Sunday, July 12, 2009

A Super-Size Smackdown of the Snobbery of Noonan ::: A Seemingly Very Nice Middle-Class Girl

Peggy Noonan used her Friday column in the Wall Street Journal to throw some dirt on Sarah Palin’s grave. It’s vintage Noonan: airheaded, dripping with condescension, and completely missing the point. No serious conservative needs to hear anything from Noonan except her groveling apology for being so horribly wrong about Barack Obama, who she energetically supported for president. However, it’s worth picking through the flotsam and jetsam of this embarrassing column, to appreciate the kind of intellectual fat that conservatives need to trim from the Republican Party.

Let’s begin by setting the stage: Sarah Palin resigned her governorship last week, and has no stated plans to run for elective office as of this writing. She has made it clear that she intends to remain on the public stage, and has a bright and useful future of public speaking, writing, and helping her party raise funds for 2010 and beyond. I personally disagree with the assessment that her resignation killed her political future, if she wants one. It will be an obstacle for her to work around, but I think she could overcome it - especially if Alaskans are clearly pleased with her successor, and think well of her as the 2012 elections get under way.

After referencing the way “The left and the media immediately overplayed their hand, with attacks on her children,” Noonan says of Palin:

She went on the trail a sensation but demonstrated in the ensuing months that she was not ready to go national and in fact never would be. She was hungry, loved politics, had charm and energy, loved walking onto the stage, waving and doing the stump speech. All good. But she was not thoughtful. She was a gifted retail politician who displayed the disadvantages of being born into a point of view (in her case a form of conservatism; elsewhere and in other circumstances, it could have been a form of liberalism) and swallowing it whole: She never learned how the other sides think, or why.

I always thought the Wall Street Journal had editors that would review columns to make sure they don’t have annoying run-on sentences that don’t use commas but maybe they don’t and never will. Poor sentence construction aside, Noonan couldn’t be more wrong to say Palin’s point of view “could have been a form of liberalism.” No, Peggy. A charismatic woman espousing a form of liberalism would never have to suffer attacks on her children in the media. People who swallow forms of liberalism are never required to understand the first thing about conservative points of view. They aren’t really expected to know anything about the intellectual history of liberalism, either. Barack Obama couldn’t articulate the principles of conservatism if Thomas Sowell hacked into his teleprompter and fed him the words.

Read the rest of it in all its deliciousness here:

Hot Air � Blog Archive � A Seemingly Very Nice Middle-Class Girl

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