Homecoming Queen of the WSJ Conventional Wisdom Parade Peggy Noonan has a big sad, because she was licking her lips over the chance to be mean about Crazy Joe Biden instead of that bookworm Hildebeast’s cankles, for a change. “The Biden Eclipse and the Trump Plateau“:
Something big happened at the Democratic debate. It didn’t have to do with Hillary Clinton besting Bernie Sanders or Jim Webb. What she had to do, after the long, battering summer, was show she is up to the battle, ready for it, capable—that she can do this. She did. She was crisp, lively, a presence. In demonstrating that she is up to the race she deprived Vice President Joe Biden of his rationale for getting into it. People say he didn’t have a rationale but of course he did, it just wasn’t something he could say or leak. His rationale, at 72 and having recently experienced great loss, was: The party’s in trouble, the front-runner can’t win, she’s too encrusted by scandal, in an act of heroic sacrifice I’m going to swoop in and save the day…
Too bad! Mr. Biden would have added a layer of affection to a so-far cold enterprise. He would have added an element of old-time normality to the field. He would have been as entertaining in his way as Donald Trump, and it would have been instructive to see how Democrats respond to the entrance of President Obama’s two-term vice president. Who has the party’s heart?…
Luck matters in politics as in life and Mrs. Clinton has now been lucky twice in a short time. Kevin McCarthy blunted Republican arrows on Benghazi, then Bernie Sanders blunted arrows by saying the email scandal doesn’t matter. To many of his supporters, presumably, it did. Now all Democrats have permission not to care. It’s nice to get a pass like that!
And now the one candidate who could have derailed her will likely not get in. She is on a roll…
While we’re sweeping out the bar, someone check if Maureen Dowd has passed out face-down in the ladies’ room, again.
But this is the Noonan nugget that’s really got all us moonbats in an uproar, for good reason:
The only thing I feel certain of is how we got here. There are many reasons we’re at this moment, but the essential political one is this: Mr. Obama lowered the bar. He was a literal unknown, an obscure former state legislator who hadn’t completed his single term as U.S. senator, but he was charismatic, canny, compelling. He came from nowhere and won it all twice. All previously prevailing standards, all usual expectations, were thrown out the window…
Steve M at No More Mister Nice Blog hits the tenpenny nail on the head:
… Who really lowered the bar? I’d say it was the party that not only reveres an ex-actor and insult comic named Ronald Reagan but seriously considered him as a possible presidential candidate when he’d been in elective office less than two years. I’d say it’s the party that put George W. Bush and Dan Quayle on two tickets each. I’d say it’s the party that gave respectful consideration to presidential aspirants such as Pat Robertson, Alan Keyes, Pat Buchanan, Michele Bachmann, and Herman Cain. And I say it’s the party that made Sarah Palin its vice presidential candidate, then made her a superstar.
If the bar’s low, Peggy, your party’s voters are the reason.
Noonan, of course, didn’t just somehow overlook Reagan’s career — she was a prime enabler, who first made her GOP celebrity bones writing “morning in America” pap for that second-banana aged-out-of-Hollywood-pretty-boy figurehead. “No, no — Gary Cooper for President, Ronald Reagan for best friend!” we joked. Those were more innocent days.
Anyone can run for president now, and in the future anyone will. In 2020 and 2024 we’ll look back on 2016 as the sober good ol’ days. “At least Trump had business experience. He wasn’t just a rock star! He wasn’t just a cable talk-show host!”
Or a B-movie actor, Peggy! To paraphrase Mr. Pierce: Clio the Proclaimer, Muse of History, needs that alcoholic anesthesia more than you ladies right now.
Baud
Baud 2016!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I am not a Feeler of the Bern, but I really think this is a stupid presumption.
A guy
How can anybody not look and listen to Bunsen and not conclude the guys is a buffoon
gussie
“Bernie Sanders blunted arrows by saying the email scandal doesn’t matter. To many of his supporters, presumably, it did.”
Huh. I thought it was largely an act, but perhaps she Truly Has No Clue.
