Noonan On Palin

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Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing — who is really one of them and who is not — and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy.[WSJ Online]

Palin does remind me very strongly of the women I grew up with in Texas. All them could literally ride and shoot. I have one cousin I never see because she spends every Thanksgiving and Christmas hunting. The idea that such women look weak in the eyes of “feminists” says a great deal about the defects of contemporary “feminist” thinking.

12 thoughts on “Noonan On Palin”

  1. The column is nice but a bit parochial in tone. Surely Noonan ought to realize that women such as Palin and your cousin already know how to reload their weapons.

  3. “Great respect goes to Barack Obama not only for saying criticism of candidates’ children is out of bounds in political campaigns, but for making it personal, and therefore believable. “My mother had me when she was eighteen…” That was the lovely sound of class in American politics.”

    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.

  4. Lexington Green,

    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.

  5. I agree with Lex. Noonan is a media person. She lives in New York. Probably most of the people she interacts with on a daily basis are liberal Democrats. She pulls punches, or maybe she’s just not a combative person. Obama was not being in any way gracious by discussing Palin’s family. Graciousness would have meant saying, “The rumors are scurrilous and I will not dignify them with a response. You people in the media should stop discussing them. Next question…” Instead he helped to keep the slanders alive by talking about them — knowing, as Lex reminds us, that the media will do his dirty work.

    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.

  7. Ha. The Peggy Noonan live microphone is great.

    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.

  11. Peggy Noonan has responded at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122044753790594947.html?mod=todays_columnists

    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.

  12. Jonathan, in light of Peggy’s declaration that someone “abused” her meaning by editing out segments of the audio, I don’t think “legit” is the right word to describe it — it’s not TANG/Killian memo fake, but there’s some fakery about it. It’s real audio, doctored to create a false impression.

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