Quick Note to the Elite, Inside the Beltway Conservative Pundits: You’re not Martyrs
Peggy Noonan, a person whom I respected up until she was caught lying to her readers in a hot mic incident, digs herself a bit deeper into her hole with her own readers with her latest piece, “Palin’s Failin’.” The subtext of her article is succinctly expressed in her subtitle: “What is it she stands for? After seven weeks, we don’t know.”
Let’s quickly recount what we learned about Sarah Palin beginning with her nomination all the way through the first Vice Presidential Debate: Sarah Palin is pro-life, in favor of utilizing America’s natural resources in order to reduce our dependence on foreign energy, favors strong second amendment rights, supports capital punishment, opposes same sex marriage, and supports a preemptive foreign policy. I suppose if you exclude all of those major issues then we really don’t know much about where Sarah Palin stands.
“Aha!” Ms. Noonan might say, “but what about important game-changing issues like which school of contemporary philosophy Sarah Palin identifies with most? Does she identify more with Realism, Existentialism, or perhaps Post-Structuralism? These are important questions that must be answered with the utmost thoroughness.”
Well, I guess it’s pretty clear that Gov. Palin won’t be able to carry the coveted North Hampton-Ivy League-Neo Conservative demographic in the same convincing fashion that Senator Obama has. After all, Senator Obama has clearly aligned himself with the Christian realism school of philosophy, a contemporary school of philosophy that is viewed favorably this election cycle by the aforementioned demographic. Darn!
After a few more paragraphs of bashing Governor Palin and the barefoot rubes who are ignorant enough to vote for, let alone identify with, someone who is clearly too vulgar and inexperienced for the likes of the ultra-sophisticated beltway political scene, Peggy Noonan tops off an already bitter tirade with an uncharacteristically self-righteous, yet oddly tangential crescendo:
I gather this week from conservative publications that those whose thoughts lead them to criticism in this area are to be shunned, and accused of the lowest motives. In one now-famous case, Christopher Buckley was shooed from the great magazine his father invented. In all this, the conservative intelligentsia are doing what they have done for five years. They bitterly attacked those who came to stand against the Bush administration. This was destructive. If they had stood for conservative principle and the full expression of views, instead of attempting to silence those who opposed mere party, their movement, and the party, would be in a better, and healthier, position.
At any rate, come and get me, copper.
Ok, I’ll bite. There is no reason that you (Peggy Noonan), Christopher Buckley, Kathleen Parker, David Brooks, or any other member of the self-anointed conservative intelligentsia should be surprised at the amount of anger outpouring from your readership towards you when you write articles that appear to “pile on” an already struggling conservative campaign effort.
You dutifully qualify every criticism of Palin with some snippet along the lines of “I’m not doing this to get invited to all the cool parties,” yet the first thing you do once you’ve been booed off stage by your own readership is exactly that - you show up onto some sort of liberal haven like Hardball or The Colbert Report to apologize for how stupid and ignorant your own political movement is. You claim that your articles against the McCain campaign are written out of some concern that true conservative principles are dying, yet you express your disagreement by cheering on a man who supports out-in-the-open socialism. You all claim that you are wholly invested in traditional bread-and-butter conservatism, yet all of your actions contradict such claims.
Let me reemphasize one of Ms. Noonan’s lines:
If [high-profile conservative pundits] had stood for conservative principle and the full expression of views, instead of attempting to silence those who opposed mere party, their movement, and the party, would be in a better, and healthier, position.
Had I been given this snippet in isolation away from the rest of the self-righteous squawking screeched by our beloved I’d be inclined to think that Noonan and others believe that it would have been in the best interests of both the Republican Party and the Conservative Movement to fight Bush and push him further towards the right during his administration. I’m inclined to agree. However, if Noonan and her cohorts honestly believe that what they are doing right now in this election cycle is conducive to bringing about a conservative realignment amongst the Republican party then they are either being disingenuous or idiotic. I believe it’s the former.
