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Joe Scarborough Rubber Room watch: The Day After
Brilliant at Breakfast — ... more attractive. 6:32 - Logrolling in our time. Scar quotes WaPo's Eugene Robinson, who is also a ubiquitous presence on MSNBC: All Americans, regardless of race or party, should think of John Lewis bleeding on that Alabama bridge -- and then think of him at Invesco Field, watching a black man accept his party's nomination. Tears are entirely appropriate. 6:33 - Hide the children. Peggy Noonan is coming. And Mika quotes from her Column of Unusual Vapidity: I think he was saying, I'm a surprising person, ...

Peggy Noonan on Sarah Palin, etc.
Babalu Blog — Peggy Noonan on Sarah Palin, etc. From today's piece by Peggy Noonan, deliciously titled " A Clear and Present Danger To the American Left ," an excerpt: Gut: The Sarah Palin choice is really going to work, or really not going to work. It's not going to be a little successful or a little not; it's not going to be a wash. She is either going to be magic or one of history's accidents. She is either going to be brilliant and groundbreaking, or will soon be the target of unattributed quotes by bitter staffers shifting blame in all the Making of the President 2008 books. Of which ...

Time to Fight Back
Power Line — Peggy Noonan , in today's Wall Street Journal: Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing -- who is ...

Sarah Palin, the legend grows
Power Line — Some of Peggy Noonan's observations about Sarah Palin (see John's post below) are over-the-top, in my opinion. Noonan notwithstanding, the Democrats I know don't see Palin as a "real and present danger to the American left." One Democrat with substantial experience in presidential campaigns told me that he viewed the race as a toss-up before the Palin selection and now gives Obama the slight edge. He and the other Dems I've talked to may be underestimating her, but that's how they see Palin. The Dems are attacking Palin, as they would attack any nominee with ...

Return of the Feminist
Southern Appeal — ... annoyance to a resonant hum following the surprise nomination of Governor Palin. Citizens such as myself who seek to preserve our sanity by avoiding talking heads and the whine of the ruby-throated North American pundit cannot block out the Left’s chest beating and its crocodile tears for the Governor’s children. Even on this sacred site, the comments inevitably turn to the issue of pregnant teens and leadership. Why this fevered fusillade from the Lunatic Fringe? As usual, Peggy Noonan has the answer. It’s fear. Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because ...

The Potential Palin Threat
The Corner — ... ] From Peggy Noonan : Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing who is really one of them and who ...

A Clear and Present Danger
small dead animals — A Clear and Present Danger ... to the American Left: Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing -- who ...

Noonan Explains...
Real Clear Politics - TIME.com — ... Tech [image] Entertainment [image] Health & Science [image] Photos [image] Blogs [image] Magazine [image] RCP Home Latest Polls Videos Links Markets Sports Obama Camp Responds to Palin | The RCP Blog Home Page September 4, 2008 Noonan Explains... Posted by BLAKE DVORAK | E-Mail This | Permalink | Email Author Peggy Noonan explains what she was saying in this video : In the truncated version of the conversation, ...

AMERICAN DIGEST — ... Noonan on The Power of Normal: "She has the power of the normal. Hillary Clinton is grim, stentorian, was born to politics and its connivances. Nancy Pelosi, another mother of five, often seems dazed and ad hoc." ...

Is Sarah Palin a huge problem for Obama or just a news cycle?
BuzzFlash.org - Progressive News and Commentary with an Attitude | Fight Ignorance: Read BuzzFlash — ... like a nation-defining election. And in this it seems almost old-fashioned. 1992 for instance didn't seem or feel nation-defining, not as I remember it, nor did 2000. 1964 did, and '80 did, but they both ended in landslides. Landslide is not what I'm seeing here. Where are the Democrats going to go? I suspect to foreign policy. In politics it used to be called Tolstoy: war and peace. McCain-Palin will mean more war, Obama-Biden will mean peace. This campaign is about to become: epic. Peggy Noonan: 'A Servant's Heart' (The Wall Street Journal) Is this indeed a battle for ...

Noonan on Palin’s Political Skills and Populism
PoliBlog: A Rough Draft of my Thoughts — ... seemed to indicate that Noonan was far from impressed with Palin. Then, on Thursday night after the debate, she was quite effusive in her praise of Palin’s performance (stating, amongst other things, that she “killed”). Her post-debate column was a bit of a mix. In that column she did ponder a not so complementary notion: ...

