Peggy Noonan Passionata: A Plea to Save Democrats

Mixed Messages from the Wall Street Journal Political Gossip Columnist

Declarations - WSJ.com




What’s up with Peggy Noonan? Isn’t she the former Republican speechwriter, now turned political gossip columnist for the Wall Street Journal? Here’s what an online bio had to say about her:

In 1996, Noonan was one of ten historians and writers who contributed essays on the American presidency for the book, “Character Above All.” In 1995 she wrote and hosted a PBS series on the debate over American values. Noonan was a special assistant to President Ronald Reagan from 1984 to 1986. In 1988 she was chief speechwriter for George Bush when he ran for the presidency.

Character above all? Yo, that poses a moralist’s dilemma. So you gotta’ wonder why, in her “Damsel in Distress” column in the Wall Street Journal of Saturday, May 10, the former CBS producer spews venom in the direction of Hillary Clinton as if she were on the short list of VP candidates on the Obama ticket. Okay, she doesn’t like Obama, either, but Noonan’s poison pen puts her into the circle of hell reserved for people like Ann Coulter who said she’d vote for Hillary Clinton if John McCain became the GOP presidential nominee.

Ya’ gotta’ wonder why Noonan would worry about “damage…to its (Dems) standard-bearer” and “who will save the Democratic Party in 2008. ” I’m sure her posturing in this piece is disingenuous, at best, and perhaps mixed with a little Southern Plantation Belle in a taboo flirtation with a house servant. Noonan makes no effort to disguise her hatred and contempt for Hillary and she’s playing to the worst elements in both major parties.

Hillary Hate Inc. has an agenda which extends from the dark corners of the left-liberal fascist mind to the excesses of the wing-nut Hillary bashing escapades of the 90s.

Look, it’s okay with me that many people don’t like Hillary for president; my point is that the level of vituperation directed at the woman is destructive to everyone in America. It’s a debasement of the national psyche.

It’s a clumsy, stumbling, rambling piece of snide race-baiting that Noonan is trying to pull off. She refers to the “Brazile-Begala smackdown” on CNN as an example of Hillary Clinton’s “racism.” Of course, Paul Begala is an idiot, and the “shape of (his) mouth” is not connected to “what the mouth says.” But if Noonan wants to apply the Begala association to Hillary, then the next paragraph should apply Jeremiah Wright to Obama but, of course, it doesn’t. That would take some “Character Above All,” and Noonan is more about about self-satisfaction, Clinton hating vitriol, journalistic solipsism than courage.

In Peggy Noonan’s Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Noonan engages in the colonial patronization of African-Americans with a big kiss-up to Donna Brazile. Brazile is quoted verbatim and at great length in the piece in what Noonan clearly considers a wonderful putdown of a____hole Begala. It’s a paen, a homage to a quaint little African-American culture, as Noonan sees it, but it’s lame, really lame, as lame as the throwback line she copped from an Obama flack: “Even Richard Nixon didn’t say ‘white”….even with the Southern Strategy.” Oooh, my heart’s a-twitter--brave stuff!