Open Mic Night at MSNBC(Noonan Response)

WSJ ^ | 9/3/08 | Peggy Noonan

[paltz]

Well, I just got mugged by the nature of modern media, and I wish it weren't my fault, but it is. Readers deserve an explanation, so I'm putting a new top on today's column and, with the forbearance of the Journal, here it is.

[clintonh8r]

OK, I’ll give Piggy the benefit of the doubt and read this before I comment. But it may be the last time I read anything she writes.

[PghBaldy]

Here’s a transcript: http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/09/transcript_of_noonanmurphygate.php

[PghBaldy]

Link to the tabloid called The Atlantic above^

Transcript Of Noonan-Murphy-Gate
03 Sep 2008 06:00 pm

OK, not a gate. But there are Republicans in St, Paul who aren’t terribly comfortable with Gov. Palin’s pick, and despite Peggy Noonan’s column this morning, she appears to be one of them.

The full transcript:

Murphy: ...because I come out of a blue swing-state governor world. Engler. Whitman. Tommy Thompson. Mitt Romney. Jeb Bush. And I mean, and these guys, this is all like how you win a Texas race, just run it up. And, IT’S NOT GOING TO WORK.

Noonan: IT’S OVER.

Murphy: Still, McCain can give a version of the Lieberman speech and do himself some good

Chuck Todd. [Unintelligible]... think the Palin pick is insulting to Kay Bailey Hutchinson?

Noonan: ...saw Kay this morning.

Todd: [sounds like ‘she’s not comfortable talking about it????]

Murphy: They’re ALL bummed out

Todd: Is she really the most qualified woman?

Noonan: Most qualified? NO. I think they went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives.

Todd: yeah, they went to narratives.

Murphy: I totally agree.

Noonan: Every time Republicans do this, because that’s not where they live, and that’s not what they’re good at, they blow it.

Murphy: You know what’s really the worst thing about it? The greatness of McCain is “no cynicism” and this is cynical.

Todd: And as you called it, “gimmicky”

[Virginia Ridgerunner]

We've already given Peggy a well-deserved thrashing over here:

A Note from Peggy Noonan

[jimbo123]

She showed her a** and was busted. Sorry Peggy, but we’re not buying it.

[Red in Blue PA]

Sorry Peggy. Not buying it.

Sarah deserves better.

[se_ohio_young_conservative]

Go to heck Peggy.

I remember your sour grape attack on President Bush after the 04 election because you didnt get that speech writing job you were sucking up to him for.

You may have wrote good speeches back before I was born. But as far as I am concerned you are a miserable bitter human being.

[WildcatClan]

Why not Kay Bailey? How about her sneaking that nonsense destroying Duncan Hunter’s Secure Fence Act into the Omnibus bill. It was sneaky, underhanded and I hope Texas remembers that, when, and if, she ever seeks to be elected to another office.

[Travis McGee]

Noonan used to be a conservative, before she became a Manhattan elitist.

Take it somewhere else, Peg. You jumped the shark years ago.

[clintonh8r]

Read it. Twice. No sale.

[sasafras]

Noonan is an elitist - she and her kind hate the common man, the working family. They only see us as fodder and a political after thought to their martini parties and elitist snob social gatherings.

[cp124]

Time to drain the swamp.

[Frank Sheed]

Answer one question Peggy from one of the great unwashed...

Have you EVER shopped at a WalMart?

;-o)

[Doc Savage]

She's tooooo smart a NE liberal Republican to get caught that easy. The tenor and tone of the audio I listened to was strident, vulture-like picking over the dead bones of what they laughing described as McCain's folly and ultimate downfall!

She is an elitist while I am a man of the people doctoring to their souls and their bodies with compassion and understanding. She chides, derides, derails, and haughtily laughs down her brahmin nose at us, the real people who make America work!

F*ck Y*o and the Mercedes you rode in on you has been gas bag troll!

[LibLieSlayer]

I made my thoughts very clearly on that thread. Well deserved indeed!

LLS

[Chaguito]

If the transcript is accurate and even reasonably complete, Noonan is lying when she says that she meant the "old ways" are over. She clearly implied that McCain's campaign was over, because he selected the wrong running mate.

