Obama, Noonan, and Blarney

American Spectator ^ | April 10, 2009 | Patrick O'Hannigan

[RobinMasters]

If the Wall Street Journal keeps to its usual schedule, the next column from Peggy Noonan will be published on Good Friday. I hope she takes advantage of that timing to offer one of the meditations on faith that she still writes better than almost everyone else, rather than another confused essay about President Obama.

When her subject is Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, or grace encountered on the streets of Manhattan or Washington, D.C., Noonan shines.

But Barack Obama frustrates her so much that even her occasional jabs at his opponents are poorly aimed. Last October, Noonan carelessly attributed a Southern accent and ignorance about firearms to Sarah Palin, the one governor in America least likely to say, "How do I reload this thang?"

[lentulusgracchus]

Peggy's best roundhouse swing might catch Sarah in the thigh ....

Peggy needs to let Sarah be Sarah.

[LouD]

Peggy needs to STFU.

[Never on my watch]

Peggy Noonan is dead to me.

[Northern Yankee]

I used to like Peggy Noonan's work.

She now has become like most of the other MSM. Unable to sort out truth.

[Arthur McGowan]

Obama “frustrates” Noonan???

I can’t imagine why anyone would choose that word—unless he means that Obama arouses Noonan, and she is in consequence frustrated.

Peggy Noonan is deranged on the subject of Marxist baby-murderer Soetoro.

She is dead to me, too.

[nathanbedford]

One of Peggy's literary orgasms prompted me to write this:

There is something very telling about this latest Peggy Noonan piece. It is not its fey detachment from realism. It is not its narcissistic quality which prompts Noonan to write in a style approaching literary masturbation. When Peggy gets the basics so wrong the soaring rhetoric crashes and and serves only to compound the embarrassment.

Peggy Noonan is not a conservative, she is a Roman Catholic. Her faith delivers her into the conservative camp on several issues, principally abortion. She is opposed to abortion and mentions it in virtually every piece, as she does here. It is important to understand that she arrives at her position on abortion not as the logical extension of a conservative' s regard for the individual as a God ordained political unit, but as an extension of her Roman Catholic faith. Let me hasten to observe that her faith has got it absolutely right on the issue of abortion. But the syllogism is, for me or least, my political conservatism is informed by my religious faith and from that comes a philosophy which forms opinions about issues like abortion. Peggy Noonan skips the middle step.

The result of that is that Noonan has no real philosophical bonds to the Republican Party or, indeed, even to the conservative movement. Many Freepers have commented that Noonan is wallowing in emotion in these columns and it is hard to argue with that description but I would put a finer point on it, Noonan is expressing a religious mysticism. She applies this mysticism to matters political and wanders in and out of mystical language and in and out of political speak. No wonder her reader is alternately confused and frustrated.

It is not difficult to understand why Noonan herself appears to be confused. Mystics simply see the world in a different way. She operates from her faith, by definition she is not operating from reason. Faith is not necessarily antagonistic to reason but detached from it, transcendental. So Noonan can rehearse Obama's bizarre biography and give it a significance 180° removed from its plain implications. We read her conclusions about Obama's character drawn from his biography and scratch our heads. But Noonan genuflects. It is not that Noonan is a traitor, it is not (as I have previously erroneously written) that she is pandering to the salons in Manhattan, it is that she is transported from deduction to intuition.

Political parties need mystics. When a transcendental issue confronts us we need the moral clarity which comes best from faith based vision. If the issue is slavery, civil rights, abortion, or American exceptionalism, we need the moral certainty, the unflinching Churchillian commitment to stand for the right against all odds.

These values do not obtain when one is weighing the advantages of moving the tax scale up or down a few percentage points. In the nuts and bolts of politics we need commonsense and reasoned argument. Other times, we need the insight of the mystic, we need that moral clarity, we need a compelling imagery. I believe that we are as Americans confronted with a moral issue in the election of Barak Obama. Our problem is that we have been confronting a pathological vision with common sense reasoning-a debate in which those with common sense are always destined to lose if the pathology spreads like a virus as it has about the person of Barak Obama. In my view, Barak Obama has a vision, a radical, anti-American, ultimately tyranical vision but a vision nonetheless. 50% and likely more than 50% of the country is laboring under a pathology, a cult of personality, a perfect storm of political factors, which will sweep a potential tyrant into office who has no qualification whatsoever apart from the melanin content of his skin. Think of the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana.

