It seems I was right to be skeptical. The youtube clip does have her words, but the conversation has been truncated to make it sound substantially more critical than it actually is.

- the words “it’s over” weren’t about McCain’s campaign, but about assumptions that worked in 1988-94 about the Republican base being “average Americans”

- she did comment about Kay Bailey Hutchinson’s experience vs. Palin’s, and was trying to understand why McCain made his choice. She thinks it comes down to McCain wanting to tell a “narrative” about being a maverick. In Peggy’s eyes, Republicans suck at the narrative bulls**t because, unlike what Shannon calls “articulate intellectuals”, they don’t live in the world of the narrative. When Republicans try to use leftist tactics they come off looking amateurish.

… and when partisan hacks use clipped and misleading audio, they come off looking even worse.

Just shows you that her whole schtick is a phony, too.

If that is what she thinks, why is her column this feel-good pollyanna stuff.

I guess she doesn’t want to hurt the feelings of her stoopid Republican friends too much.

Link

[link cleaned up by Jonathan]

I suspect that Lex is correct about McCain’s campaign as well. The Republican Party (like the Democrats) is lousy with people who benefit from big government and whose livelihoods are threatened by a real reformer, like Palin, who might eventually do something crazy if she is elected, like cut a budget. These people have little incentive to help Palin. If I were she I might discreetly call on Cheney or Rumsfeld for advice.

I don’t agree with a lot of what Noonan has to say. I just thought that one paragraph rather neatly encapsulated modern capital-F “Feminist” thought.

Pure crap.

As Noonan also said:

She could become a transformative political presence.
.
So they are going to have to kill her, and kill her quick.
.
And it’s going to be brutal. It’s already getting there.

Obama knows the media will do the dirty work for him.

I like Peggy Noonan, but she goes on way too long thinking the best of everybody, long after the evidence is in.

She says

The mainstream media, which has been holding endless symposia here on the future of media in the 21st century, is in danger of missing a central fact of that future: If they appear, once again, as they have in the past, to be people not reporting the battle but engaged in the battle, if they allow themselves to be tagged by that old tag, which so tarnished them in the past, they will do more to imperil their own future than the Internet has.

If? What planet is Peggy living on?

Her final advice, however, is realistic and tough-minded. She says that McCain’s campaign team will be willing and eager to throw Palin under the bus, to blame her for any problems, and that the human snakes running the campaign will be a worse threat to Palin than the Democrats wlll ever be. That is the voice of experience talking.

Good point.