TW: Peggy Noonan is an articulate, if exceedingly pompous, voice for the Republicans. Here she seeks to retain some of her intellectual honesty by flaying the Fembot unmercifully. However, she spends much of the piece fretting over her potential banishment from the right wing punditry legion. Intellectual honesty and membership in the Republican punditry being somewhat mutually exclusive in the Palineolithic Era.
From Noonan/WSJ:
"There has never been a second's debate among liberals...over Mrs. Palin: She was a dope and unqualified from the start.[TW- it did not take a rocket scientist to figure her out Peggo...]
Conservatives and Republicans, on the other hand, continue to battle it out...You have to hold open the possibility of magic. People can come from nowhere, with modest backgrounds and short résumés, and yet be individuals of real gifts, gifts that had previously been unseen, that had been gleaming quietly under a bushel, and are suddenly revealed. Mrs. Palin came, essentially, from nowhere. But there was a man who came from nowhere, the seeming tool of a political machine, a tidy, narrow, unsophisticated senator appointed to high office and then thrust into power by a careless Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose vanity told him he would live forever. And yet that limited little man was Harry S. Truman. Of the Marshall Plan, of containment. Little Harry was big. He had magic. You have to give people time to show what they have. Because maybe they have magic too. [TW- I have posted before on the feebleness of the Truman/Palin comp., any comp. is really an insult to Truman who had a resume several multitudes thicker than Palin's, not to mention a demonstrably superior intellect]
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?
But it's unclear whether she is Bushian or Reaganite. She doesn't think aloud. She just . . . says things...She does not speak seriously but attempts to excite sensation—'palling around with terrorists.'...In the past two weeks she has spent her time throwing out tinny lines to crowds she doesn't, really, understand. This is not a leader, this is a follower, and she follows what she imagines is the base, which is in fact a vast and broken-hearted thing whose pain she cannot, actually, imagine. She could reinspire and reinspirit; she chooses merely to excite. She doesn't seem to understand the implications of her own thoughts.
...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 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."
http://online.wsj.com/article/declarations.html
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