Birthday Fundraiser Day Two -- Dry-Heave Politics With Peggy Noonan

Once again I descend the rickety stairs down, down, down into my archives to retrieve another moment lost to time.   This time the date is October 23, 2008 and the person is Peggy Noonan playing Tone Cop who is terribly angry at (see if this sounds familiar)  those liberals and those win-at-any-cost Democrats who are silencing debate in this country. 

Plus, they're also being rude about it!

 

Keep Drinking

Eventually you'll believe anything

Except, of course, the simple truth.

In fact eventually you will sound exactly like this…

From Media Matters

Peggy Noonan, meet Bill O'Reilly
by Eric Boehlert

Peggy Noonan is pained about the state of public debate in this country. The longtime Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan speechwriter longs for a time when dignity flourished and political dissent was embraced. Lecturing with signature certainty in her latest column, Noonan bemoans the loss of "civic grace, democratic grace, the kind that assumes disagreements are part of the fabric, but we can make the fabric hold together."

After all, she laments, "Free speech means hearing things you like and agree with, and it means allowing others to speak whose views you do not like or agree with."

Peggy Noonan may be anguished, but at least she's sure who is to blame. It is liberals, those win-at-any-cost Democrats (and worse, celebrities!) who are silencing debate in this country. Plus, they're also being rude about it.

The way Noonan sees things, it's inquisitive, open-minded conservatives who are grappling with the hard questions, eager for public debate and a civilized, wide-ranging dialogue. They're the solemn protectors of dissent in this country, particularly vigilante about shielding unpopular opinions during wartime.

All of which begs the questions: Has Noonan ever watched Fox News where Bill O'Reilly tells guests to "shut-up" and unfurls insults, all while compiling an "enemies list"? Has she tuned into right-wing talk radio, which is designed to be hermetically sealed in order to keep dissenting voices off the air? And has Noonan ever read the right-wing war bloggers, who, as a rule, question the patriotism of anyone who speaks up against the war in Iraq?

Noonan's attempted maneuver about grace and free speech is clunky, but it's not unfamiliar. She's simply mimicking a popular right-wing attack that happens to be a classic Rovian, jujitsu thrust, which is to acknowledge your own weakness -- unhinged hatred for liberals and bullying desire to muzzle dissent -- and relentlessly project it onto your opponents, arguing that they're the ones who have blinders on and are driven by partisan rage. Consequently, Republican pundits pretend it's high-minded conservatives -- gentlemen and women who prefer the Queensbury Rules of intellectual combat -- who are trying to cling to a fading notion of poise and civility in the public square.

Where to begin? You could start with Media Matters for America's catalog of graceless attacks made by the likes of O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh, who owe their careers to their willingness to assault political opponents and stomp on minority viewpoints. In terms of Noonan herself, travel back to last year's Terri Schiavo right-to-die controversy and try to find the grace hidden in the insults Noonan hurled against anyone who disagreed with her radical notion that Congress needed to overrule the rights of Schiavo's husband and keep Terri alive via legislation. To Noonan, her opponents had a "bizarre passion" for death, were "unstable," "unhinged," and "red-fanged and ravenous." She warned that they were paving "the low road that twists past Columbine and leads toward Auschwitz."

…
As for Noonan's allegation that it's liberals, not conservatives, who actively despise dissent, blogger Glenn Greenwald did an efficient job of demolishing that talking point, noting, as just one of many examples, that "David Horowitz has built his career over the last several years on his campaign to limit academic freedom through legislation."

Or how about the Fox News pundits in late March 2003 who were attacking journalists who raised legitimate questions about the early military progress of the invasion into Iraq. At Fox, that public discourse was slapped down as "disgraceful," "idiotic," "stupid," and "moronic."
…

While I agree with Boehlert’s analysis – his dissection of “method and opportunity” -- I disagree with his take on the motive for Noonan’s crimes. His assertion that “She's simply mimicking a popular right-wing attack that happens to be a classic Rovian, jujitsu thrust…”

Her actions may well have the effect of mimicking Rove’s pathology, but there is no reason to think that the cause of her now-complete detachment from Reality isn't that she has simply and finally gone insane.

That her whispery, dolphineering, Jebus-conjuring blather and Locked Ward Stare into a Universe that does not exist would look and sound exactly as they do from inside four padded walls and tied into five-point restraints, instead of in front of the cameras and microphones of the national press.

Because once you have fallen too far into darkness, the thought of having to face the reality of the carnage that gapes at you from your rear view mirror becomes your ultimate horror.

Your cage of rats.

You mash on the gas, piling more of the same onto the disasters you have already sired (the Hair of the War that Bit You, so to speak) but no matter has fast you flee or how loud you screech, the only thing protecting you from your Room 101 primal dread is a tissue of lies that grows more brittle and translucent with each passing day.

Because now the heaps of corpses you have stacked out to the horizon are bringing down the roof beams.

The ruin and penury in which you have happily collaborated in press so hard against that last onion-skin of perfidy that the blood now oozes freely through.

What is coming next is beyond doubt, as are the names and faces of the authors, axe-honers and axe-wielders who have stampeded the entire 21st century into this abattoir.

Because chaos and nightmare is and always was

the real Project for a New American Century

And there was a moment, long ago -- who can say exactly when? -- that you knew beyond any doubt that all that have sworn by is a fraud and all you believe is a lie.

But you couldn’t muster the courage to face the music you yourself composed.

Because once you knew better – once you galloped on past that checkpoint beyond which you can not possibly, plausibly argue that you were misled or were just too stupid or credulous to figure our what was really going on – and you keep on going in the direction of evil while spouting scripture and wheezing on and on about righteousness, you were lost.

Possibly forever.

Part of the symptomology of the wildfire cancer that has now swallowed your soul is the volume and fever with which you now say the most despicable and deranged things.

You denounce patriots as traitors, back war criminals as heroes and denounce as misfits and Compulsive Bush Haters the level-headed realists who warned you this was all coming. You lie and lie and lie about crazy shit. Obvious shit.

Because Rove is has no conscience, what he does doesn’t bother him, but to follow him -- to survive after trading in your soul for protection from the consequences of your lies -- you have had to slowly cut yourself off from anything having any spiritual nutritional value. You live now, under siege, in the battle-bridge of your own skull, sustained only by swallowing lies regurgitated down to you from above which you, in turn, puke into the mouths and hearts of the rank and file below.

At long last – after clearing a path to One Party Power by projectile vomiting unhinged hatred in anything that stood in their way – there is nothing left in the Republican belly but the sour aftertaste of that fiery cask-strength rage that has kept them warm and voting for so long.

At long last, nothing left but the pathetic gibbering of Dry-Heave politics.