If anything, the recent slide away by conservative megapundits away from McCain / Palin appears to be a rescue mission designed to salvage the credibility of conservative megapundits, not the Republican Party or the Conservative Movement. In fact, I think the deception on the behalf of these conservative pundits is a bit more duplicitous than they let on. While they claim to want a true conservative realignment of the Republican Party, they’re retooling their writing as though they expect the opposite to happen. It appears as though most of these longtime conservative pundits believe that a liberal realignment is what’s going to occur, and these conservative pundits are simply making a phased withdrawal away from their longtime readership towards a left-leaning future readership.
Ms. Noonan and other megapundit turncoats: the outrage expressed by your readers hasn’t been incurred because you’ve shifted your support away from the only conservative ticket on the ballot this November. You’re faced with reader outrage because you’ve expressed the same contempt for your readership that has traditionally been expressed solely by your colleagues on the other side of the aisle regarding conservatives - you extoll conservative virtues with one article and then damn the very candidates who embody those virtues simply with another, and not due to any substantive reason. Rather, it’s because those candidates didn’t attend a university with a high enough U.S. News & World Report college ranking and don’t articulate their positions using the same ebullient language found in the stump speeches of Senator Obama. You’re not sold on Palin or McCain out of lack of substance, but of lack of style; you claim that Gov. Palin hasn’t effectively conveyed her positions on any major issues, yet it’s apparent that you have not been listening.
The problem of you and the rest of the intelligentsia on the conservative side of the aisle is that most of you are profusely embarrassed by the stylistic, not substantive, failings of your candidates. To make matters worse for your readers, there happens to be a candidate at the top of the Democratic ticket who has the opposite problem (lots of style, little substance), one which was widely recognized by yourselves and your readers prior to McCain’s financial crisis poll-slide and Palin’s Katie Couric interviews. You mull it over and decide that the Democratic candidate is the better choice, not for your historical ideological alignment but because he’s the more intellectually defensible choice when it comes to your profession. You’ve made a choice that will make it easier for you to maintain your credibility as thought leaders and journalists. There is no nobler choice for supporting a particular candidate than self-preservation.
But no long after you’ve made your decision you have to try your hand at persuading your audience, and you fail utterly. In the course of writing your article where you announce your strategic withdrawal away from McCain and towards Obama you experience severe cognitive dissonance: you can’t explain why it makes sense to abandon a conservative candidate and support an ulta-liberal candidate in order to save conservatism, but you can’t risk becoming a laughing stock among your Beltway cocktail buddies at the Washington Post by supporting a clear loser and his permapregnant rookie Governor sidekick from the backwash of the country. So you end up producing a garbage exit post and piss off the vocal majority of your readers.
Let’s make this clear: when you’re getting bombarded with angry emails from your subscribers, you know, the people who pay you money to write stuff that they want to read, you don’t have any right to call their treatment “unfair” when you’re the one being a duplicitous asshole. Just a thought.
Your point, Peggy? Benjamin Franklin's son spent time in jail for being a loyalist counterrevolutionary, and father and son never spoke again.
You took fifteen paragraphs to call these conservative turncoats damned snobs?
1) You never were a conservative, but just made your living fooling conservatives
2) You are really unintelligent to let Obama fool you. If that's the case, you don't deserve to be a commentator.
3) Your social standing matters more than your principles.
Like I said, I don't care whether you vote for/support Obama, but if you cared at all for the conservative movement and had serious disagreements with the party's nominees you would keep your mouth shut and vote as you wished. The conservative movement is more than just the top of the ticket and your silly attempt to demoralize Republicans damages all down-ticket races. But, my inclination is to believe that the conservative movement really doesn't matter, and your announcements were totally self-serving. (Of course, maybe I'm just an ignorant rube because I support McCain/Palin, thinking that the principles of an imperfect Republican outshine those of an eloquent Marxist any day).
Excellent catch! Great post!
Outstanding.