally catching on…
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/813/gen-dems
We grew up deep in the Reagan era, and among many of my peers, there is an attitude of “If you don’t have anything, you’re not working hard enough for it. And you sure as hell can’t have mine.”
But, I’ve seen quite a few John Coles coming out of the closet lately. :)
Stefan
You know [Bush]. 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.
You know, I think the rig might be able to find the house THAT’S ON FIRE without help from Bush….
chrome agnomen
@kay
spot on. i shook my head during those years in much the same way the i, and millions of others, did during the new dark ages at the beginning of the third millennium. pure invention. the active making of mythos. one difference is the speed with which it was constructed. there was at least a brief time lapse in the eighties, while it seemed that the myth and reality occurred simultaneously during the W years.
perhaps it would be even more accurate to say that the myth had been built before the reality. the shaping of the data to support the chosen fable. truly the fruit of the poison tree that noonan so assiduously cultivated.
Krissed Off
@jenniebee:
I love this. Are you married?
Fulcanelli
@Molly:
The tar pits?
This is a good day. A sunny, summer friday afternoon with wingnut blood in the water courtesy of one of their own. Better than sex. Almost.
There’s a sizable chunk of what’s left of the republican party that believes Sarah Palin will help the US find it’s way back to Kansas if she gets elected and nothing is going change their minds, not no way, not no how. She’s an ‘orse of a different color!
The only way they will abandon that belief is if she gets that job and fails miserably, and even then they’ll just blame congress, or teh liebrul media, or the dhimmicrats or something… It’s a textbook example of a cult.
If only Palin would start her own religion, move all her acolytes to Oklahoma and mix a big batch of Kool-Aid…
Nooners? She’s a opportunistic, elitist media tool of the rich who resents all the boys going gaga over her dumb country cousin who got admitted into the club by giving the best hand job.
Uloborus
To Inkidu:
I *don’t* know Noonan’s previous works, so I certainly can’t argue with you. Are you saying she’s not a wingnut, just conciously pandering to them for her own profit? I mean, what’s been referenced about her previous employment history would mesh perfectly with that.
TuiMel
What little I know about Noonan:
She always looks and speaks as if she is catching a whiff of stinky hoi poloi as she offers her opinions. She smells something unpleasant and can’t readily identify it. The distaste shows – both on her face and in the lilting condescension in her voice.
She always writes in “her” moment, and as Inkadu has documented above – with what I am sure are the tip of the iceberg of existing examples – without even a hint of self-awareness or the inconvenient encumberance of her past pontifications. Thus our “responsible neighbor,” Dubya is later able to morph to the “casual sower of discord,” Dubya without so much as a hint of disonance.
She can salt her writing with observations with which readers can find resonance, but she is ever the salmon returning upstream to the Morning in America where she thinks she was spawned. Reagan is her gold standard. Those she approves of are wrapped in the gauze of her recollection of her spawning ground. Those who (today) do not meet her approval are cast in negative relief and whopping generalities.
Just as she does not have to acknowledge her own inconsistencies of her writings and judgements, she will NEVER acknowledge that her movement and its methods are flawed in any way. Sarah Palin’s failures surely are the product of some “liberal” self-esteem regimen, not the noxious air bubble pushed upward in the froth of conservative Christianity wedded to conservative power-mongering.
I simply cannot credit her – even when I agree with much of her assessment of Palin’s skill set.
Fulcanelli
@TuiMel:
That was a blade in the back ‘twixt the ribs so sharp and smooth as to not be felt until it was removed. US Marines style. Awesome.
I wouldn’t want to piss you off.
Uloborus
That’s kinda my point, TuiMel.
It’s mildly impressive for one of those people to admit that their candidate is a loser. It’s a lot more impressive for her to specifically state that Palin was a creation of the Republican Machine. Especially while you can watch her rambling diatribe looking for ways it’s the Left’s fault. But she’s quite plain – the Party made Palin, and Palin is a massive failure.
Elie
I was just watching “Dog Whisperer” (Cesar Milan) working with a vicious pooch who would not let anyone approach his ‘things” — a bone, his food, etc.
Reminded me of the Republicans and their cherished ideas — chewed up and they growl and snap to maintain their link to this energy — as the dog in the show did.
Cesar asserted his ol “calm assertiveness” and using his energy and his body calmly and smoothly asserted himself over the bone and moved the bitting dog away from it, claiming the leader role. The dog bites and growls but eventually scales back its energy and becomes “calm, submissive”
I think that in some ways as someone said upstring, the GOP is a bit at war with itself over that bone and who will become their “pack leader”.
I think that the ‘dominant territory’, the dialogue and frame has been calmly overtaken by Obama — whether every issue is “right” or “wrong” — HE is the pack leader. The right’s only energy right now is their old bones, their old symbols. They are not moving forward, just reflexively, self protectively cowering and growling over the bone that no one wants anymore — relegated to the back corner of the yard away from the new pack leader…fighting over their scraps…
steve s
@grendelkhan:
another bit from that wingnut piece written last year:
HAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHA.
inkadu
@Uloborus: Noonan is a pundit. If you read enough pundits, you will see what a joke they are as writers and human beings. They are consistently wrong, almost always hew to the conventional wisdom, and pack together to defeat any outside ideas. Noonan’s main concern is Noonan. What she writes is to advance her interests, preferably with the least amount of effort or risk. If Peggy Noonan is blasting Palin, it means that Palin is already past her prime, and it safe to go after her. Just like afterBush was widely recognized to be a disaster, Peggy and her ilk distanced themselves and said Bush had betrayed cosnervative ideals. It’s a racket, dude, and you are doing yourself a disservice if you read their articles in isolation and think they seriously give a shit about anything but staying relevant among the media dim bulbs.
But, if you were not reading any pundits during the Bush presidency, it would explain your charming naivete… (btw, this criticism is not limited to “conservative” columnists, but almost the entire mainstream pundit class; Krugman is the only one I can think of that has a true consistent compass).
Julia Grey
Noonan and her elitist epiphanies. Sheeze.
Every time she has one of her brain waves she thinks it’s THE New Concept of Her Generation.
hal
She wasn’t thoughtful enough to know she wasn’t thoughtful enough
Exactly…