Turgidson
Leave it to Peggy “Yard Signs Elect Presidents” Noonan to deliver one of the ultimate entries of the “Thanks Obama” genre, but do so with utter sincerity.
Noonan needs to go the fuck away and keep herself busy drawing pictures of Reagan’s foot, preferably somewhere hundreds of miles from any TV cameras or major newspapers.
benw
@Baud: depends, what’s your take on the 9/11 attacks – safe or not safe?
Baud
And God forbid I take anything Noonan says seriously, but it is impossible to fathom how Obama influenced Republican standards for the presidency.
Turgidson
@Turgidson:
Oh and Nooners was also totally convinced that the IRS “scandal” was certain to end up being bigger than Watergate, Iran Contra, and Teapot Dome combined. She’s reaching Kristolesque levels of always-wrongness as she further succumbs to booze-fueled senility.
Baud
@benw:
Bush kept me safe! Still kicking 14 years later.
Remfin
Fixed
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Turgidson: the fact that she could publish the “Magic Dolphins” theory and still be taken seriously is about as good as an indictment of the Beltway’s collective intellect as any.
But of course, that was her Faith speaking, and we must never question anyone’s Faith, as long as that Faith is rightwing, Aryan Jeebus Xianity.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@A guy:
Bunsen? Like, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mggl7cC8iys
benw
@Baud: Sounds like you have a lot in common with Jeb! Feeling the veep love?
Baud! / Jeb! 2016!
Also, I will now stop making 9/11 jokes before I say something regrettable.
Turgidson
@Baud:
I think she has a sliver of a point about that, though since she’s a moron she arrives at it accidentally.
Republicans to this day refuse to acknowledge Obama’s obvious intelligence and political talents. So, to them, his elections were a bizarre and catastrophic fluke, but it also proved to anyone in the party with any presidential ambition whatsoever that if ‘Murica-hating Kenyan sockulist Muslin Barack HUSSEIN Obama could get elected, then literally anyone could get elected.
This realization, when combined with the GOP’s complete detachment from reality, must at least partly explain the candidacies of Bachmann and Cain in 2012 and, at minimum, Cruz, Paul, Carson, Fiorina, and Rubio this time. Heck even Trump. They’re all wackjobs, hucksters, and frauds, (yes, Village, even your boy Rubio is a total clown) but they must be thinking “if that commie idiot Obama can do it, I’m a shoe-in!” Which would be funny, if we knew for sure none of them could actually win.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
Since it’s an open thread, Medium has an interesting look at the new biography of Steve Jobs:
https://medium.com/backchannel/the-war-over-who-steve-jobs-was-92bda2cd1e1e
I really like the final summation.
Baud
@Turgidson:
It explains why the idiots run. It doesn’t explain why they are at the top of the polls with Republican voters. Noonan can’t explain why Real Americans are choosing the “Obama-like” candidates.
benw
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: As a card-carrying, jack-booted Berniac, it mattered very, very much to me that the email “scandal” died as soon as possible.
SANDERS/BLUNT ARROWS 2016
hylen
It’s fate. Or rather, it’s fate!
Turgidson
@Baud:
True. Noonan can’t explain much of anything, of course. I suppose the answer is that the GOP voters are currently most interested in who can be the biggest fucking asshole on the planet, and the inexperienced, unknown (and in that sense Obama-like per Noonan’s rubric) candidates are the ones really letting their asshole flags fly.
piratedan
talk about your left handed compliment. Obama goes to an ivy league school, does community work in areas that were underserved… then runs for a Senator spot, gets it. Organizes a grass roots campaign, wins that ntional election thingy over a supposed national war hero and she said that this guy has lowered the bar.
If Obama had cured the common cold, these fuckers would write it up as damaging Big Pharma….
and the MSM wonders why its dying and no one pays them any attention anymore… perhaps it the case where ordinary people read this and wonder how in the fucque did Peggy Noonan merit Noblesse Oblige status….
Baud
@benw:
He would serve to make me look good.
And what better assassination protection.
srv
Show me a democrat who can give a speech like this, and I’ll show you a great Republican leader.
