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An array of RINOS and CINOS (or CRINOS for short) are suddenly all agog about Barack Obama’s chimerical shift to the “center”. Obama tosses out a few entirely mendacious lines about America being a good country; or helping small businesses, and those who should know better are clapping like trained seals. Former Reagan speech writerand WSJ columnist, Peggy Noonan is not the only RINO giddy about Obama’s imaginary centrism; immediately after Obama’s Afghanistan speech in which we were told he was finally getting around to sending extra troops, though they would only be there for a few days, to the...

In response to the NY-23 news, Rush Limbaugh tells me: “Hmmm... I thought the Era of Reagan was over? Who was it that said that? Oh yeah, the smart people on our side who told us the only way we could win was with moderate/liberal candidates like Scozzafava. Hmmm...”

  Belmont Club October 30th, 2009 12:43 pmThe Lordlings Peggy Noonan adopts a meme that has been sweeping the blogs of late, the idea that America’s elite is broken; so broken she says, that it doesn’t know it’s broken. In a WSJ article, she describes the current and disastrous reign of “callous children”; people who have “never seen things go dark” and are leading their nation into the abyss.  For the first time, she says, the national mood is one of despondency. There are no solutions because the problems come from within. The heirs have grown strange and wayward. They...

We have met the enemy, and according to Peggy Noonan, it is us!

Don't strain the system. Don't add to the national stress level. Don't pierce when you can envelop. Don't show even understandable indignation when you can show legitimate regard. Realize that the ties that bind still bind but have grown dryer and more worn with time. They need to be strengthened, not strained. Govern knowing we are a big, strong, mighty nation, a colossus that is, however, like all highly complex, highly wired organisms, fragile, even at places quite delicate. Don't overburden or overexcite the system. America used to have fringes, one over here and the other over there. The fringes...

We have entered uncharted territory in the fight over national health care. There’s a new tone in the debate, and it’s ugly. At the moment the Democrats are looking like something they haven’t looked like in years, and that is: desperate. They must know at this point they should not have pushed a national health-care plan. A Democratic operative the other day called it “Hillary’s revenge.” When Mrs. Clinton started losing to Barack Obama in the primaries 18 months ago, she began to give new and sharper emphasis to her health-care plan. Mr. Obama responded by talking about his health-care...

We have entered uncharted territory in the fight over national health care. There’s a new tone in the debate, and it’s ugly. At the moment the Democrats are looking like something they haven’t looked like in years, and that is: desperate. They must know at this point they should not have pushed a national health-care plan. A Democratic operative the other day called it “Hillary’s revenge.” When Mrs. Clinton started losing to Barack Obama in the primaries 18 months ago, she began to give new and sharper emphasis to her health-care plan. Mr. Obama responded by talking about his health-care...

It turns out the president misjudged the nation’s mood.This is big, what’s happening. President Obama appears to have misstepped on a major initiative and defining issue. He has misjudged the nation’s mood, which itself is news: He rose from nothing to everything with the help of his fine-tuned antennae. Resistance to the Democratic health-care plans is in the air, showing up more now on YouTube than in the polls, but it will be in the polls soon enough. The president, in short, may be facing a real loss. This will be interesting in a number of ways and for a...

Return to the Article July 18, 2009Peggy Noonan: Sarah Palin JealousBy Stuart Schwartz You're Peggy Noonan and you're jealous. But it's not the normal kind of jealous, the kind reserved for girlfriends who can squeeze into size 2 jeans. No, it's the kind of jealous that hurts, that grabs your gut and twists, that has you howling with rage into your pillow in the middle of the night, screaming "It's not fair" like a two-year-old denied another piece of cake. It is Sarah Palin jealous...and it is consuming you. You're Peggy Noonan and you're jealous. You are a card-carrying...

I used to be a big fan of Peggy Noonan. I thought that her columns were thoughtful, eloquant, and had a way with the English language. Her seeming understanding of the world and of Conservatism was always enjoyable, and I looked forward to her weekly columns. All of that started to change after the 2004 election. While still writing good columns, she seemed off her game. As the 2008 campaign heated up last fall, she started to show tendencies of elitism, denigrating Sarah Palin and swooning over Barack Obama. Now, in her latest column, she viciously attacks Sarah Palin, calling...