Michael Ames: The Dark Side of the Swoon
Politics on HuffingtonPost.com — ... . Cynical jeering at the national convention, angry rally crowds, divisive populism. An optimist might call these the death throes of a hobbled conservative movement. But a realist can only be alarmed by John McCain's solicitation of his supporters' worst instincts. All of it, as Peggy Noonan gracefully warned, is bad for America. ...

Conservative pundits on Sarah Palin
Winds of Change.NET — ... Peggy Noonan: "In the end the Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics. It's no good, not for conservatism and not for the country. And yes, it is a mark against John McCain, against his judgment and idealism." (link) ...

Getting Palin wrong, coming and going
Power Line — ... Palin's performance. But in her latest column, she takes the position that Palin is "a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics" that is "no good. . .for conservatism [or] for the country." ...

CONSERVATIVES BEWITCHED, BOTHERED, AND BEWILDERED
Right Wing Nut House — ... convention, during the heady days of early September. Except that Noonan may not have believed what she wrote. Noonan’s current position—that Palin epitomizes what’s wrong with conservatives – fares no better. She begins by citing Edmund Burke’s admonition that writers owe their readers their judgment, and that they betray their readers if they present what may or may not be their opinion. Ironically, this is precisely the betrayal of Noonan’s initial column on Palin. In her latest column , Noonan argues that Palin has not been sufficiently thoughtful in her public statements ...

And now they’ve lost Peggy Noonan
Clareified — Buurn. In the end the Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics. It’s no good, not for conservatism and not for the country. And yes, it is a mark against John McCain, against his judgment and idealism. 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 ...

The GOP: Tripling Down on the Shrinking Base
Firedoglake — ... weren’t conservative enough. Now, after the 2008 election, in which the GOP lost even more seats in the House and Senate as well as the White House, the Republicans have concluded that they lost because they let their base down and weren’t conservative enough. Even though Obama received a higher percentage of the popular vote than Reagan did in 1980, the GOP’s response to this palpable shift in the electorate has been to obsess about the Fairness Doctrine and FOCA, repeat “center-right nation” like a mantra, publicly grovel before Rush ...

Rejection?
The Corner — Saturday, January 31, 2009 [image] Rejection? [John Derbyshire] Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal : "Business as usual." "That's Washington." But in 2008 the public rejected business as usual. Did they? I missed that. According to my notes, 381 of the 435 members of the House of Representatives in the 111th Congress are returnees, having sat in the 110th. Of the other 54, 31 had retired and only 23 were defeated in either primary or general elections. Similarly in the Senate, where, of 29 incumbents running for the U.S. Senate, either four or five were defeated ...

Peggy Noonan Then. Peggy Noonan Now.
ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES — ... They have their reasons. The Republicans want to cut taxes. They have their reasons too. ... So it's all pretty clear and not at all murky. Whoever is right will triumph and be politically rewarded, and whoever isn't will not. This is good. It's not "Tweedledum and Tweedledee," and it's not "There's not a dime's worth of difference between them." It's a choice, not an echo. This year, however, Noonan's message on the stimulus package is rather different: It looks like a win but feels like a loss. The ...

Having had power & lost it, has GOP learned its lesson?
GayPatriot — In her column on the ninety-eighth anniversary of the Gipper’s birth, Peggy Noonan heralded the new-found serioiusness of the Republicans:  They hadn’t been this way in years!.  She cautioned them not to get overconfident, to return their focus and not to “revert to the triumphalism of the Bush era, when they often got giddy and thick-necked and spiked the ball.“ Perhaps, they had become so giddy and thick-necked because when then-President Bush won re-election in 2004, increasing Republican majorities in both Houses of Congress, ...

Rush Limbaugh is channeling our blog
sisu — ... They're still not getting behind Palin, but Peggy Noonan and other leading lights of the Northeast Corridor Conservative community are starting to have their doubts about the current occupant of the Oval Office: These are the two great issues, the economic crisis and our safety. In the face of them, what strikes one is the weightlessness of the Obama administration , the jumping from issue to issue and venue to venue from day to day. Are Noonan & Company onto something, or are they unwitting dupes of a deliberate "crisis strategy" masterminded by the ...

Oh, Good--We'll Be Poorer!
The Corner — ... ] This Peggy Noonan column is a lovely piece of writing, as usual. But I detect a whiff of recession romanticism. Perhaps it's more virtuous to be de-leveraged rather than over-leveraged. Otherwise, I'm skeptical that the fall-out of the current economic tumult is going to make us any better people. We'll be as dishonest, greedy, selfish and prideful as ever just poorer. ...