IDK why you liberals say he couldn’t get elected today – that speech is a relevant today as it was 51 years ago.
Roger Moore
They also nominated an admittedly experienced but obviously despicable Richard Nixon. I would say that’s when the party showed it was in real trouble.
Cervantes
Presumably, “presumably” does not mean what La Noonan thinks it does.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Turgidson:
As I’ve said before, the realization I came to after Obama’s election is that racists genuinely think that every white person is automatically smarter/better than every person of color, regardless of the POC’s education or background. They really believe in their heart of hearts that a white meth dealer with a fifth-grade education is smarter than Obama because of the color of that meth dealer’s skin, and there is absolutely nothing you can do to shake that belief.
Aunt Kathy
Can somebody help an old auntie out? Did the Drunk Peggy thing actually originate in any serious episode of public drunkenness, or is it just that anybody who writes & speaks so stupidly must be drunk? Anybody know who started it? Just curious.
WereBear
Once again, it’s right wing projection at work.
If anyone lowered the bar, it has to be W.
Cervantes
@piratedan:
Who better to judge than she?
(He went to two Ivy League schools, if you’re counting.)
David Koch
Idiot ¿Jeb? is being savaged on Twitter
https://twitter.com/JebBush/status/655098096649707520
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Aunt Kathy: I think it’s a joke, a way of explaining both the crazy shit that comes out of her mouth/keyboard and all the hammy affectations of her TV persona: that weird purr, the strange accent that I suspect came from some 1950s B movie about high society, and most of all the mugging and bouncing around in her seat.
Though I’ve also read rumors she was quite the DC party girl back in the 80s and early 90s
jl
So, Noonan says that Obama lowered the bar by entering the race as a relatively inexperienced politician who used superficial style points to win. And then Noonan says that Biden would improve the Democratic primary contest, dominated by two very experienced and knowledgeable candidates who in their own ways elevate substance over style, because he would make people feel good with his style?
Got it, OK then. Makes sense.
Archon
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
That’s why I always thought the more racist attack from Trump and others of Obama wasn’t asking for his birth certificate, it was asking for his college transcripts as if he wasn’t smart enough to get into elite American schools.
If you don’t think Obama is intellectually qualified for Ivy league schools you don’t think any black person is.
Dmbeaster
@srv: Uh, B league actor good at reading other’s speeches which he was incapable of writing or thinking himself? So what? There is a reason he got paid a lot for the General Electric Theater TV gig.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Cervantes:
I always forget that Columbia is in the Ivy League.
To continue my current obsession, Alexander Hamilton attended Columbia back when it was Kings College, as did four other Founding Fathers who did not rate a place on our currency.
David Koch
@jl:she doesn’t mind when gop candidates like Mittens, Rubio and dare I say it… Reagan have little experience and use style points.
yes, why elect people with little experience like lincoln and FDR, when we could have the experienced gravitas of Cheney and Rummy.
Aunt Kathy
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I figured. I googled my little heart out, trying to find some DC gossip item, never found one. And now all I can hear in my brain is her warbling “Rrrrronald Rrrreagan.” God.
Cervantes
@Aunt Kathy:
When she worked at the White House she was seen to be a regular souse — quantities of wine in the day-time, stronger stuff in the evenings. Her colleagues noticed; some of her superiors were unimpressed. Don Regan, himself no angel, chastised her more than once.
The “Drunk Peggy” thing, as you call it, started in earnest after she left the White House and began slurring her way across the television dial. Meant as a joke, it “took” because of the earlier history, which was known to everyone.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Archon: absolutely, that was also the rationale behind the (brief and small) campaign to draft Chris Christie, and what support Newt Gingrich had, that a tough guy would bring the fight to Phony President Affirmative Action T Teleprompter, and at last the American People would see!
ThresherK
@Cervantes: Was Nooners the only person watching to not get the actual target of that insult?
Villago Delenda Est
Shitty grade Z movie star.
All that needs to be said about the object of Nooner’s affection.
Keith P.