The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan, who famously wrote for President Ronald Reagan but slowly become a RINO thanks to spending way too much time in the Beltway (see this embarrassing clip of Ms. Noonan from September of last year declaring the GOP dead meat) is no longer a must-read. In her post today, she bashes Sarah Palin one final time, just to make sure that the almost former Alaskan governor knows what the main streamers think about her and her policies. Among the pathetic quotes: Her history does not need to be rehearsed at any length. Ten months ago...

In America almost everybody has a base, not only political parties. Businesses do, and public figures, and Web sites. We attempt to quantify to the nth degree everybody's numbers, ratings, page views. These tell us how big a base is and, roughly, who is in it. "The base" is a great if largely unspoken preoccupation in broad segments of our public life. In fact we have developed baseitis. Is this good? What occasions the question is the USA Today story this week on a Gallup poll saying nearly half the country's Republicans and Republican-leaners can't come up with a name...

A conservative activist told the New York Times, "We need to brand her." Another told me a fight is needed to excite the base. Excite the base? How about interest an independent? How about gain the attention of people who aren't already on your side? The base is plenty excited already, as you know if you've ever read a comment thread on a conservative blog. Comment-thread conservatives, like their mirror-image warriors on the left are perpetually agitated, permanently enraged. They don't need to be revved, they're already revved. Newt Gingrich twitters that Judge Sotomayor is a racist. Does anyone believe...

"Let's play grown-up." When I was a child, that's what we said when we ran out of things to do like playing potsie or throwing rocks in the vacant lot. You'd go in and take your father's hat and your mother's purse and walk around saying, "Would you like tea?" And that's what the GOP should do right now: play grown-up. The Democrats in the White House have been doing it since January, operating with a certain decorum, a kind of assumption as to their natural stature. Obamaland is very different from the last Democratic administration, Bill Clinton's. The cliché...

We didn't need another reason to avoid reading the slippery Peggy Noonan, but she gave us one anyway. Still in awe of the Dear Leader whose news conference Wednesday night was in her words "a bit of a masterpiece," in her Friday Wall Street Journal column Noonan shows that she has become a captive of liberal conventional wisdom on yet another issue. Noonan implies that the Republican Party is too conservative and as such it forced liberal Sen. Arlen Specter to defect to the Democrats. Noonan complained that the people inside the party "can't always be kicking people out of...

Out of all the conservative betrayals in the last election, none broke my heart more than Peggy Noonan's. I've loved her writing for years. I grew up hearing the wonderful speeches she wrote for Reagan. Her political memoir, "What I Saw At The Revolution," is still my favorite of its kind. I agree with a lot of what she says in her latest article, but I still wonder why she feels so dismissive of Joe-Six Packs and Hockey Moms. I don't think you can grow a party by dissing ordinary people the way she did during the last election.

President Obama's news conference Wednesday night was a bit of a masterpiece. The Obama Thinking Look was back, as he parsed questions, took notes, and offered up rehearsed answers in a way that made them seem not written by the Committee on Soundbites but natural to him, as if he were formulating answers in the here and now. On torture, he cited Churchill. He spoke of pro-lifers not with any of the appellations the left prefers but as pro-lifers. He dispatched the culturally radical Freedom of Choice Act as "not a top priority"; he said he doesn't want to run...

It is six months since Lehman fell and the crash (or the great recession, or the collapse—it's time it got its name) began. An aspect of the story given less attention than it is due, perhaps because it doesn't lend itself to statistics, is the psychic woe beneath the economic blow. ********* It is six months since Lehman fell and the crash (or the great recession, or the collapse—it's time it got its name) began. An aspect of the story given less attention than it is due, perhaps because it doesn't lend itself to statistics, is the psychic woe beneath...

It is six months since Lehman fell and the crash (or the great recession, or the collapse—it's time it got its name) began. An aspect of the story given less attention than it is due, perhaps because it doesn't lend itself to statistics, is the psychic woe beneath the economic blow. There are two parts to this. One is that we have arrived at the first fatigue. The heart-pumping drama of last September is gone, replaced by the drip-drip-drip of pink slips, foreclosures and closed stores. We are tired. It doesn't feel like 1929, but 1930. People are in a...

It is late March, and yet still feels like the deepest part of winter. The earth warms and the days grow longer, but the hearts and souls of Americans continue to feel the chill of our times; the feeling that Shakespeare so beautifully termed the winter of discontent. As I travel from my townhouse in Virginia to my beach house in Nantucket, I sense an unease plaguing the American people. A malaise, if you will. The president's steely gaze and direct, simple solutions to this country's problems cut through that ill-will and helped reassure the bleating masses, showing them someone...

