Peggy Noonan Hath Been Captured By Electronicks

Say what you will about Pegz, that broad sure can do words good, and how.

Who knew being a speechwriter for Grover Cleveland would provide employment opportunities for life? At the risk of sounding like the sexist jerk that I am; may I say I am tired of seeing and hearing this tired old piece of ass.

May you never deign to relinquish your mighty quill, most noble Athena! For the heathen who hath most barbarously usurped your scribblings most divine shall by his own greedy had be smitten.

Or smote. Or smoted. This is why we need you, Peggins, to conjugate old-ass verbs.

[re=529265]Advocatus_Diaboli[/re]: Ye Antipodean Media-Empire of Rupert FitzMurdoch doth seek to increase its Profittes; therefore, ye Commoners who heretofore accessed ye Webb-Syte absent of charge, shall no longer be countenanced.

[re=529271]Naked Bunny with a Whip[/re]: Best comment about Peggy Nooningtan ever!

[re=529283]Katydid[/re]: I only read your excerpt and now I want to stab something too.

[re=529283]Katydid[/re]: Forsooth, there is a Moor inhabiting ye White-House, who hath taken on divers Aires and playeth the Game known to his ilk as Basket-Balle, and needeth to be taken down a Peg or three, anent he further sully the Reputation of Washington-City.

Hey, writing like a Colonial almanack-printer is fun!

[re=529293]dogscantlookup[/re]: Ye Bathysphering soundeth like something which Doctor Franklin of Philad’a might Conjure in his Studio of Infernal Tricks, where he hath taken French-Maides for divers purposes, perhaps Harlotry, or perhaps Sorcery; but ye Snorkkelling involveth as it does the Union of two Men in ye Water, one wearing an Undersea-Garment, whilst he arouseth the Humors in his Partner; and when after a Tme ye Partner prepareth to fain swoon in the arms of Eros, then shalt the Man in the Undersea-Garment dive into Poseidon’s deepest reaches and consume the very Seed of his Partner, fain it dissolveth in the watery Liquor in which they sitteth.

Pleafe, fpeake ye no more of this fnorkelling. I find it moft upfetting.

Too much work for something I won’t understand.

What a luminous, numinous aura of purest gossammer idiocy does Miz Noonan weave. It is certainly a progression of ideas that belongs behind a wall, if only to protect the gullible and feebleminded. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Miz Noonan’s two biggest subjects of adoration in recent history were Saint Ronald the Jellybean Aficionado and some sock puppet named George, an ex-cheerleader from Andover who ran back and forth over his daddy’s last nerve until he got kicked to the last bit of upstairs we have. You remember — the one who thought Top Gun was a war documentary and that real leaders stuck to their decisions even if everybody knew they were completely wrong.
And then Miz Noonan’s biggest comlaint (or at least her most memorable one) about healthcare was “Stop — you’re frightening us!” It was as though someone took the country mouse to the supermarket and she was terrified at acre of enclosed stuff under that many fluorescent lights. It’s a perfectly valid reaction for some people — but it’s amazing that Noonan found it a valid argument against preventing 600,000 people a year from declare bankruptcy because they can’t afford their medical bills.
Anyway — it seems that this very same Peggy Noonan — who thinks that airplanes are conveyed from origin to destination in the merciful hands of a Just God (and no wonder she hates that fraudulent Pilots’ union!) — finds our current presidential candidates to be a gang of frivolous lightweights. Oh, but of course. If only we had the gravitas of Nancy Reagan’s astrologer, things would be much, much better.
How expensive is this Wall Street Journal paywall behind which lurk the calcified giblets of Miz Noonan’s innermost thoughts? It is not enough — this much I know.

Poor, poor Peggy Noonan. She wants to write a piece about how all presidential candidates are completely whacko, which is not a bad premise. It certainly requires an amount of self-confidence that is way beyond normal and a heightened sense of competitiveness in an already over competitive society.
So, she runs down the list. Hillary Clinton, temper tantrums, check. John McCain, swears at wife, check. Sarah Palin, doesn’t have a clue, lost in her own head, check. John Edwards, well everybody just knows about John Edwards.
Barack Obama…smartest person in the room and sometimes interrupts other people while they’re talking…shit.

[re=529294]President Beeblebrox[/re]: Greatest comment in the historie of ye Englishe.

[re=529294]President Beeblebrox[/re]: Thread over.

[re=529255]JeffGoldblum[/re]: He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health,
a boy’s love, or a whore’s oath.

[re=529293]dogscantlookup[/re]: [re=529294]President Beeblebrox[/re]: The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne, burnt on the water.

