← Friday Blogaround
Only From The New Yorker →
Peggy Noonan Is An Idiot
Wow, there's a news flash. Glenn Greenwald has the details.
In her Wall St. Journal column today, Peggy Noonan offers up a Santa-like checklist of which presidential candidates are "reasonable" and which ones aren't. In describing the attributes that Americans want in a President, she says: "I claim here to speak for thousands, millions." On behalf of the throngs for whom she fantasizes she speaks, Noonan proclaims: "We are grown-ups … We'd like knowledge, judgment, a prudent understanding of the world and of the ways and histories of the men and women in it."
This grown-up then proceeds to pronounce that Romney, McCain, Giuliani, Thompson and Duncan Hunter are all "reasonable" — as are Biden, Dodd, Richardson and Obama (though too young and inexperienced to be President) — but this is what she says about John Edwards:
John Edwards is not reasonable…..[W]e can't have a president who spent two minutes on YouTube staring in a mirror and poofing his hair. Really, we just can't.
John Edwards, however, is disqualified, because four years ago, he was caught red-handed brushing his hair before a television appearance — "poofing," in Noonan's words, which isn't really a word at all, but rather, a British epithet for a male homosexual — "Slang: Disparaging and Offensive" — a synonym for "faggot." Noonan is making the same point Ann Coulter made: Edwards can't possibly be President because he's a faggot. And to make her "grown-up" case for this, she cites one of our national media's most talked-about political stories of both 2004 and again in 2007: Edwards' brushing of his hair.
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.
What gets me is that after seven years of the Bush administration, Ms. Noonan can seriously complain about a lack of "grown-ups" in the political spectrum. Is she truly incapable of seeing the irony in that kind of statement? And we're not just talking about appearances and shallow surface details here; we're talking about an administration that raised adolescent petulance and schoolyard bullying to a global dimension. She begs for mature leadership and she's calling John Edwards a faggot. Zoinks.
Categories: Campaign 2008, Right Wing Nutsery