Monday, August 31, 2009

Peggy Noonan: Too Lazy To Steal?


So the Magic Dolphin Lady took up her Mighty Bic of Agape to pen her thoughts on the passing of Senator Edward Kennedy.

It begins thusly:
"It was the summer of 1985, a year after the second Reagan landslide, and there was a particular speech coming up that was important to the president and first lady. It was a fund-raiser for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, which at the time was relatively new and the only presidential library that didn’t have an endowment. The event was at Ted Kennedy’s house."


After which, Sweet Baby Conservative Jebus' very favorite scribbler copies and pastes all 12 paragraphs of a speech she wrote for Ronald Reagan...

...for a JFK Library fundraiser...

...24 years ago...

...that had as much to do with the life and accomplishments of Senator Edward Kennedy as Noonan's high school essay on Tricia Nixon's weeping Virgin Mary shoe trees.

She then concludes this truly spectacular example of ostentatiously lazy, nihil ad rem self-plagiarism with a brief, third-hand mention that:
"Nancy Reagan gave a telephone interview to Chris Matthews on "Hardball." "We were close," she said of their friendship, "and it didn't make any difference to Ronnie or to Ted that one was a Republican and one a Democrat."
And having read this bloodless scrap of regurgitato, I am now sure of three things:
1. After all this time, the Wall Street Journal still pays Peggy Noonan by the word.

2. If I had ever tried to fob off as Newly!Relevant! something I'd written years before on an entirely different subject, the very least my English Comp teacher would have done is shred it in front of me, one page at a time.

3. However often Noonan embarrasses herself with her "whispery, dolphineering, Jebus-conjuring blather and Locked Ward Stare into a Universe that does not exist" she will roll on and on like a mighty river. She long ago found that magic doorway into the Villager Media Clubhouse, from which no one is ever exiled regardless of the rancidity of their lies, the depths of their duplicity or the sheer tonnage of their incompetence.

6 comments:

Mike Goldman said...

To the contrary, drifty, lies, duplicity and incompetence are the coin of the realm!

OM said...

Oy... Maybe she's just getting old and weird. "Grandchildren, remember how I wrote a speech and everyone's still quoting it? Here, I memorized it."

Cirze said...

A doorway which no writer with integrity would have ever walked through willingly in the first place as the price is always an indication of its value.

Thanks for all your reporting, Dg.

You are the writer for our time.

S

She long ago found that magic doorway into the Villager Media Clubhouse, from which no one is ever exiled regardless of the rancidity of their lies, the depths of their duplicity or the sheer tonnage of their incompetence.

lostnacfgop said...

well, DG, chalk it up to Noonan not having anything else to say about the man, since her memory receptors for Senator Ted have been indelibly tarred and obscured by "ChappaquiddickChappaquiddickChappaquiddickChappaquiddick" thanks to the cabal of ignorants with whom she cavorts. To limit one's understanding of Ted Kennedy to that one admittedly low and shameful indiscretion is to fail to understand the concept of life as an exercise in learning, redemption and reclamation.

karen marie said...

"... to fail to understand the concept of life as an exercise in learning, redemption and reclamation."

But that is one of the most endearing qualities of the never-right!

For all their talk of "redemption and reclamation" ("learning" not so much) only those anointed can achieve them. Five minutes in the wilderness and they're good to go. The unanointed can never wash away the sin, even where none exists.

p.s. ~ I thought the post epitomized Peggy.

Anonymous said...

Noonan says--

"He (Obama) could always surprise everyone by saying he made a mistake and he's going back to the drawing board to work hand in hand with Republicans. That would be interesting, and could be quite productive."

Jeez, lady. Go back to your butterfly collection.

If the Republicans had shown ANY sign that they're willing to work with Obama on health care or on any of the pressing matters before us and not just interested in obstructing and interfering and churning up the bottom dwellers they call their base--

--that would be interesting and could be quite productive.

God help us.