Noonan for all to see

Tom Smith at the Right Coast does one of the most effective demolitions of Peggy Noonan that I have ever read.

Oh Peggy, Peggy. What is to be done with her? She writes in the WSJ to distance herself from the Tea Party, those enthusiastic women with large breasts in tight T-shirts and more alarmingly those men with large breasts in tight T-shirts, waving signs that say "Taxed Enuf!" or "We The People!" America is such a hard place to be an aspiring to be upper class Republican. If you were really upper class, you would be living off your great grandfather's buttonhook fortune and working on remodeling your barn for your darling Arabians. But poor Peggy like so many of us was not to the manor born and so has to convince her true audience that she is absolutely nothing like those white people waving signs. This is not all bad. The ferocious desire of the upper middle class to be truly upper class is one of the engines of American greatness. It's just too bad we don't have a Queen who could make her Lady Patricia of Potomac so she could just go away and be quiet and stop troubling us with her confusions. Peggy, my advice is, just give yourself permission to be a Democrat. It's OK. We understand. You think we're grubby, noisy, ill educated and don't know our place, and we think you're a pompous, posing RINO who wishes she were Patricia Harriman and isn't. So let's just agree to disagree.

And furthermore, as to Lee Harris, the Tea Party does not need new ideas. The last thing we need is new ideas. The problem with ideas is, most of them are terrible. They're like recipes -- how many great, really new recipes do you know of. The Tea Party, if it works out as one should hope, has some old ideas that have the great advantage of being true. Ideas like, limited government; fiscal responsibility, even conservatism; strong state and local government; accountability by elected officials to the voters, even those of us who fly coach and buy our clothes at Target (Yes, I draw the line at WalMart. I guess that makes me a snob.) There's this meme of disgust lately -- well, aren't we right to feel disgusted? I mean, Nancy Pelosi really does spend millions of our money flying her private Air Force jet back and forth to San Francisco because first class in a 747 isn't good enough for her. That's a perfectly fine symbol of a political class that is drinking deep of the life blood the rest of us could be using to send kids to college, give mom a few more days off, get the car fixed, or buy a big screen TV, and why shouldn't we? The way federal and state governments spend our money is disgusting and would be even if we could afford it, which we manifestly cannot.

Back to Lady Peggy and her assertion that politics should be about love. I'm sorry but what a bunch of utter cant. Love? Ronald Reagan may have been a very nice man and a genuine patriot but there was not a lot of love in the air in the 1980s. Love may be in there somewhere but far ahead are emotions such as vigilance, fear, jealousy and suspicion. Any politician who first stirs up love amongst you is trying to steal something from you. Government is a necessary evil. Love on the other hand may be necessary but it's not evil or at least need not be. So Noonan doesn't like the Tea Party because they appear to be inspired not by love but by anger, fear, resentment, and desire not to be fleeced by their government. They're baaaaaaaaaad sheep! Why can't they just feel the love of all those cozy sweaters they will make for the Noonan grandchildren as they sit around their spectacularly decorated 18 foot Noble Spruce which gracefully adorns the atrium of an exquisitely decorated manor house in the very best part of Maryland?

Noonan is a graceful writer and does a good job when someone does her thinking for her.  She is riding on her reputation as one of Reagan's speech writers.  But Reagan is dead and he's no longer around to tell her what to think.  So she tries to do it on her own ... and fails.