She has her right to an opinion. I have my right to wish her the worst demise to her career imaginable. She didn't give Sarah Palin an iota of a chance to prove McCain right, because she is to enamored of her own, oh-so-precious wisdom.

[MHGinTN]

I posted this on the other thread of this same title. I guarantee you that Peggy Noonan reads this board and has probably done a word search on her name to read the threads talking about her big screw up. She’s a big girl, smart, but perhaps getting tired of always ‘being on’ around the vampire media.

She blurted an obscenity which was extraneous ... and Peggy knows extraneous, she stretches columns too well to not be intimately familiar with the term. Peg needs a vacation. Then she can come back to write insightful essays again.

At least note that she didn’t try to make herself the issue over which she was brought to that venue. She is enough of a professional to loathe that she has become the issue even for a short moment. This too will pass.

[Presbyterian Reporter]

Here is the email I sent to the WSJ Editors earlier this evening:

To: ‘wsj.ltrs@wsj.com‘
Subject: Peggy Noonan

Dear Editors,

I have subscribed to the Wall Street Journal for over 30 years.

Peggy Noonan’s comments this afternoon were beyond the pale. Her long winded excuse posted on National Review Online was even worse.

Unless she humbly and totally apologizes to John McCain, Sarah Palin and to the American public, she needs to be fired from her position at the WSJ.

[papasmurf]

That was an excellent piece, one of her raw best. I accept her explanation.

More immediately and seriously on Palin:

Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing -- who is really one of them and who is not -- and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy.

She could become a transformative political presence.

So they are going to have to kill her, and kill her quick.

And it's going to be brutal. It's already getting there.

[tflabo]

Well just one more elitist jaw to drop on election day when we send McCain/Palin to victory Nov 4th. It will be priceless to see the media gargoyles in utter shock when we win this thing.

[Ann Archy]

Go away, Peggy and take that trashy Mike Murphy with you....PIG.

[alarm rider]

Hey Peggy:

I read and admired your columns after 9/11. Especially “Men Are Back”.

I am done with you now until you get a grip, get out of New York and rediscover real Americans.

You screwed up. Take the lesson.

[squarebarb]

Elitism is a kind of chronic disease.

It’s so seductive to sneer. Hauteur can become a chronic response to everything.

To use an old phrase, it is being in a constant state of I’m Okay, They’re Not Okay.

Sneering at the great unwashed is a cheap, quick thrill.

Makes people feel instantly smart and important.

Liberals and now apparently Peggy Noonan are locked into this static, monotonous emotional response.

[mkjessup]

Spin, spin, spin, spin like a top Peggy.

We heard what you said, and we know what you meant,

“IT’s OVER!!!”

Your faux credentials as a ‘conservative’ that is.

[Huck]

No sale. F U. Pardon the vulgarism, you uptight, pretentious, over the hill, worthless piece of elitist insider crap!

[taildragger]

The way I heard it she comes across as a NE Blue-Blood Country Club Republican and definitely no Reaganite, and the rest of those Dolts do not get the base either.

What a damn shame, Not only do we get Hastert and Trent Lott, now she is one of them.

Glenn Beck is right, where's the pitchforks....

[UB355]

mark

[KoRn]

"that whatever the base of the Republican party thinks is what America thinks. I made the case that this is no longer true, that party leaders seem to me stuck in the assumptions of 1988 and 1994"

She manages to forget about 2000, 2002, and 2004. Especially in the cases of 02 and 04 when the democrats got their asses handed to them. With the left wing media bias for Obama, combined with the brutal assault against the Palin family, I believe there could be a strong awakening in the conservative base which could bring a turnout similar to that in 04. Before all if this I was likely going to grudgingly vote for McCain, but now I'm mad as hell, and McCain has my support with conviction!!

It's time to show the left and their assassins in the left wing media a lesson!!

[goldfinch]

Sounds like Peggy caught the Inside the Beltway virus. She tried to say something that would make it seem like she fit in with the Beltway ‘In Crowd’. The urge to say the popular thing overwhelms the best of them at times.

[uncbob]

• Unless she humbly and totally apologizes to John McCain, Sarah Palin and to the American public, she needs to be fired from her position at the WSJ.
  