The poop was beaten gold…

Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes.

[re=529310]gurukalehuru[/re]: More matter with less art.

[re=529307]Wugou[/re]: Slanders, sir.

For the satirical rogue says here that old men
have grey beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging
thick amber and plum-tree gum, and that they have a plentiful
lack of wit, together with most weak hams; all which, sir, though
I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not honesty
to have it thus set down, for yourself, sir, shall grow old as I am, if
like a crab you could go backward.

They think somebody’s going to pay to read Peggy Noonan?

Gather thine monstrous Geuggle ballistae and trebuchet-likke moteur de recherche, to assaulteth his moste vomitous Lord Meur d’Oc’s payewalle…free thine Ladye Neunnington from his blackguard clutches!

Wow. This whole thread has broken my brain. I’m going to go by some green tights and set up my booth at a RenFair, FORTHWITH!

Gad zooks!

First Dame “Faithful” Quinn and now Lady Peg have been barred from view by the hoi polloi.

This will not stande.

As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods,
They kill us for their sport.

Fuck you and your paywall, Rupert. “A president with shiny hair” — hahaha! Enjoy!

It was 1976 and I was interviewing Democratic presidential candidates as they came through Boston for the Massachusetts primary. One of them was Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, who came into our radio studios with a small entourage. The Washington state Democrat talked about his issues, mostly national defense. He was an intelligent and accomplished man, a serious one, but that day he was very dull. He just repeated what he always said. This was in the early days of soundbites, when candidates had first twigged on to the fact that whatever they said, in speech or interview, TV and radio producers were going to cut it down into a 14-second snip, so they might as well dictate the soundbites themselves.
Whenever I hear broadcast journalists complain about candidates’ prefabricated talking points I think: Don’t only blame them, you did it too, they’re just trying to fit their candidacy into your reality.
So Jackson was repeating the same things he said everywhere, and I, mesmerized, struck dumb by boredom, began to daydream. I noticed he had a scratch on his face. He’d cut himself shaving. I imagined him looking at his face in the mirror that morning, lathered up, wielding a straight razor and thinking, “I’m the man who should be president.” What a funny thing to think, I thought. Hey, that might be an interesting question.
So I asked him why he wanted to be the leader of the free world, as we used to say and no longer do. Why would he want to command the U.S. nuclear arsenal, why should the weight of so much potential history be on his shoulders? I think I asked it badly. There was silence when I finished.
He blinked, startled. “I’m not crazy, you know!”
I said I didn’t mean to suggest he was, only that it took a certain interesting, even outlandish confidence to think you should be president.
He nodded, and began again to repeat his rote stand on the issues.
Only now do I realize I had a story: Presidential Candidate Insists He’s Not Mad!
But lately I think maybe they all are.
The recent spate of political books says they are. In “Game Change,” by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, almost all of the 2008 candidates appear to be truly barking mad.
“Game Change” came out two months ago, but I can’t stop thinking about it. It is written and reported by rigorous and believable reporters who are professionals. They didn’t make it up. They know the rules. Their prose is sometimes bodice-ripping and over the top, sometimes thumpingly clichéd, but no one to my knowledge has come forward to say, “I didn’t say that!” or, “That’s a lie!”
And really one wishes they had.
Not only do staffers turn on candidates in this book, but candidates turn on staffers. At times you get the impression people were wearing wires. But the overwhelming fact the book communicates is that our candidates for president are emotionally volatile, extreme personalities. They spend a lot of time being enraged. They don’t trust those around them. They desperately want power and want to be celebrated, but they don’t know what they want to do with power beyond wield it, and they seem incapable of reflection about why they need to be admired. Most seriously, they show little interest in, or even awareness of, the central crises of their time.
Hillary Clinton, made wild by her snake-bit campaign, has temper tantrums, fires staffers, weeps, rehires them. “Let’s talk turkey,” she says to one. “Let’s talk ham. Let’s talk tortillas.” She considered her husband’s administration “soft.” Her presidential operation would be staffed by the “hardheaded and hard boiled” who “embraced her conception of politics as total war.” When she won the New Hampshire primary, she declared in a victory speech, “I come tonight with a very, very full heart. . . . I listened to you, and in the process I found my own voice.” Minutes later, with a “puffed out chest,” she high-fives her staffers and explains her victory: “I get really tough when people f— with me.” When offered the vice presidential nomination, she is ambivalent. “I’ve already done that job,” she told her pollster, Mark Penn. She had already been vice president, in her husband’s presidency.
John McCain, too, is extreme. At one point he screams 12 f-words in a 13-word sentence. He is speaking to his wife. In a key pre-2008 planning session, everything is discussed—operations, organization, budgets, office space, proposed logo and state-by-state strategy—everything except the meaning or purpose of Mr. McCain’s run. He presides looking “vaguely bored,” his detachment “striking but not entirely unusual.” During the financial crash, he boldly suspends his campaign and calls for a White House meeting with the leadership of both parties. When called on to speak, he has, actually, nothing to say. In the harried days after Sarah Palin is chosen, she turns to a McCain aide with an urgent question: “My brand is hair up, isn’t it?” During debate prep, Mrs. Palin shuts down, “chin on her chest, arms folded, eyes cast to the floor . . . lost in what those around her described as a kind of catatonic stupor.” Mr. McCain’s four top aides hold a conference call to discuss whether she is “mentally unstable.”
Barack Obama, who interestingly gets the best treatment in the book—protect those sources!—is not immune. He is smart, “and he not only knew it but wanted to make sure that everyone else knew it.” In meetings with aides, he controlled the conversation by interrupting whoever was talking. He is boastful, gaudily confident. Before his 2004 convention speech, a reporter asked him if he was nervous: “I’m LeBron, baby,” he answers. “I got some game.”
Messrs. Heilleman and Halperin speak of what they call postmodern politics as “a meat grinder/flesh incinerator.” It is that. Perhaps now only the deeply strange apply for entrance.
A companion volume, “The Politician,” is not a history but a memoir about working for John Edwards, of whom nothing can be said that does not feel like pile-on. Author Andrew Young seems to be trying to be truthful within the limits of his ability to observe and understand, which appear to be real limits. His centerpiece is the Rielle Hunter scandal, but more interesting is the sheer, extraterrestrial weirdness of John Edwards’s mental processes. On the morning of 9/11, in the midst of Washington’s chaos, Young runs into Mr. Edwards leaving the Dirksen Senate Office Building. He calls the capitol police to find out where to take the senator. “They were overwhelmed,” writes Mr. Young. Yes, they would be. He is told only senators “in the direct line of succession” get Secret Service protection. Mr. Edwards, when told this, is “angered” and drives home to be with his family. At an early campaign meeting, he gives a set speech to potential supporters. One, political veteran Erskine Bowles, asks Edwards why he should vote for him, what makes him qualified.
“The room fell silent.” The senator “struggled to answer.” “I realized,” says Mr. Young, that in all the hours of talk, no one had said anything about what an Edwards presidency would mean for America.”
It would mean we had a president with shiny hair.
The shallowness, the lack of seriousness of modern presidential candidates is almost unbelievable. It is also a mystery: How could this be? If today a candidate told me he was not crazy, I will go with it, for it would be news.

