September 28, 2001

6:37 AM

1998 essay by Peggy Noonanpredicts a "big terrible thing" for New York and D.C. Poetic and eerie. (found at: Follow Me Here).
posted by xowie (15 comments total)

Saw an interview with her day before yesterday. She really scared me with her take on why more security measures were not taken in the late 90's. Polls indicated that the American public would not be for homeland defense measures.
posted by bjgeiger at 6:46 AM on September 28, 2001

I'm strangely attracted to Republican women pundits. Of whom Noonan is by far the nuttiest.
posted by xowie at 7:00 AM on September 28, 2001

xowie, I have to disagree about Noonan being the nuttiest Republican pundit. Ann Coulter, a borderline psychotic, far outdistances her in that department.
posted by Ty Webb at 7:17 AM on September 28, 2001

Nothing Coulter has written is stranger than this passage from Noonan:

"I first saw [President Reagan] as a foot, highly polished brown cordovan wagging merrily on a hassock. I spied it through the door. It was a beautiful foot, sleek. Such casual elegance and clean lines! But not a big foot, not formidable, maybe a little frail. I imagined cradling it in my arms, protecting it from unsmooth roads."

MediaWhoresOnline has a great piece on Peggy by former classmates. My favorite quote: "where did she get that affected unctuous delivery that sounds like a gene splice between William Buckley Jr. and Thurston Howell III?"
posted by rcade at 7:55 AM on September 28, 2001

Ann Coulter is incredibly cute and undeniably psychotic (even if she did attend America's best college as is rumored). But once I read The Case Against Hillary Clinton, I knew that Peggy Noonan would always be my Nurse Ratchett.
posted by xowie at 8:09 AM on September 28, 2001

That MediaWhoresOnline thing is one classy idea. An entire site, dedicated to below-the-belt ad-hominems! Talk about intellectual discourse!

none of us trusted her. She was sneaky. She always seemed to have an eye trained on my boyfriend, the most talented artist in the school.

Is this written by an 11-year old?
posted by dagny at 8:11 AM on September 28, 2001

Nice ad-hominem attack, there, Dagny. You really showed them!
posted by Doug at 8:43 AM on September 28, 2001

*rolls eyes*
posted by dagny at 8:47 AM on September 28, 2001

An entire site, dedicated to below-the-belt ad-hominems! Talk about intellectual discourse!

Unlike the Clintonian penis obsessed Free Republic?
posted by y2karl at 8:52 AM on September 28, 2001

So we're agreed: Free Republic and MediaWhores are both the best places for non-partisan objective journalism. Noted!
posted by Skot at 9:06 AM on September 28, 2001

bjgeiger,

As Noonan herself asserts in the cited column, "there's no Armageddon constituency."

The paragraph that haunts me is ths:

Maybe, of course, I'm wrong. But I think of the friend who lives on Park Avenue who turned to me once and said, out of nowhere, "If ever something bad is going to happen to the city, I pray each day that God will give me a sign. That He will let me see a rat stand up on the sidewalk. So I'll know to gather the kids and go." I absorbed this and, two years later, just a month ago, poured out my fears to a former high official of the United States government. His face turned grim. I apologized for being morbid. He said no, he thinks the same thing. He thinks it will happen in the next year and a half. I was surprised, and more surprised when he said that an acquaintance, a former arms expert for another country, thinks it will happen in a matter of months.

I can understand if a bunch of MFers want to make fun of her, but this paragraph will stick with me a lot longer than their catty sniping will.
posted by alumshubby at 11:10 AM on September 28, 2001

Ms. Noonan (a former Reagan speechwriter turned professional Clinton-basher, I'll always remember her "Why Clinton won't be reelected" story in 1995, Forbes magazine) usually blames everything bad on the Clintons. The recession? Bill's fault! Terrorism? Blame it on Hillary! A rainy weekend? It's those awful Clintons.
A Kennedy fan in her youth, she did a great job in the White House because she took famous JFK and RFK lines and adapted them to her new Boss' needs
It can be effective sometimes, but it's a pretty boring shtick, if you ask me.
posted by matteo at 1:16 PM on September 28, 2001

I can understand if a bunch of MFers want to make fun of her, but this paragraph will stick with me a lot longer than their catty sniping will.

MFers? That's the best abbreviation I've ever seen to describe us. (Even better -- "a bunch of bad-ass MFers").

As a Peggy Noonan fan, if you're going to carry around one of her paragraphs, you can do a lot better than that. The woman wrote the "slipped the surly bonds of Earth" speech after the Challenger disaster.
posted by rcade at 4:36 PM on September 28, 2001

FreeRepublic deserves every opproprium one may be creative enough to lay on it. In the last few days I've there observed the following: withering criticism of Chelsea Clinton for "cashing in" on the tragedy, Tina Brown having recruited her to write for Talk, which didn't end with insults of Chelsea's writing abilities, but with insults to her personal appearance, a long-firmly-held belief at FR that her real father is not Bill but instead Webb Hubbell, and suggestions that she was herself giving oral sex to either her legally recognized or supposed biological father, one couldn't exactly tell [and that's just one]; withering criticism of Angelina Jolie, who was hired by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees as a roving ambassador but one month ago, for donating $1M to Afghan refugees, comparing her with Jane "Viet Cong" Fonda and authoritative statements as of fact that she had admitted having sex with her brother (a snickering rumor based on that Oscar kiss, which she vigorously denied, rather than admitting); an attempt by a Muslim to explain that the terrorists were not in fact following Islam as he understood it, to be met with Quiet your lies, apologist, the true face of Islam has been shown and we will never forget it; withering criticism of John McCain for, well, not being a raving conservative anymore, his eulogy for a Flight 93 hero (incidentally gay) evidence of how he's become a practical Democrat, since he accepted gay Republican support in his campaign; and now the Republicans have found their April Glaspie (the Bush I diplomat infamously supposed to have given Saddam Hussein the green light for his invasion of Kuwait by citing a deliberately vague US policy), one Robin Raphael, a Clinton-administration State official who advocated rapprochement with the Taliban as a means to an end (her husband having been killed in the same airplane bombing that killed Pakistani President Zia, she perhaps was under fewer illusions than many).

Oh, topic? I guess I should have posted this bit about Peggy Noonan's latest column God Is Back in this thread instead. Sorry ...
posted by dhartung at 6:45 PM on September 28, 2001