Here is the Wall Street Journal’s important journalistic follow-up expose on Erick Erickson’s infallible plan to convenience Olympia Snowe out of office, forever. Erick Erickson was so stoked yesterday about getting a call from the WSJ, and check out all this killer contextualization he did. MORE »

• HEY IF YOU WANT TO READ THAT SARAH PALIN EXCERPT COLLECTION THAT THE WSJ TOOK DOWN… Then one thing you can do, if you’re fancy, is subscribe to the WSJ’s Washington Wire RSS Feed for your Google Reader or whatever, and the article should still be there in full. We were considering just posting the whole thing as screen grabs, but who wants to get sued? [WSJ Washington Wire]

What is troubling our Upper East Side princess of wordsmithery on this fine Friday? Health care! Not the lack of it, of course — Peggy could give a crap about the 40 million Americans with no access to basic health care, the kind of wretched untouchables who never see a doctor outside of an emergency room, with a sick child, swollen with some easily preventable illness had only a pediatrician been something within economic reach. Peggy isn’t impressed by this liberal president already delivering government-backed health care for another 3.5m uninsured kids, either. What she wants, this wealthy Wall Street Journal columnist, is some soaring bullshit rhetoric about health care, on her teevee. Worked for Reagan! MORE »

Regarding George Will’s anti-blue jeans column of today, the Wall Street Journal had a much funnier “denim sucks” column, by your editor’s actual relative-by-marriage Daniel Akst, three weeks ago. DO NOT CLAIM YOU DON’T READ THE WSJ, GEORGE. Dan’s column is also far less elitist than Bow-tie George’s thing, because instead of Will’s example of regular American activity — playing golf, natch — Akst’s “you don’t need dungarees for that” example is “people who spend most of their waking hours punching keys instead of cows.” And then he goes in for the kill with “It looks bad on almost everyone who isn’t thin, yet has somehow made itself the unofficial uniform of the fattest people in the world.” [Wall Street Journal]

Every day is Good Friday in the Wall Street Journal, because Friday is Peggy’s Day, and this week her wonderful Declaration is right there in the headline, “At Least Bush Kept Us Safe.” Wait, what? Let’s just ask the old Internets here and double-check, because it is so hard to remember, say, when TERRORISTS BLEW UP MOTHERFUCKING MANHATTAN, WITH JETS, WHICH RUINED EVERYTHING FOREVER. MORE »

We’ve had a wonderful year with our favorite columns-writer-of, Peggy Noonan — maybe because, in our hearts, we knew this day was coming, this declaration to end all declarations. And here, today, we have our reward, our moment of grace. As usual, as always, our Peggy doesn’t bother with tired old introductions and such — this is, after all, a woman who burst into Bloomingdale’s and demanded pen and paper, one day, when she chanced upon a Mexican. Instead, she drops the bomb we always expected, like this: “The case for Barack Obama, in broad strokes:” And then she makes her case, which contains the most delightfully cruel assessment of John McCain’s delusional character we’ve even encountered. MORE »

Have you seen the new movie about The Batman? If so, you know what everybody is talking about: How dead Heath Ledger is super awesome as the crazy-ass Joker terrorist. How the idiot George W. Bush is exactly like the heroic Englishman, The Batman. “There seems to me no question that the Batman film The Dark Knight, currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war,” writes some dingbat on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page today. Yep, no question at all. [Wall Street Journal]

Our girlfriend Peggy Noonan has been more enjoyable than usual this year, as a tragically drawn-out Democratic primary battle provided her with endless opportunities to touch herself while Barack Obama spoke pretty things, and to then guiltily wash her hands and realize that Obama was, in fact, the Democrat and not Ronald Reagan and, indeed, kind of “multicultural,” if you get our drift. But all that tortured eloquence has vanished from Peggy’s column, because the oxycontin/vodka cocktail hit hard as soon as she finished typing the relatively sane setup of today’s “Declarations.” MORE »

Even more bad news for Republicans and John McCain today, courtesy of Reagan Revolutionary Peggy Noonan: Everybody loves Obama and hates the GOP, the end. Ha, not really. Peggy has a whole column to write, so she needs to explain exactly how badly the Republican Party will be stomped by the Democrats in November, even in slave states like Mississippi, where only Trent Lott’s family can legally vote. Let’s see what kind of weird new words and phrases Peggy makes up this week, after the jump. MORE »

Ever since Reagan-era propagandist Peggy Noonan started reading Wonkette this month, we’ve all noticed a spring in her step and a bee in her brain. Peggy is back, and people have taken notice. According to an anonymous “liberal journalist” who tipped William Powers at the National Journal, Noonan now has “the best political column these days, by far.” Congratulations, Peggy! You are our shining city on a hill. [National Journal]

It’s not every day that Ronald Reagan’s favorite speechwriter admits she not only reads Wonkette, but laughs at it. So we were very pleased this morning to see that Peggy Noonan, our nation’s most beloved newspaper columnist since 1911, mentioned our New Hampshire coverage and a particularly Victorian bit of high-minded satire we dropped along the way: MORE »