What Happened To Peggy Noonan?
When did The Great Scarf Lady get permanently stuck in the 1980s?
Last month, the Wall Street Journal columnist and (supposedly) Republican icon Peggy Noonan made an appearance on Meet The Press which must surely rank among the most bizarre and incoherent ramblings of her once fabled career in Washington.
When asked by Chuck Todd about how Republicans should handle “exceptions” to total abortion bans after Roe v Wade was struck down by the Supreme Court, Peggy Noonan made the following statement:
“Do you know what the Republican Party should do now? It should use this victory — if you see it that way — to change itself and become a party that helps women. Change its reputation. Become a party that helps women and children — becomes responsible and supportive...”
Yes, those words actually came out of the mouth of The Great Scarf Lady on TV.
You could almost hear President Reagan turn over in his grave.
When did Peggy Noonan decide that the GOP is not a party that helps women or children?
When did she decide that overturning Roe v Wade was not a victory for the conservative movement?
It’s not that Peggy Noonan is clearly a social liberal that’s so surprisingly — or that she seems troubled that Roe v Wade was overturned — it’s that her worldview is essentially identical to the worldview of the Democrats on the panel. Her demeanor on the show seemed to suggest that her primary duty was to provide aid and comfort to liberals at this fragile psychological moment for them.
Which leads me to a central question for Peggy Noonan: how do you support a political party that you claim doesn’t support women and children — when you’re a woman with kids?
Not one to dwell on her own logical inconsistencies, Peggy Noonan had a column in the WSJ a few days later that outlined another of her worst traits: her gullibility.
Noonan opined that the testimony of Mark Meadows’ co-ed coffee-fetcher Cassidy Hutchinson was, you know, the final nail in the coffin for Donald Trump’s political career.
Seriously.
She instantly turned Cassidy Hutchinson into the hero who would finally vanquish Orange Man Bad.
Peggy Noonan didn’t bother to fact-check all the obvious holes in Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony (Cipollone told me to stop the insurrection! Trump grabbed the limo’s steering wheel!) because she doesn’t care about facts anymore — she cares about taking down Trump.
That’s why Noonan doesn’t bother to issue corrections or retractions or apologies when the “testimony” of Cassidy Hutchinson collapses instantly a day or two later — since there’s no rule of journalism that can’t be broken in the corporate press if it’s done to destroy the 45th President, and Peggy Noonan is totally on their side.
Nor does she display any regret or embarrassment over her weekly failures to comprehend American politics in general. That’s because Peggy Noonan isn’t doing journalism — she’s doing fantasy role-playing for liberal Republicans who fell asleep sometime in 1992 and mistook the ineptitude of the George Herbert Walker Bush Administration for some golden age.
This bring us to Peggy Noonan’s biggest failure: she was predicting Donald Trump’s political demise before the Trump Administration, and then during the Trump Administration, and she’s doing it still after the Trump Administration. There has never been a time in the last eight years that Peggy Noonan wasn’t sure that Donald Trump’s coffin was nailed down tight.
Here’s Peggy Noonan on August 4th, 2016 in the WSJ telling you that Trump was crazy and doomed: “I think this week marked a certain coming to terms with where the election is going. Politics is about trends and tendencies. The trends for Donald Trump are not good, and he tends not to change.”
And here’s Peggy Noonan on June 30th, 2022 in the WSJ telling you that Trump is crazy and doomed: “Mr. Trump’s national polling numbers continue underwater, but the real test will be to see those numbers after the Jan. 6 hearings are over. I believe we’ll see Rep. Liz Cheney’s kamikaze mission hit its target, and the SS Trump will list.”
Now, folks, three months after the August 4th, 2016 column appeared, Donald Trump won the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton. As for the June 30th, 2022 column, opinion polls show that Donald Trump would easily beat Joe Biden in a election today.
In other words, Peggy Noonan has been providing the opposite of accurate political analysis for the last eight years. Her political judgments are not just laughably wrong — they are so consistently and obviously awful that it must have occurred even to her that she’s managed to cancel her own legacy.
On the most important issues of the day for the GOP — abortion, gun control, election fraud, Biden’s competency — Peggy Noonan is not just out-of step, she’s totally out of lunch. She wants more gun control after Uvelde. She has no problem with the 2020 election. She thinks Gen. Mark Milley is a smart guy who was right to reach out to his Chinese counterpart outside the chain of command.
The list goes on and on and on.
It’s more than just a long string of hilariously bad opinions of course. Most of us could forgive Peggy Noonan for striking out more often in the Old Wine Aunt phase of her career — because she’s been at the plate so many times in the majors. It’s more than that: it’s the disturbing sense that the mind of Peggy Noonan permanently inhabits a world where Republicans and Democrats are friendly at Georgetown cocktail parties and their disagreements over policy are mostly polite.
That world — the world of Washington in the 1980’s — is long gone. Noonan seems totally oblivious of the fact that the Left is trying to destroy America — they’re ready to gut the Constitution, pack the Supreme Court, forcibly inject you with a vaccine (or lose your job), defund the police, and require a drag queen to perform a lap dance on your three year old child in kindergarten. If you brought up these inconvenient truths to Peggy Noonan, she would probably chuckle at you and call you imaginative or eccentric in that charmingly dismissive way of hers — she’s not equipped to handle the post-Trump cultural revolution in America.
She’s chosen to ignore it completely.
She’s wishing it away.
Peggy Noonan is lost, in other words, in a world of magical thinking. She doesn’t seem to believe that Democrats are really doing these things, because they’re not doing these things to Peggy Noonan. After all, Andrea Mitchell still smiles at her in the TV green rooms, and liberals still book her on the Sunday shows. Her polite and orderly world hasn’t changed a bit. Nobody is going to shake her faith in settling policy differences at Georgetown cocktail parties. Nobody is going to convince her that conservatives and liberals aren’t still friends — well and truly friends! — in 2022.
You don’t drag The Great Scarf Lady into a gun fight.
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The corporate media is completely corrupt. Just go down the list: the Russia Hoax, the stolen 2020 election, the deadly COVID vaccines. The corporate media is actively trying to hide the truth from the American people on a daily basis.
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Peggy Noonan is dead to me. I used to read her regularly. Trump has exposed and destroyed her. Sad the WSJ still publishes her unreadable bullshit. Stand fast Emerald and never let go of your principles or your fire!!
"co-ed coffee-fetcher Cassidy Hutchinson" 😀😀😀