He is willowy when people yearn for solid, reed-like where they hope for substantial, a bright older brother when they want Papa, cool where they probably prefer warmth. All of which may or may not hurt Barack Obama in time. Lincoln was rawboned, prone to the blues and freakishly tall, with a new-grown beard that refused to become an assertion and remained, for four years, a mere and constant follicular attempt. And he did OK. Such impressions—coolness, slightness—can come to matter only if they capture or express some larger or more meaningful truth. At the moment they connect, for me,...

A mysterious thing happened in that speech Tuesday night. By the end of it Barack Obama had become president. Every president has a moment when suddenly he becomes what he meant to be, or knows what he is, and those moments aren't always public. Bill Safire thought he saw it with Richard Nixon one day in the new president's private study. Nixon always put a hand towel on the hassock where he put his feet, to protect the fabric, but this time he didn't use the towel, he just put up his feet. As if it were his hassock. And...

It was like "The Canterbury Tales." That's what it was like last Saturday, in LaGuardia Airport, on the shuttle to Washington packed full of people going to the inauguration of President Obama. A handsome, affluent black woman in first class - fur hat, chic silver jewelry - laughed on a cell phone as a businessman - tall, black, middle aged - hurried down the aisle in black overcoat and Burberry scarf.

Washington It was like "The Canterbury Tales." That's what it was like last Saturday, in LaGuardia Airport, on the shuttle to Washington packed full of people going to the inauguration of President Obama. A handsome, affluent black woman in first class—fur hat, chic silver jewelry—laughed on a cell phone as a businessman—tall, black, middle aged—hurried down the aisle in black overcoat and Burberry scarf. A young man in slouchy jeans and dark watchman's cap, iPod buds in place, nodded, in coach, to the tune in his head. Two young white men in beige cowboy hats and grey fleece jackets came...

Washington Flying in, we take the route over the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson, the Tidal Basin: the signs and symbols of the great republic. And you've seen it all a thousand times but you can't stop looking, and you can't help it, your eyes well. After a minute you realize you must have a moony look on your face, and you lean back. The lady to your right, engrossed in a paperback of "Marley & Me," sees nothing. Your gaze continues across the aisle, and you see another woman looking out the window in the same way, avidly taking it...

He didn't seem distracted, like he was thinking about lunch, and he didn't seem to be deflecting responsibility, but taking it. This was a relief, and rather unusual in a Washington politician, or pretty much any politician... It struck me as I watched Barack Obama, in giving a substantive economic speech just 11 days before his inaugural address, that he was trying to clear away a lot of brush... The brush-clearing suggests the inaugural itself won't be programmatic, bureaucratic or factoid-laden but more broadly gauged and reaching at something higher. Will he reach for poetry? I hope so, if poetry...

http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20081207/peggy-noonan-lesley-stahl-and-friends-raise-more-money-wThe purse strings haven’t completely closed for start-ups looking to raise money–even niche Web sites that hope to stay afloat by selling advertising. Wowowow.com, a site launched earlier this year, which targets women over 40, has raised a $1.5 million round led by Bob Pittman’s Pilot Group and the Rhime Group. No word on valuation, but I’d guesstimate Wowowow.com’s investors peg its value in the high 9-figure range. The company has now raised $3.1 million in less than a year. The five founders–former publisher Joni Evans, “60 Minutes” reporter Lesley Stahl; New York Post gossip columnist Liz Smith; ad exec...

We've gotten through roughness before. Of things to be thankful for, I personally include this. I traveled this year, and when I fly I say a prayer that has become a ritual: "Dear God, put your big hands under this plane and lift it up, and carry it forward through the air untouched and unharmed by other objects. And may its inner workings work. And put us down softly in our place of destination, and return us safely to our homes, and to those in whose lives we are enmeshed." It occurs to me that is perhaps how many of...

Why does Sarah Palin continue to receive so much media coverage? Peggy Noonan has a theory. The Wall Street Journal columnist believes the MSM is up to what she considers "mischief": attempting to make Sarah Palin the face of the Republican party. Noonan propounded her premise during an appearance today on Morning Joe. View video here.

