November 25, 2000

7:51 PM

The Greenwood Position.Partisan perhaps, but will Peggy Noonan's latest OpEd in the WSJ be a rallying cry for frustrated conservatives? She offers compelling arguments and solid suggestions for proactive redress. Talk amongst yourselves.
posted by netbros (6 comments total)

Peggy "thousand points of light" Noonan comes right off and equates our present election problems to events like "...Vietnam, Watergate, the ayatollah, a stuck economy, and the fall of the Wall." Not only were conservatives on the wrong side on most of these issues, but she couldn't be farther from the truth. Gore and Bush, if I remember their second debate correctly, are nearly identical on almost every issue. There is no sea-change, no historical turning point here to rally the troops.

At the end of her poorly-cited hearsay recounting of what has been going on she advocates that Bush make his first official act to "announce that he will give a complete pardon to anyone who goes down to the FBI within 30 days and swears out a confession of his involvement in vote fraud and vote tampering in the 2000 elections." Joseph McCarthy would be proud.
posted by stevis at 10:24 PM on November 25, 2000

These are strange times when conservatives have to look to the left for their rallying cries. I mean, under normal circumstances, I'm sure, Noonan would sooner see Labour's Greenwood and the I.W.W.'s Joe Hill, both of whom she quotes, safely locked up in jail. Now they're providing her with words of inspiration.

I do wish though that she'd get her history straight. The Brits in the house can correct me but wasn't Greenwood asked to "Speak for England" because there was a national consensus concerning Nazi aggression which Chamberlain had utterly failed to address? Without a national consensus, the request would not have made sense.

Noonan turns this on its head. The foe, instead of being foreign, is all too domestic and instead of coming to terms with the opposition party, she's accusing them (without proof) of "trying to steal the election". Hardly a recipe for national consensus. Greenwood, I think, would have been pissed.
posted by leo at 10:46 PM on November 25, 2000

"Pissed" -- of course in the sense of being angry.
posted by leo at 10:49 PM on November 25, 2000

And this idea, from a conservative activist. In January President Bush, as his first act in office, should announce that he will give a complete pardon to anyone who goes down to the FBI within 30 days and swears out a confession of his involvement in vote fraud and vote tampering in the 2000 elections. It's harder to spin history when history has the affidavits.

No problem, Peggy... And I hope the guys who organized the Miami-Dade riot are the first ones in the door...

Sheesh.

posted by aurelian at 1:32 AM on November 26, 2000

Peggy Noonan sees what she wants to see. I'm sure it goes over well with the crowd that reads the WSJ opinion section -- one of the most rabidly conservative in the U.S. -- but I can't imagine many Democrats or independents being persuaded by that screed.

As someone who has watched way too much television and read way too many publications about this presidential recount, I have come to appreciate the commentators who are willing to say things that don't follow the scripted party line. Pat Caddell, a former Democratic pollster, has been loudly critical of many things the Gore campaign is doing in Florida. Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hegel, a Republican, has publicly stated that a full recount of Florida seems like the fairest outcome.

Noonan isn't one of those people. Her fawning and embarrasing columns advising Bush on how to perform at each of the debates were journalism at its most nauseating.
posted by rcade at 8:14 AM on November 26, 2000

I really dislike the "we counted, Bush won; we recounted, Bush won" line spun by Republicans. The phrase "false teleology" comes to mind. "We see a white swan: swans are white; we see another white swan: all swans are white; we fly to Australia... oh."
posted by holgate at 8:22 AM on November 26, 2000