'If I Say McCain Won the Debate, They Won't Notice When I Say Palin's a Dumb Clown'

Oh, it's "Peggy Day," meaning Friday, the blessed weekly occurrence of Peggy Noonan's myriad declarations on the sepia-toned pages of theWall Street Journal. Your morning editor took a whack at this earlier today, and gave up -- "I am not old enuff to understand Peggy Noonan's cultural references," she said, lazily. Your afternoon editor also abstained. "You should write about Peggy Noonan," he whines. "I can't handle her. I don't have any speed." Oh what's the matter little diaper babies? Did Peggy's terrifying schizophreniablow your little pussy minds? 

There are four (4) themes, one (1) meme and one (1) defiant/crazy conclusion in Noonan's latest chapter of her upcoming best-seller, "What I Saw At The Sanitarium." The themes are, a) My Brave Battles With Known Reality On Our Planet, b) The Evils of Eloquence, c) Dumb and Vulgar American Lowlifes Have Ruined Everything I Ever Cared About, and d) The Only People Who Would Believe A and B Will Be Outraged by C and D.

Then, for a fun ending, she flirtatiously dares the cops to seize her, bodily, tonight.

Theme One combines two patently, obviously false premises:

I can well imagine hearing, the day after Election Day, a lot of "You won't believe it but I was literally in line at the polling station when I decided."

and,

John McCain won the debate, and he did it by making the case more effectively than he has in the past that Barack Obama will raise taxes, when "now, of all times in America, we need to cut people's taxes."

The only way her first bit could possibly be true is if she wakes on November 5 in a mental hospital, and the "line" is the one feeding sedatives to her bloodstream from a clear plastic bag hanging from a chrome IV trolley, and she's hearing "a lot" of this because she's screaming it over and over again, to a bemused nurse from Harlem.

As for the second Declaration, McCain died during that excruciating debate and was replaced with a leering hell monster during one of Obama's long answers. The only metric by which McCain "won" that debate was on the level of "instilling dread and horror." And crankily repeating an obviously untrue talking point -- "Colored will raise everybody's taxes, HEHGHNGH HEHENGHG!" -- is not winning anything, it is losing in a particularly stupid and graceless manner.

But, Ms. Noonan must feed her readers a bit of pre-digested "red meat," lest the clods at Free Republic and The Corner start calling for her simultaneous rape and decapitation and a wingnut time-travel journey to murder her mother before Peggy is conceived. After all, this is what the Modern Conservative Movement has done to basically every public intellectual or common newspaper/website hack who previously leaned Republican -- this is because the Modern Conservative Movement is nothing but a fat mob of actual retarded people who stopped learning words once they got to "Nigger."

Let's not get ahead of ourselves, because Peggy still needs to make Crazy Point B, which is the utterly insincere/absurd GOP talking point that Barack Obama, this mud African from the apes, is so crazy smart that he will someone trick the crackers into voting for him, because of his Eloquence, because you know how impressed the bitters are by intellect and verbal dexterity.

[McCain] also scored Mr. Obama on his eloquence, using it against him more effectively than Hillary Clinton ever did. When she said he was "just words," it sounded like a bitter complaint. Mr. McCain made it a charge:  Young man, you attempt to obscure truth with the mellifluous power of your words. 

So, uh, McCain lustily prosecuted his opponent for, uh, speaking well at a verbal debate. And then, heh heh, McCaintranslates his honking gibberish, in his mind's eye, back to the Waughian ripostes which occupy his inner dialogue. (THIS IS WHERE PEGGY'S ACID KICKED IN. Hang on to the desk, old gal, it's gonna be a long eight hours!)

Having dispatched one cross-eyed paragraph to the wingnut war on Mr. Talks Pretty, Noonan immediately plunges into a new drink and a new theme, one she actually believes: McCain is an inarticulate hypocrite pandering to the worst, dumbest parts of America, and this is all the fault of the idiots, who have somehow seized America's intellectual life and replaced it with an obese tattoo-covered clown masturbating to a NASCAR race on the TeeVee.

