Noonan hears a hooah
Peggy Noonan sure is glad President Obama kicked those love-bead-wearing, peacenik, flower-children Dems in the junk and made them realize we are locked in an existential struggle with Islamofascism:
A deep and perhaps the deepest benefit of the speech was that a Democratic president asserted compellingly, and with a high degree of certitude and conviction, that the United States is and has been immersed in a long struggle with intractable enemies.
For eight years we heard this from Republicans. Halfway through those years people began to tune the president out: He was acting on a Republican obsession and approaching it with the usual Republican tear-jerking bellicosity. The Democrats for eight years had been removed from daily national responsibility—the party out of power always is—and in any case it’s always easier to question and criticize than to know and make a decision. But to have now a Democratic president surveying essentially the same history and data as his predecessor and coming to the same rough conclusion—we are in a real struggle with bad people, it will go a long time—was encouraging, and seemed to mark a two-party sharing of overall authority and investment.
Yeah, the Democratic Party sure was a unified foil during the Bush years, blocking Shrubya at every turn when he asked for authorizations for military force, turning down war funding requests, rallying hordes of patchouli-smelling hippies to the Capitol steps to broadcast their message of unbridled pacifism for Eight. Long. Years. Why, it’s a wonder the Military Industrial Complex wasn’t dismantled completely!
But Noonan wasn’t done scaling Kristolian heights of wrongness by misremembering the past eight years in her opening grafs: She digs deeper here:
This is also the first time we’ve seen an American president declaring, or rather redeclaring, a war without a political base. Again, LBJ, Nixon, George W. Bush—they always had a base that would support them, on which they could rely and from which they could maneuver. But Mr. Obama’s base is not with him on this decision.
Wha? LBJ’s base was with him? The incumbent president refused to run again partly due to a “base” rebellion, and the Secret Service didn’t allow LBJ to attend his own party’s national convention in 1968 because part of his “base” was rioting in the streets to chants of “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” And that was the NICE part: Other factions of “the base” were blowing shit up.
But even stranger than Noonan’s apparent memory lapse is her sudden aversion to soaring rhetoric. Noonan—yes, NOONAN!—now objects to verbal flights of fancy:
About two-thirds of the way through, the speech degenerated into the faux eloquence that makes people listening across our nation want to gouge out their eyes and run screaming from the room. Lots of our children and our children’s children, the dark clouds of tyranny, the light of freedom. Our strength comes from “the entrepreneurs and researchers who will pioneer new industries; from the teachers that will educate our children, and the service of those who work in our communities at home . . .”
This is where normal people began to daydream. Or scream. None of it was terrible, but we’ve heard it now for 40 years. Enough. Make it new.
She’s right—we have heard it for 40 years, and a not insignificant portion of the paeans to American Exceptionalism were penned by the Nooners herself, including these nuggets she stuffed into Reagan’s gullet:
We are bound today by what bound us forty years ago, the same loyalties, traditions, and beliefs. We’re bound by reality. The strength of America’s allies is vital to the United States, and the American security guarantee is essential to the continued freedom of Europe’s democracies. We were with you then; we are with you now. Your hopes are our hopes, and your destiny is our destiny.
Noonan also served as ventriloquist when George HW Bush mouthed “a thousand points of light” and “read my lips: no new taxes,” the latter of which arguably made him a one-termer. Very recently, she suggested Obama deliver a mash-note to America via his Nobel Peace Prize (which she termed a “wicked and ignorant award”) acceptance speech:
America hasn’t just helped the world, it literally lit the world with its inventions, which are the product of its freedoms. The lights under which the Peace Prize judges read, and rejected, the worthy nominations? Why, those lights were invented by an American. The emails the committee members sent to each other, sharing their banal insights on leadership? They came through the Internet. Who invented the Internet? It was a Norwegian bureaucrat with a long face and hair on his nose and little plastic geometric eyeglasses? Oh wait, it was Americans. The members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee are healthy because they have been inoculated against diseases such as polio. Who invented the polio vaccine, an enfeebled old leftist academic in Oslo? Nah, it was a man named Jonas Salk. He was an American.
And now she says “enough” of this magic dolphin bullshit already? That’s odd.
Posted by Betty Cracker on 12/04/09 at 09:47 AM • Permalink
Categories: Politics • Barack Obama • Our Stupid Media •
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