To combat this mass psychosis, this political pathology, with an election campaign tethered to common sense, as John McCain has done, is to attempt to use willpower to check diarrhea. That is why I have been maintaining for so long that the Republicans had to redefine the rules of the game or lose this election. Further, that is why I have been so relentlessly pessimistic warning that if Barak Obama were not morally destroyed this election was lost. You cannot triumph over a virus with logic. You must find stronger medicine.

This brings us back to Peggy Noonan and the tragedy of her fatal flaw. Her epistemology, for whatever reason, simply does not bring her to see that Barak Obama is potentially more threatening to her faith than any crazed Mohammedan who plots from outside America to steal her faith and put her to the sword. It is a very great pity that Noonan cannot compute the raw data and, in an epiphany, create the imagery out of her rich talent that would at once define and morally destroy Barak Obama.

Peggy, why do you think we have been keeping you around all this time?

[PBRSTREETGANG]

Peggy has terminal beltway disease.

She wants to be loved and accepted by the elites above all.

I haven’t bothered to read her in a long time. I hope she enjoys the cocktail parties.

[T-Bird45]

Wow, great post, especially the summary paragraph as it could apply to any number of “conservative” pundits that cannot compute Obama. Thanks for your thoughts.

[2nd Bn, 11th Mar]

I put the Pegster in the “dumb twat” bin a while back.

[Brett66]

The way she writes, makes it sound like some really groovy acid trip she’s on.

[Will88]

She may be right about all that, but these symptoms of buyer's remorse come from an essayist who had praised the president for appearing "fully in command" less than a month before.

Noonan has gone from pious and overwrought to one acting on schoolgirl like crushes, and she becomes more irrelevant with each succeeding, gushing or puzzled, column about Obama. Schoolgirl crushes can so be confusing, but she left any pretense of objectivity behind months ago.

[Bahbah]

It is not its fey detachment from realism. It is not its narcissistic quality which prompts Noonan to write in a style approaching literary masturbation. When Peggy gets the basics so wrong the soaring rhetoric crashes and and serves only to compound the embarrassment.

I thought your commentary and analysis could not get any better after this beginning. I was wrong.

[andy58-in-nh]

As usual, you offer superb analysis of a complex and vexing matter, and thank you for that. The larger "matter" with which I am chiefly concerned is our Republic's loss of its moral bearings at the same instant its leaders have also rejected reason and logic as a means of discerning reality. Which leaves them with precisely: what, as a guide?

What guides Barack Obama, et al. is an ideology they themselves identify as "progressive", but which is in reality a Utopian-utilitarian amalgam: a smidgen of John Stuart Mill, a dollop of John Dewey, a souçon of John Jacques Rousseau, and where it suits them, a dash of Marx as a secret spice.

That this ideology, whose policy reflections are now advanced by President Obama is profoundly antithetical to the philosophy that has guided our Nation for over 200 years ought not be lost on people as smart as Peggy Noonan. And yet, it so obviously is, and the question is: "why"? I agree with you that Ms. Noonan's Catholicism explains quite a lot about her view of the world, including a blessedly consistent value for human life. But spiritualism only explains so much. Having researched and written so well for Ronald Reagan ought to have at least acquainted her with the philosophical underpinnings of Conservatism: John Locke, Edmund Burke, and later, Friedrich Hayek.

And yet she seems curiously distant from those traditions even as she wrote for others words steeped so deeply in their nourishing waters that the authoress could scarcely avoid baptizing her own hands in the process.

And for that reason, I would disagree with you in a small way. I think that Ms. Noonan's confused admiration for Obama is to some degree an unconscious matter of cultural affinity. She lives and works among people who are almost walking textbook definitions of "elitists", social liberals, all. In that environment, I believe many of her attitudes are expressed not as a matter of intentional flattery or conscious ingratiation, but as a natural phenomenon, aided (as you suggest) by her tendency toward revelation, but abetted by the daily reinforcement of the cocktail circuit and the dinner party crowd.

Once again, I offer my respects to you for being among the most consistently excellent and interesting writers on this site.

[nathanbedford]

Thank you for the kind words. Judging from your reply and your about page-which I heartily recommend to anyone who reads this-you know a little bit about pushing a noun against a verb.

I too have been preoccupied by the larger "matters" to which you allude. I'm trying to fashion a template to apply to these times and especially to the appeal of the left but so far the "Eureka"

moment has eluded me. Meanwhile I take your point respecting the peer influences on Peggy Noonan. I think we both see that she's not really the issue, only the illustration.

[dr_who]

Her latest column: "Goodbye Bland Affluence" (sorry, no link).

Yeah, I'm sure she's no longer into bland affluence. Betcha she has her own little vegetable garden in the back yard of her humble little highrise apartment. Right. Noonan's a fraud.

[kalee]

bttt