Friday, December 28, 2007

Peggy Noonan slap-down

To some extent, Peggy Noonan is responsible for the vacuity and empty flag waving and cross bearing of today's political rhetoric. Not that demagoguery are anything new or unique to our time, but today's Bush speeches and Thompson declarations owe as much to her speeches for Reagan as any other influence. Nowadays her posture as some sort of "reasonable" elder statesperson simply because she's not quite as rabid and reactionary as today's bunch of Republican neo-conservatives is incredibly irritating, since she's just as annoying as ever and only benefits by comparison to the likes of Tom Tancredo, Dick Cheney, Ann Coulter, and Michael Savage.

So it's nice to see Glenn Greenwald do a full-on takedown:
What a stupid and vapid woman this is, but respected and admired by our media class because she fits right in with them -- endlessly impressed by her own sophistication, maturity and insight while drooling out platitudes one never hears except in seventh-grade cafeterias and on our political talk shows. As always, this isn't worth noting because the adolescent stupidity on display here is unique to Noonan, but precisely because it isn't. This is how our national elections are decided: by people like her, spewing things like this.

Nice.

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