There hasn’t been a mome rath that could outgrabe Peggy Noonan, that’s for sureth.

It’s for our own good, just like they crated up the Ark of the Covenant.

[re=529355]norbizness[/re]: She’s being studied by top men. Top. Men.

[re=529297]DoktorZoom[/re]: Oh, pullschid.

I remember when soft-headed crybabies were caterwauling about the NYT editorials being behind a pay wall. It’s the end of satire, they moaned, what with the latest musings from David Brooks and William Kristol made inaccessible to us broke-us bastards.

I mean, do they complain that they can’t actually see radioactive waste because it’s being hidden behind a steel barrel?

Somebody should remind Pegs of this column 2.5 years from now when she’s taking Cleveland Steamers from the Romney/Palin ticket and declaring them to be the wisdom of the ages.

So I readeth the goddamned thing. Jesus H. Christeth. Better shiny hair than cast iron brain like the guy who WAS in charge, Dame Nooningtonethski.

Happy birthday, Jim Newell!

So she worked for (and worshipped)Reagan who was clinically brain-damaged and senile and now she wants to call No-drama Obama insane?

I just can’t …. can’t…. (>pop< head explodes)

[re=529255]JeffGoldblum[/re]:

Meh. She’s the only writer I know- besides George Will- that manages a style which is somehow constipated and verbose at the same time.

How do you say “leet haxor skillz” in Peggington Noonington-speak? Anyway, now that I’ve broken through the firewall and accessed Dame N’s column, I’m still waiting for Jim to recap so I don’t have to actually read the damned thing.

Out of all the articles on Wonkette I so look forward to anything about Lady Dame Peggyton Goodwyfe Of Noonenton-on-the-pond.

It’s like how I look forward to The Onion’s Jean Teasdale articles.

Full fathom five thy column lies

Seeke. Easy.