The GOP position has been, for as long as I can remember, that their policies are so rock-solid right that it doesn’t matter who the person is administering them; the country will be better for it. If it isn’t, it’s because said person did not administer them correctly, but the policies will always work by design because they are, that’s why.
srv
@Dmbeaster: At least he could do it without a teleprompter.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
After being turned down by Princeton. Hamilton also never graduated, leaving to become an artillery captain at the start of the war.
Villago Delenda Est
@piratedan: If Obama walked across the Potomac to save a drowning man, the Rethugs would complain that he couldn’t swim.
Rand Careaga
@Aunt Kathy: Here’s a high school classmate purportedly dishing on the Pegster.
Villago Delenda Est
@Keith P.: Conservatism cannot fail; it can only be failed.
Hobbes
How is the email thing not a real scandal?
Republicans have conspired to spend millions of dollars of taxpayer money to try to damage a political rival.
the Conster
@Keith P.:
If there was one place that conservative policies worked for anyone not named Koch, they would tout it. Instead they have GWB’s 8 years of disaster culminating in the Great Recession, Kansas under Brownback, Louisiana under Jindal, Wisconsin under Walker and New Jersey’s rating downgrade under Christie. They can keep saying that conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed, but it’s pretty clear by now that only failure can be expected when implementing conservative policies.
Archon
@srv:
Reagan didn’t use a teleprompter? I swear by the time you guys done with Reagan it will have been him that defeated the Soviet Union, saved capitalism from the Depression, and wrote the Gettysburg Address.
Mike J
I saw Trump on NBC saying of course all the email stuff is stupid, but Bernie was wrong to remove it as a campaign issue because it could have been useful for him.
Cervantes
@Archon:
Nonsense, of course.
Peale
@Baud: also doesn’t explain how Bush would be any different from Trump in office. And if so, what trump has it wrong. It’s really not the democrats Job to argue against mass deportation, or Muslims walking around free. Bush doesn’t want to make any arguments against what Trump wants, so why should anyone change their minds.
Baud
@Mike J:
Doubt it. It would be inconsistent with the image he wants to project.
Cervantes
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym:
Well, the school closed when the war began.
Turgidson
@Hobbes:
Simple Village rules. IOKIYAR and the Clinton Rules. Republicans are not held accountable for anything, ever, and Hillary Clinton is presumed guilty of the worst possible offense in any situation.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Archon:
If you visit the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library (don’t blame me, I had to go for work), they have a set-up where you can stand at a podium and pretend to be the Gipper in the White House press room. And, yes, there’s a TelePrompTer. Two, if I remember right.
Mike J
@Baud: I didn’t say that, Trump did.
jl
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: I read that Princeton turned Hamilton down because he said he was not impressed with their curriculum and proposed his own study plan and wanted to get the degree over and done with in two years. I suppose Hamilton could be termed a ‘self assured’ kind of person. I forget exactly why he left King’s College, IIRC he thought the Revolution was more important to attend to.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mike J: Bernie is not a shitheel, unlike The Donald. The Donald demonstrated his shitheel status by mentioning that…that Bernie should have used the email thing against Hillary…it’s what The Donald would have done!
Baud
@Mike J:
Ah. That makes more sense.
jl
@Cervantes: Thanks for info on why Hamilton never finished. It rings a bell now that you remind us.
Edit: Hamllton’s wiki bio says he did graduate.
Edit: wiki says King’s did not suspend classes until 1776 when Continental Army arrived, and Hamilton graduated in late 1773 or early 1774.
Turgidson
@Archon:
They’ve already convinced themselves that Ronnie single-handedly destroyed the Soviets with nothing but his chiseled jawline. The other projects are in progress but will take some time. They’ve already begun blaming “FDR’s Hoot-Smalley tariff” for the Great Depression and claimed that the New Deal made it worse, so that story is on a trajectory of eventually praising Ronnie for single-handedly putting the nation back to work and winning WW2 in spite of the commie Democrat party. Making him the actual author of the Gettysburg Address will take some real work, but I’m sure they’re up to it.
Villago Delenda Est
@Turgidson: Given the shitty grade Z movie star’s service record during WWII, securing Camp Roach from the Nazi and Nipponese hordes, well, gosh, we’ll have to do something about that service record!
