Posted on 12/29/2007 6:15:20 AM PST by xtinct
By next week politically active Iowans will have met and tallied their votes. Their decision this year will have a huge impact on the 2008 election, and a decisive impact on various candidacies. Some will be done in. Some will be made. Some will land just right or wrong and wake up the next day to read raves or obits. A week after that, New Hampshire. The endless campaign is in fact nearing its climax.
But all eyes are on Iowa. Iowans bear a heck of a lot of responsibility this year, the first time since 1952 when there is no incumbent president or vice president in the race. All of it is wide open.
Iowa can make Obama real. It can make Hillary yesterday. It can make Huckabee a phenom and not a flash, McCain the future and not the past. Moments like this happen in history. They're the reason we get up in the morning. "What happened?" "Who won?"
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
"Duncan Hunter, Fred Thompson, and Bill Richardson are all reasonable--mature, accomplished, nonradical. Mike Huckabee gets enough demerits to fall into my not-reasonable column. John Edwards is not reasonable. All the Democrats would raise taxes as president, but Mr. Edwards's populism is the worst of both worlds, both intemperate and insincere. Also we can't have a president who spent two minutes on YouTube staring in a mirror and poofing his hair. Really, we just can't."
Joe Biden and Chris Dodd are reasonable candidates?I stopped reading at that point...
From Drudge:
NOONAN: Hillary ‘most polarizing, distrusted political figure of my lifetime’...
“reasonable—mature, accomplished, nonradical”
The first two in that sentence are Statesman. Men among boys.
Duncan and FRed.
My thoughts exactly...Peg is having a “bad column” day..
Peggy, I'd agree on Dodd as reasonable for a dim, but Biden! He's ass clown.
They have been United States senators for a combined 62 years.
That my dear Peggy, is a major problem in my book, not an asset
They've read a raw threat file or two.
Wow, they read! That's a real asset!
They have experience, sophistication, the long view. They know how it works.
All true. But, missing is the one word that we really need. That word is LEADERSHIP
No one will have to explain it to them.
Somehow, I doubt that
I just don’t see support for McCain-Feingold as reasonable by any standard.
I believe that. He's not my number one choice but we'd be better off with him than McCain, Huckabee or Guliani, IMO
Tax-and-spend Dims are not reasonable and Noonan is foolish to claim that they are.
Wasn’t Chtis Dodd involved in the waitress sandwich with Ted Kennedy? That’s reasonable?
Duncan Hunter is the only reasonable.
She praises her list of candidates with faint damns and damns others with faint praise.
I expect a journalist of her conservative stature to have the courage of her convictions and not waste our time with simplistic analysis, unenlightening remarks and her non-conclusions we've read a thousand times elsewhere.
What a soft-headed article. I think she's now embedded in the establishment media circle of the bad, the beautiful and the mushy.
Leni
Not to parse it too fine, there are at least five degrees of separation from reality in one sentence about Obama:
1 He has earned the attention of the country...with passionate supporters
2 such as JFK hand Ted Sorensen,
3 who has told me he sees in Obama’s mind and temperament
4 the kind of gifts Kennedy displayed
5 during the Cuban missile crisis.
I count Noonan among those too scared to say something against Obama, meek enough to feel she has to say something nice.
Nevertheless...GO OBAMA!!! Our best opponent by far.
Peggy Noonan wrote nice articles about Ronald Reagan. I hope after IOWA, the race is thrown WIDE OPEN, and we get to the National Conventions both parties are without a winner, and in the summer pick a candidate that never campaigned.
I agree with you.
I don’t use the “reasonable” criteria, but my criteria provides the same results.
If we have to have a Democrat president, I would rather it be Dodd or Biden at this point in history rather than “wet behind the ears”, or “the most evil person in the world”.
I believe that Hunter is the only true conservative on the Republican ticket, but Thompson is close and I can support Romney. No way for Huckabee.
Guiliani is the puzzle piece. I would support him against any Democrat candidate, but I wouldn’t be happy doing it.
I’m afraid I don’t read Peggy since she seriously urged in her column that Cheney resign. I think she’s lovely but possibly a bit touched in the head.
I doubt if a quarter of the people that call themselves Democrats ever know who he is.
agreed!
He doesn't have the catchy name like Barack Obama, or a celebrity like Oprah to support him. Besides, there is some substance to Richardson, because he has actually made executive decisions as governor. That's a disadvantage with democrats, because in the make-believe world of leadership in the Senate, actual decisions are an option.
I'm sure I agree that Rudy is not a desirable candidate. His chaotic life of cruelty toward his family renders him incapable of winning. His radical liberalism renders him incapable of winning.
I think Noonan is wrong about Giuliani being reasonable. It is not reasonable to have those skeletons that he has and to believe that you can win the conservative vote in America. He has wasted a lot of time and money on his narcissism.
I have trouble seeing these two as “reasonable” both are far leftists that never saw a citizen disarmament law they couldn’t push.
Noonan did a great job as Reagan’s speech writer. Her Challenger speech is one of the best ever.
she'll probably take this awful age by a landslide.
Exactly. Biden and Dodd? Reasonable? She has lost her mind.
You’ve got to learn to continue reading, Farmer Dean.