I've been traveling in New York and Texas, and it's all Obamarama all the time. People mention Sarah Palin (there was appreciative laughter the other day in Houston when a speaker said wistfully that the Alaska governor may soon discover the power of silence), and now and then President Bush (not often—people move on with a finality that is brutal), but the topic is Barack Obama. There is continuing national curiosity at and discussion of the mystery of the man—what does he think, what will he do?—coupled with a great sense of expectation, and a high sense of anxiety. The...

Understanding Peggy Noonan I read the other day that Peggy Noonan voted for John McCain. What's news is that that is news. You would think that we could assume a leading conservative writer didn't vote for Barack Obama, but Peggy Noonan has given us reason to wonder. After Peggy declared that “Palin's Failin'”, the notion was taken up far and wide that she wandered from the conservative fold. “Peggy, we hardly knew ye” has become a refrain among on-line conservatives. But her wanderings didn't begin with that op-ed. I have read all of Peggy Noonan's books and followed her column...

You're lucky to live through big history. And you're living through it. The explosion of joy in large pockets of the country Tuesday night was beautiful to see, and moving. For me, at the end of the evening, looking at live shots of the throngs in Chicago's Grant Park, I flashed back to 1960 and how it felt, as a child, to see that the grown-ups had elected a Catholic president. I can't say we stood taller—we were Irish, we already stood tall—but yes, there was a wave of feeling: "What a country," "What a development!" The other day, when...

If the caricature of Republicans as heartless capitalists with cash registers instead of souls is accurate then they should gleefully accept prodigals Peggy Noonan and Christopher Buckley back into the fold. Because I absolutely believe that their personal attacks on Sarah Palin were nothing personal. It was nothing more than a money grab. I'd imagine the pressure to sell books is enormous. The top book publishers have a lot riding on each title. And if your book doesn't sell you don't get to write books for the top publishers anymore. It's capitalism in its purest form. And that's why I...

After weeks of suspense, she finally declares at around 4:10. I honestly don’t get it. After all the praise for The One’s coolness and supposed eloquence and passages like this about the ‘Cuda, she’s going Republican anyway?

The case for Barack Obama, in broad strokes: He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief. He climbed steep stairs, born off the continent with no father to guide, a dreamy, abandoning mother, mixed race, no connections. Obama and the Runaway Train The race, the case, a hope for grace. He rose...

Financial Times reporter Edward Luce has found another sign of trouble for the McCain campaign: he's turning up the noses of the "cocktail party circuit" inside Washington, D.C., which is "swelling with disaffected Republicans." I kid you not. From Luce's page 4 October 24 article, "McCain's troubles highlight party rift": The more trouble John McCain's campaign encounters, the more it highlights the cultural divide between the "real America" the Republican candidate says he represents and the Washington "cocktail party circuit" that largely disdains it. That circuit is swelling with disaffected Republicans. Some complain about Mr McCain's selection of Sarah Palin,...

Peggy Noonan had to cough up her Sarah Palin fur ball sometime, I suppose. We heard it coming, but had hoped that Noonan would suppress it by drinking deeply of that gracious political civility she's selling in her newest book, Patriotic Grace. Instead, her Oct. 17, Wall Street Journal column, "Palin's Failin,'" disgorges Palin with all of the civility and grace one finds in the kitty litter. On her book's back cover, Noonan echoes some clichéd sound bites from the upper chambers of political punditry such as, "If I am right, we must change not only the substance but the...

It’s erupted. Sensing losses of historic proportions, conservatives seem not to be waiting for the official results to start dividing into camps. And while Sarah Palin is the nominal reason for the schism, you can see by digging a little deeper that she’s only a symbol. A certain faction of the conservative punditry has now gone pedal-to-the-metal in its disdain for Palin. The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan – who was the first of the right’s chattering classes to turn full-bore against President Bush – last week joined the likes of Kathleen Parker, Heather MacDonald, David Brooks and a host...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122419210832542317.html?mod=article-outset-box While taking a tiny break from having fun with my family, I ran across your article in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Palin's Failin'." It so happens that I have always admired you, your beauty, your mind, and eloquence. I have to tell you in this very public way how disappointed I am with your recent conclusions. "More than ever on the campaign trail, the candidates are dropping their G's. Hardworkin' families are strainin' and tryin'a get ahead." Now what are you tryin' to say? Seriously, Peggy, (can I call you Peggy?) Are you saying that Sarah Palin's honest-to-goodness...