Mike in NC
Peggy Noonan needs more electrolytes, less booze.
Villago Delenda Est
@Archon: Heck, he parted the fucking Red Sea, not that Charleton Heston dude.
Roger Moore
@Keith P.:
You got the last part wrong. If Republican principles don’t work, it isn’t because they weren’t administered correctly; it’s because the person who was supposed to be administering them betrayed them. W wasn’t a disaster because he did a poor job of implementing Republican principles, it’s because he was a RINO who pushed for Medicare Part D and didn’t privatize Social Security.
Cervantes
@jl:
Well, to be precise, that the school closed for the duration of the war does not explain why he never finished (i.e., why he never went back afterwards to finish). There were other reasons for that.
It does explain why his studies were interrupted.
Anyhow, you’re welcome.
I’m off. You have a great evening.
jl
@Mike J: Sanders gave the same response repeatedly to questions about the BS email non-scandal in interviews over last few months as he gave in the debate, and as in the debate, immediately followed up with a little corporate media bashing.
So, any half-way decent politician would know better than to pull a switch in a nationally televised debate, especially after being increasingly critical of the corporate press over last few months. So, no reason to give Sanders a lot of chivalry points for his response.
So, a lot of the story is media BS. I saw a clip of it from some network or cable outfit, and noticed they clipped out his criticism of the media.
gogol's wife
I love the way the NYTimes keeps saying that McCarthy “suggested” that the Benghazi investigation was designed to hurt Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. He didn’t “suggest” it, he “CAME OUT AND SAID IT.”
gogol's wife
@jl:
Let’s go to Broadway and ask Lin-Manuel.
gogol's wife
Almost time for Midsomer Murders, “Electric Vendetta,” one of the best ever. Barnaby in 2016!
Renie
That twitter account of ?JEB? is being destroyed. I wonder if they will have to shut it down. No way can that be cleaned up. I guess BRINKS TRUCKS are now backing out of the driveway.
Suzanne
Lordy.
On the email thing….NO ONE gives a shit. No one. The only people that cared only did so insofar as they are hoping to find a way to discredit HRC without talking about her looks and her pantsuits, because they’re realizing that they’re already alienating anyone who isn’t a rich white dude pretty quickly already. No one really gives a fuck about the actual content of the email.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@gogol’s wife:
Ron Chernow — author of the biography that the show is based on — was a consultant throughout the writing of the show and still gets a small fee. It’s historically accurate (within the bounds of theater) AND an artistic triumph.
I think I’m starting to hate Lin-Manuel. It’s not his fault, I’ll get over it. But today I hate that guy for being talented AND charming AND self-deprecating. What a jerk.
The Other Chuck
@srv: oh you’re such a pathetic little wingnut to still need teleprompter jokes even now.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
@jl:
“Matriculated” does not mean “graduated.” You matriculate when you start at a school.
Patrick
@srv:
No, he couldn’t.
http://brobrubel.com/2012/03/13/like-a-president-never-used-a-teleprompter-before/
bk
@srv:
Villago Delenda Est
@The Other Chuck: srv is basically a puddle of Rosie’s piss.
gogol's wife
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
And a MacArthur Award!
Steve from Antioch
Whether or not Peggy Noonan is a drunk has nothing to do with whether she is an idiot and whether her opinions deserve scorn and ridicule.
Substance abuse is a serious problem and people who suffer from it don’t also need to be ridiculed because of it.
It’s just a cheap shot and not unlike attempting to criticize a woman’s opinion by saying she’s fat.
Cervantes
@jl:
I have no idea what you’re looking at, sorry, but, no, the young Hamilton began at King’s in the fall of 1773 and formally matriculated in 1774. Neither of these are graduation dates.
He would have preferred (Presbyterian) Princeton, but they had refused to admit him with advanced standing, so he “settled” for (Anglican) King’s, which took him on as a “special student.” At the time, King’s was the wealthiest and the most expensive college in the colonies.
