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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. 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,...