  Apologies are worthless

[gaijin]

The woman has SO diminished since her Reagan days. Toast? No, but I'm suer not wild about this woman, now, and not for a long time, either.

Remember that stupid dreck she wrote with the repeated "savor" thing?

Just ooozing BS. YUCK!

[NativeNewYorker]

Peggy, you can social climb and a—kiss all you want. But without an audience, you have no value to anyone. With luck, I’ll see you bagging groceries at Gristedes (downscale NYC grocer) in a couple of years.

[The KG9 Kid]

So much for the formerly-brilliant Reagan speechwriter obeying Reagan's 11th Commandment.

Noonan just isn't very inspiring anymore. Like Orson Welles, she was regarded as a genius in her younger days, now she's about to hire out for commercial appearances selling cheap-ass box wine.

[Seaplaner]

Ms. Noonan, like so many elitists, is unable to contain her envy of our remarkable Vice President-to-be.

To Ms. Noonan, and all her post-menopausal, hyper-critical, would-be-has-beens-but-never-really-were chums...

...let them eat Moose Stew.

[ReleaseTheHounds]

I read her opening of her article — you’re right: time to take Peggy off the “must read” list. Too bad.

[AZLiberty]

Hang with MSNBC dogs and you’re sure to get something far worse than fleas.

[Bedford Forrest]

Peggy has always been a gifted wordsmith, but nothing more, very adept at spinning long strings of witty superficialities with nary a serious thought or insight. In politics, such talent is a commodity, and treated as such. People like Peggy are like professional athletes - they have their day and then they are tossed. Perhaps the stress of needing to be ‘on’ all the time, to avoid the horror of being discarded and ignored, attracted her to the sauce, at least ten years ago. She looks like a serious smokehound and such folks often have poor impulse control, self-destructive tendencies, etc.

[seekthetruth]

I didn’t have to, figured it was her strong RINO opinions coming out. She is actually less of a Republican than most RINO’s! Just play-acts being conservative!

[NonValueAdded]

Nope, not buying it. It’s your macaca moment, Peggy. Do people even remember who said “macaca” any more? George who? His excuses didn’t cut any mustard, either.

[fightinJAG]

I agree: I don’t find her “explanation” reasonable at all.

[SuziQ]

There are only two questions.
1. Can she take it?
Will she be rattled? Can she sail through high seas? Can she roll with most punches and deliver some jabs herself?

I think tonight's speech put that question to rest forever. Sarah Palin is a tough lady, and if the MSM thought it could send her crying back to Alaska, they were soundly disabused of that notion tonight!

[bruinbirdman]

Later in the column Nunnan make this point:

"There are 262 cities in this country with a population of 100,000 or more. But there are close to a hundred thousand small towns with ten thousand people or less. "You do the math," the conservative pollster Kellyanne Conway told me. "We are a nation of Wasillas, not Chicagos." "

yitbos

[Schnucki]

Sounds like an obama acolyte in the media conveniently edited the “open mic” segment and then raced to the internet to ambush the GOP with a soundbite “scandal”.

[VanShuyten]

Better not do the math, or the implication she makes becomes transparent. 26,000,000 in cities vs. 1 billion in small towns. So obviously wrong that it ruins the point.

[bruinbirdman]

"ten thousand people or less."

There are still a lot of them.

yitbos

[OneLoyalAmerican]

Ms. Noonan:

As far as your column explaining the open microphone gaff, perhaps you’ve become a “bubblehead” from working inside the beltway. I think of the inner beltway as a modern Gomorrah, much like San Francisco is a modern Sodom.

My forgiveness toward you might have been too easy to come by. But I will not forget.

Cheers,
OLA

[petitfour]

But, but, but . . . she wasn’t vetted by Peggy. Some old white guy who is still thinkin’ it is 1988 or 1994 picked her. Why didn’t the white guy pick Kay Bailey Hutchison??? (no offense to Senator Hutchison) Peggy is the one stuck in the past.

[petitfour]

You are very gracious. :)

[King of Florida]

But there are close to a hundred thousand small towns with ten thousand people or less.

I accept her explanation. What I neither accept nor forgive is the use of the word "less" with "people." It's "fewer." Peggy should know that this rule always applies in written English. In this regard, she has indeed slipped.