More than ever on the campaign trail, the candidates are dropping their G's. Hardworkin' families are strainin' and tryin'a get ahead. It's not only Sarah Palin but Mr. McCain, too, occasionally Mr. Obama, and, of course, George W. Bush when he darts out like the bird in a cuckoo clock to tell us we are in crisis. All of the candidates say "mom and dad": "our moms and dads who are struggling." This is Mr. Bush's former communications adviser Karen Hughes's contribution to our democratic life, that you cannot speak like an adult in politics now, that's too austere and detached, snobby. No one can say mothers and fathers, it's all now the faux down-home, patronizing—and infantilizing—moms and dads. Do politicians ever remember that in a nation obsessed with politics, our children—sorry, our kids—look to political figures for a model as to how adults sound?

Now we get to the main course, which is a snarling and funny attack on Sarah Palin. The beloved Noonan trope about how any dipshit nobody can become Ronald Reagan, as long as they're simple enough and believe urban legends, makes its regular appearance in what is otherwise a calmly considered "No thanks" to the idiot Palin mobs, and the idiot Palin herself.

You have to hold open the possibility of magic. People can come from nowhere, with modest backgrounds and short résumés, and yet be individuals of real gifts, gifts that had previously been unseen, that had been gleaming quietly under a bushel, and are suddenly revealed.

Perhaps Peggy thinks she can steer the weak-minded mouth breathers with this shiny bit of Reagan Glimmer, this phantom Gipper bullshit. She, like her New York martini-sipping liberal christ-fucker Christopher Buckley, naively believes the "Republican Base" dillweeds actuallyread the columns. Ha! They use two swollen, cheetos-stained fingers to get the Internets on the Home Page, which is Free Republic or Lucianne.com or whatever they heard about on the AM. And then, their lips move slowly as they try to comprehend the day's jihad, complete as always with the direct link to that empty comment box, and then they excitedly CTRL-V whatever ALL-CAPS bullshit from their AOL forwarded lunacy of the moment, and maybe get fancy with some misspelled freestyle of the "EXAKUTE HIMS" variety, with the John 3: 16 verse (in pink Comics Sans) in the sig. Bekky helped set that up on the 'puter before she was beaten to death in the break room at BIG LOTS!, by her husband, who had just got back from his fourth tour in Iraq, missing his right eye and three ounces of brain.

Anyway, there's no hiding from Them, Ms. Noonan, not online. But there is joy in intellectual honesty or whatever, right? And it's not like you're going to run into these people at Bloomie's .... So tell us, what do youreallythink of Sarah Palin?

She doesn't think aloud. She just ... says things.

Her supporters accuse her critics of snobbery: Maybe she's not a big "egghead" but she has brilliant instincts and inner toughness. But what instincts? "I'm Joe Six-Pack"? She does not speak seriously but attempts to excite sensation — "palling around with terrorists." If the Ayers case is a serious issue, treat it seriously. She is not as thoughtful or persuasive as Joe the Plumber, who in an extended cable interview Thursday made a better case for the Republican ticket than the Republican ticket has made. In the past two weeks she has spent her time throwing out tinny lines to crowds she doesn't, really, understand. This is not a leader, this is a follower, and she follows what she imagines is the base, which is in fact a vast and broken-hearted thing whose pain she cannot, actually, imagine. She could reinspire and reinspirit; she chooses merely to excite. She doesn't seem to understand the implications of her own thoughts.

That's a little more long-winded than your first assessment of the Palin pick -- "It's bullshit" -- but we pay you (or Murdoch does, anyway) to be long-winded. Hell, you make yourreaderslong-winded. What is this, a thousand-word blog post? Luckily, you have very few readers. Just us elitists, checking our portfolios, perusing the opera reviews in theWeekend Journal, a knowing smile when our Peggy references something from our more elegant past. We remember, too. And we all hate white trash.

Her bold closer? "At any rate, come and get me, copper."

 Palin's Failin' [Declarations]