Wonkette

It’s tough to tell someone you love that they’re being sent to the assisted-living place and will only be able to submit columns to the Nursing Home Newsletter, but today’s the day we send off Grandma Peggy Noonan. A bizarre love ode to Rick Santorum finally convinced us it was time:

But here’s an exception: the state of Pennsylvania, which has been this year a bright patch of meaning. Its U.S. Senate contest has been the great race of the cycle, the one about which conservatives in their hearts most care. And not only conservatives, but those who know, for whatever reason and in whatever way, that there is something truly at stake here, something beyond mere red team and blue.

That would be Sen. Rick Santorum. The sense among so many people — including politicians and journalists — is that the Senate needs his sort, his kind.

Christ! She’s putting out this regal bullshit about a screeching Jesus Freak obsessed with screwing dogs, an embarrassing twit who makes the rest of the Senate seem almost dignified in comparison. His approval rate in Pennsylvania (where he hasn’t lived for years) is in Bush Territory, the 30s. Bob Casey has a double-digit lead. Where are these “politicians and journalists,” Peggy? You know, besides Santorum and yourself? Enjoy the rest home! Tuesday is Taco Night! MORE »

Last night, Team Wonkette rubbed elbows with the D.C. media elite, at the third annual presentation of the Michael Kelly Award:

The $25,000 award is given annually to a journalist whose work exemplifies a quality that animated Michael Kelly’s own career: the fearless pursuit and expression of truth. Kelly, who was the editor of two Atlantic Media publications, The Atlantic Monthly and National Journal, was killed while covering the war in Iraq in 2003.

It was a delightful evening, definitely one of the better parties that we’ve crashed attended lately. As media junkies, our heads were left spinning from all the star-spotting: Peggy Noonan! Adam Nagourney! Howard Fineman! Gwen Ifill! Matt Cooper! (But where was FROOMKIN???)

After the jump, additional commentary on the evening — plus fabulous photos, by Liz Gorman. Enjoy!

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• Inside Politics: Peggy Noonan’s predictions for ‘06: “The Democratic Party continues as the dead man walking of American politics” and “the Republicans are not on their deathbed but they are in heavy therapy.”. . . Bill Clinton sends an e-pitch for his wife’s campaign. [WT]

For those of you who were impressed by the Note’s “leaking” of today’s Presidential address: There is no Presidential address. And here we always thought of pretend freelance speechwriting as Peggy Noonan’s schtick. We admit we were almost taken in ourselves, especially at the top, where Bush sounded like Tracy Flick. By the time we got to the part about 10 billion dollars for carpools and mass transit, however. . . Of course, that bit was about 2000 words in. Should have tipped us off right there: Robert Byrd doesn’t give speeches that long anymore. We assume most readers just stopped after the first paragraph as usual. MORE »

Give Peggy Noonan credit: She’s not going to let a mere heat-based hallucination deter her columnizing. Indeed, in today’s Wall Street Journal, she draws back the curtain on the workings of her own, uhm, gelatinous muse to demonstrate a causal relationship:

the humidity [is] just high enough that you feel like you’re walking through pleasantly warm gelatin as you walk along the streets. A good time for a general political overview, I say.

Hear, hear! A good time, too, to administer transitions as though you’re in the lightning-round of Password:

. . . half the country would be relieved to have a lazy president as he’d do less and make us less nervous.
And there is Iraq.

So there is! But what of. . .the bookends of terror? Let Peggy, uhm, explain:

It started with terror and has ended with no-terror-since.
That’s a big reason [Bush's] base is still with him, and that’s why a lot of Americans, when you come right down to it, are with him.
Those are the bookends. And the great question of course is: Will the second bookend hold? Every fact of our domestic political future rests on the answer to that.

And with that settled, we’re off, of course, to the next obvious transition:

A word on Mrs. Bush. Everyone knows she is popular and admired . . .

Indeed. By plasticene people with looking-glass eyes. –HOLLY MARTINS MORE »