And when I say “the young Hamilton,” he was in his mid-teens when he entered King’s, but some of the kids he met there were even a couple of years younger.
And now (again) I really must go. It’s approaching my bed-time.
BillinGlendaleCA
Contrary to popular belief on the right, Obama didn’t invent the tele-prompter.
scav
@BillinGlendaleCA: Maybe they’re just proud that many of their candidates are seemingly unable to read — proof of they’re being untainted by that edumacataion indoctrination.
jl
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym: @Cervantes: Thanks. I skimmed the bio too quickly. The timing is right for Hamilton starting King’s and then leaving when it suspended classes when the Revolution began.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
“The only thing I feel certain of is how we got here. There are many reasons we’re at this moment, but the essential political one is this:Mr Lincoln
Mr. Obamalowered the bar. He was a literal unknown, an obscure former state legislator who hadn’t completed his single term as U.S. senator, but he was charismatic, canny, compelling. He came from nowhere and won it all twice. All previously prevailing standards, all usual expectations, were thrown out the window…/”Fess up, Noon just recycled an article from an 1862 edition of the New York Times and changed the names, didn’t she?
Thoughtful Today
As the token Bernie supporter in these comments, I’ll repeat myself:
I have 25 years of annoyances with the Clinton’s policies and choices … and not a damn one of them has ever coincided with the bullshit noise-machine of the right-wing and their Corporate handmaidens.
Bernie is pushing policies and issues that are important to his supporters.
Right-wing attack points like the emails and Benghazi are distractions, at best, and insults at worst. I find them insulting and was proud of Bernie for yanking Anderson’s and Corporate media’s chain for pushing those right-wing attacks.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I think Bernie would make a wonderful Secretary of the Treasury if he doesn’t get it the nomination.
And how the 1% would howl, oh yes.
ruemara
@Aunt Kathy: I have always maintained Peggers Noonington is our formost Alco-American and thusly, her every utterance should be treated like something said when one is floating in a cloud of bathtub gin & percoset.
Smiling Mortician
@Steve from Antioch: Shitty analogies all around, Steve. Fat can’t make you stupid. Drunk sure can. Now, I’m kinda-sorta drunk right now, but I’m not stupid enough to buy your false analogy. Up to you to decide whether I’m fat or not.
Mnemosyne
@Cervantes:
The relevant lines from the play:
[HAMILTON]
Sir…
I heard your name at Princeton. I was seeking an accelerated course of study when I got sort of out of sorts with a buddy of yours. I may have punched him. It’s a blur, sir. He handles the financials?
[BURR]
You punched the bursar
[HAMILTON]
Yes!
(The history is slightly off — Hamilton actually punched a different university official at Princeton, but it didn’t rhyme as well “bursar” did.)
Atlantic Records has wisely made all of the lyrics publicly available — you can get lyrics to either the individual songs or download PDFs of the booklets.
Lurking Canadian
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: the track record of former Illinois state legislators who never served a full term in the Senate is so impressive that a case could be made for making it a job requirement.
Matt McIrvin
Strangely, the whispers and murmurs about Biden getting in seem to have actually increased after the debate.
Matt McIrvin
…and at this point, I don’t quite get who Biden’s target constituency is. When it looked like Hillary Clinton might just let her support erode away to nothing, it was “centrist Democrats worried about Hillary Clinton’s viability.”
Now? Is it some combination of antiwar Democrats to Clinton’s right (all five of them), people who can’t vote for a woman and people who think he’s Onion Joe?
g
an obscure former state legislator who hadn’t completed his single term as U.S. senator,
There are three such candidates on the Republican slate, as we speak.
g
@srv:
Um, no. Ronald Reagan used them all the time, he actually preferred them. And at least once, he couldn’t function when it broke down, stopping himself in mid-speech.
Google is your friend.
Cervantes
@g:
But that’s her point: it’s Obama’s fault. He “lowered the bar.”
(You’d think she’d try to avoid that particular locution.)
Cervantes
@Lurking Canadian:
!
Matt
From where Nooners is at, the bar looks really really high. Somebody help her up off the floor, will ya?