But we have seen Mrs. Palin on the national stage for seven weeks now, and there is little sign that she has the tools, the equipment, the knowledge or the philosophical grounding one hopes for, and expects, in a holder of high office. She is a person of great ambition, but the question remains: What is the purpose of the ambition? She wants to rise, but what for? For seven weeks I've listened to her, trying to understand if she is Bushian or Reaganite—a spender, to speak briefly, whose political decisions seem untethered to a political philosophy, and whose foreign...

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.

Wednesday afternoon, in a live MSNBC television panel hosted by NBC's political analyst Chuck Todd, and along with Republican strategist Mike Murphy, we discussed Sarah Palin's speech this evening to the Republican National Convention. I said she has to tell us in her speech who she is, what she believes, and why she's here. We spoke of Republican charges that the media has been unfair to Mrs. Palin, and I defended the view that while the media should investigate every quote and vote she's made, and look deeply into her career, it has been unjust in its treatment of her...

After a segment with NBC's Chuck Todd ended today, Republican consultant Mike Murphy and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan were caught on a live mic ridiculing the choice of Sarah Palin. "It's over," said Noonan, and then responded to a question of whether Palin is the most qualified Republican woman McCain could have chosen. "The most qualified? No. I think they wen tfor this-- excuse me -- political bullshit about narratives," she said. "Everytime Republicans do that -- because that's not where they live and it's not what they're good at and they blow it." Murphy chimed in: "The...

Peggy Noonan made a serious point about MSNBC's slanted coverage, and I suppose seriousness compels me to mention it first. But please do yourself a favor and stay tuned for the description of Peggy's un-PC laugh line that could be the best guilty pleasure of the campaign season. Joe Scarborough opened today's Morning Joe with an ode to the wonderfulness that was Obama last night. He was entirely in tune with Olbermann's claim that the speech was beyond criticism. All the adoration apparently annoyed Peggy, and she made a point of providing a counterweight when she appeared later in the...

And so it begins, the campaign proper. You probably guessed that there would be no letup in this relentless year, no break between the primaries and the general election, that both candidates would stay on the screen. You were right. They will not leave, and go, and rest. They feel they can't, it's inch by inch, slow and steady wins the race. This robs them of the power of disappearance. You disappear and then come back and people say, "Hey, look at that guy." They listen anew after a break in the drone.

Leave him alone. He wrote a book. It is true or untrue, accurately reported or not. If not, this will no doubt be revealed. It is honestly meant and presented, or not. Look to the assertions, argue them, weigh and ponder. That's my first thought. My second goes back to something William Safire, himself a memoirist of the Nixon years, said to me, a future memoirist of the Reagan years: "The one thing history needs more of is first-person testimony." History needs data, detail, portraits, information; it needs eyewitness. "I was there, this is what I saw." History will sift...

Leave him alone. He wrote a book. It is true or untrue, accurately reported or not. If not, this will no doubt be revealed. It is honestly meant and presented, or not. Look to the assertions, argue them, weigh and ponder. That's my first thought. When I finished the book I came out not admiring Mr. McClellan or liking him but, in terms of the larger arguments, believing him.

America is in line at the airport. America has its shoes off, is carrying a rubberized bin, is going through a magnetometer. America is worried there is fungus on the floor after a million stockinged feet have walked on it. But America knows not to ask. America is guilty until proved innocent, and no one wants to draw undue attention. America left its ticket and passport in the jacket in the bin in the X-ray machine, and is admonished. America is embarrassed to have put one one-ounce moisturizer too many in the see-through bag. America is irritated that the TSA...

People are figuring Hillary Clinton out. And that's a problem. At least, it is if you're Hillary Clinton. That's a theme of Pegggy Noonan's Wall Street Journal column of today, Getting Mrs. Clinton. Along the way, the indispensable Ms. Noonan disperses numerous valuable insights into Hillary's persona. From our NewsBusters perspective, of particular interest were these paragraphs on the way the MSM has come to view her, and vice versa [emphasis added]: Many in the press get it, to their dismay, and it makes them uncomfortable, for it sours life to have a person whose character you feel you cannot...

I thought Barack Obama's speech was strong, thoughtful and important. Rather beautifully, it was a speech to think to, not clap to. It was clear that's what he wanted, and this is rare. It seemed to me as honest a speech as one in his position could give within the limits imposed by politics. As such it was a contribution. We'll see if it was a success. The blowhard guild, proud member since 2000, praised it, and, in the biggest compliment, cable news shows came out of the speech not with jokes or jaded insiderism, but with thought. They started...