Let’s face it. Ron Paul is not going to win this election; neither is Dennis Kucinich. (Nor would MY personal choice, Newt Gingrich)
The point of the article is to identify those leading candidates whose election would be disastrous for our country: 1) Hillary Clinton 2) John Edwards and 3) Mike Huckabee.
Noonan does NOT say Joe Biden and Chris Dodd are great candidates, just that they wouldn’t wreck the country if they were president.
If you REALLY want to do something to help your country, throw your own congressman out of office this time around. If EVERYBODY did that, we could truly take America back.
Bill Richardson is a fraud and a Clinton crony and facilitator. Having lived in New Mexico, and seen him at work, I would NEVER vote for him!!!
Fred on the other hand is great, though a little to reserved for the general public to get excited about.
LOL So true
She did use the word reasonable,and she just lost my interest at that point.I don’t waste my time reading an article that’s just a s—t shoveling exercise.
I think she may have written this one too, if so, it's not too shabby either.
The Boys of Pointe du Hoc
We're here to mark that day in history when the Allied peoples joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty. For four long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow. Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved, and the world prayed for its rescue. Here in Normandy the rescue began. Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history.
We stand on a lonely, windswept point on the northern shore of France. The air is soft, but forty years ago at this moment, the air was dense with smoke and the cries of men, and the air was filled with the crack of rifle fire and the roar of cannon. At dawn, on the morning of the 6th of June 1944, 225 Rangers jumped off the British landing craft and ran to the bottom of these cliffs. Their mission was one of the most difficult and daring of the invasion: to climb these sheer and desolate cliffs and take out the enemy guns. The Allies had been told that some of the mightiest of these guns were here and they would be trained on the beaches to stop the Allied advance.
The Rangers looked up and saw the enemy soldiers -- at the edge of the cliffs shooting down at them with machine-guns and throwing grenades. And the American Rangers began to climb. They shot rope ladders over the face of these cliffs and began to pull themselves up. When one Ranger fell, another would take his place. When one rope was cut, a Ranger would grab another and begin his climb again. They climbed, shot back, and held their footing. Soon, one by one, the Rangers pulled themselves over the top, and in seizing the firm land at the top of these cliffs, they began to seize back the continent of Europe. Two hundred and twenty-five came here. After two days of fighting only ninety could still bear arms.
Behind me is a memorial that symbolizes the Ranger daggers that were thrust into the top of these cliffs. And before me are the men who put them there.
These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.
Gentlemen, I look at you and I think of the words of Stephen Spender's poem. You are men who in your 'lives fought for life...and left the vivid air signed with your honor'...
Forty summers have passed since the battle that you fought here. You were young the day you took these cliffs; some of you were hardly more than boys, with the deepest joys of life before you. Yet you risked everything here. Why? Why did you do it? What impelled you to put aside the instinct for self-preservation and risk your lives to take these cliffs? What inspired all the men of the armies that met here? We look at you, and somehow we know the answer. It was faith, and belief; it was loyalty and love.
The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next. It was the deep knowledge -- and pray God we have not lost it -- that there is a profound moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest. You were here to liberate, not to conquer, and so you and those others did not doubt your cause. And you were right not to doubt.
You all knew that some things are worth dying for. One's country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it's the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man. All of you loved liberty. All of you were willing to fight tyranny, and you knew the people of your countries were behind you.
I love Ms. Noonan, but one of her last articles rubbed me the wrong way. She seems to believe that the Republican Party is intolerant now, because religion has played such a large role in the campaign. I disagree. The front runners, at various times, have been Huckabee (Southern Baptist), Romney (Mormon), Giuliani (Catholic liberal), and McCain (Episcopal I think but rarely speaks of religion.) Ms. Noonan I think was overreacting.
Now that I have commented on her past article, I’ll be sure and read this one. :)
If writing speeches for Presidents Reagan and Bush(41) makes Miss Noonan a political expert, does writing intelligence reports and briefings for Presidents Carter and Reagan make me a foreign policy expert?
IMHO - slow and steady wins the race..
Zack:
Senator McCain was Episcopal, but recently became a Baptist. Senator Thompson is Church of Christ and I’m not sure about Congressmen Hunter or Paul.
No one talks about that, but I see that as a real possibility this year. I think at least one of the parties has a brokered convention.
>>Bill Richardson is a fraud and a Clinton crony and facilitator.<<
“Reasonable” Bill Richardson just said that we should immediately cut all military aid to Pakistan. Doesn’t sound any more “reasonable” to me than than Jimmy Carter’s decision to get rid of the Shah of Iran in the late 1970s. Yes, Musharraf is a corrupt thug, but who would fill the power vacuum after he was gone?
clueless...
but I thought Peggy Noonan did an ok job of pointing out the positives and the flaws in each candidate
It's important to get difference perspectives when voting in the primaries.
Independent here... leaning toward Fred who seems like the most normal of the bunch...
Yes, she seemed to think that Bush should replace Cheney after the accidental shooting. That was the most offensive, asinine Noonan column that I can recall reading.
She still has something to offer, as she shows in this sane, balanced column. Who else is going to write this sort of thing? Maybe Mona Charen, but probably not.
Thanks!
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