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PowerNoonan
What is this a picture of? It is a nail gun, a high-quality piece of equipment that will put nail after nail into board after board. Whatever you need nailed, this thing will nail it, consistently and accurately. And that is precisely why it should be called a Noonanator. Or a PowerNoonan. Or a Pneumatic Noonanizer. To understand why, here’s an article in the Wall Street Journal by its namesake titled “How Global Elites Forsake Their Countrymen:”
The challenge of integrating different cultures, negotiating daily tensions, dealing with crime and extremism and fearfulness on the street—that was put on those with comparatively little, whom I’ve called the unprotected. They were left to struggle, not gradually and over the years but suddenly and in an air of ongoing crisis that shows no signs of ending—because nobody cares about them enough to stop it.
The powerful show no particular sign of worrying about any of this. When the working and middle class pushed back in shocked indignation, the people on top called them “xenophobic,” “narrow-minded,” “racist.” The detached, who made the decisions and bore none of the costs, got to be called “humanist,” “compassionate,” and “hero of human rights.”
Once again, this essayist who somehow arrives at far different conclusions than mine, winds up describing in precise terms the problems I see; problems that are not acknowledged by most people who wind up with results like hers.
She’s a riddle. Wrapped in an enigma. Holding a nailgun.
Published in Politics
I can’t stop laughing….
Yes, sir!
OMG…. hilarious.
Reading her copy, I smell two glasses of red wine.
I read this earlier this morning and was struck by how she is echoing points being made by Ace and Ben Domenech that elites (which must include me given my income, occupation and background) have failed their fellow citizens and thus shouldn’t be surprised by the disruptive consequences manifest in this election. I was grateful to see BDB had picked up the column’s message in his post.
It’s understandable that our current environment would make so many discount her observations by noting that she doesn’t belong to their team or tribe. After all, so many of these same elites have no positive things to say about those among us who know they are being disparaged and disenfranchised.
But what does it mean that someone among her tribe, her class, her neighborhood notices the practical consequences of the disinterest in and disdain of the citizenry by the powerful few? Even though I don’t agree with everything she has ever written (not surprising given her prolific body of work), I affirm the clarity of the diagnosis and I affirm BDB for posting it.
I just can’t quite figure her out.
I’m angry too!
I take a drug that suppresses my immune system, and when I hear that immigrants are bringing in TB and other drug resistant illnesses, and it upsets me greatly because if I get something like this – best case is I have to stop taking the drug that’s helping me, worst case, I die. Why in the world are we letting people in without at least making sure they aren’t carrying terrible illness?
Decade.
Allow me to register an objection to be pursued, inevitably, some other time.
Several years ago, the Vice President of Nursing at the hospital where I worked was a lovely, tasteful, quietly-spoken woman who, it seemed, could walk through a bog of steaming you-know-what and come out smelling like roses. Every meeting she ran was well-mannered and polite, and all her written and verbal communications were gracious, deferential and genteel.
We always used to say that, if we were ever to be fired, we would want it to be by her, because it would sound so good we wouldn’t even know it was happening, and at the end of it we would thank her for her consideration.
I think of Peggy Noonan in sort of the same way.
But I’m just not sure she’s trustworthy.
Yeah, I’ve decided I can usually take something away from Noonan’s analysis, it’s just her opinion I find worthless. Until she issues a groveling, ashes and sackcloth apology for her endorsement of Obama, I won’t respect her judgement.
I think the word you’re looking for is, “cloying.”
Same for Heather Mac Donald and Jeffrey Hart.
Ah, yes. Thanks.
Musta missed that one. She has some good articles, but there’s a reason she’s called Bandwagon Peggy.
Noonan writes “And so the great separating incident at Cologne last New Year’s.”
She doesn’t say a word about this:
The elites she’s writing about tried to corrupt their own police forces to keep from disturbing the preferred narrative, and the German news media slow rolled the coverage of the assaults.
Not just the German media, either. While the WSJ, Noonan’s home paper, did cover the mass sexual assaults before ABC and NBC bothered to, you can’t exactly say that the Journal scooped them since it still took the Journal until January 7 to put up significant coverage. Noonan herself didn’t comment on it until late February.
Where is the women’s lib movement?
You have to look further down the Left’s list of favored “victim” groups to find them, since Muslim (rapists) are at the top apparently. One of those lists where you improve your status by threatening murder and mayhem…
It’s truly diabolic.
Yes. Back when he was still teaching in the CSU system, if anybody asked me for advice about where they or their kids should go to college, I used to say “Go to Cal State Fresno and take every course Victor Davis Hanson and Bruce Thornton teach.”
If groveling apologies is the price of admission to the post 2016 Conservative reboot, there will be lots of holes in the ranks.
I’d encourage you to read her columns for the last 7-8 months or so. I wouldn’t call it a conversion, not yet, seven or eight months is too short a time considering the length of her career, however she has been the only one at the WSJ oped page who appears to understand and is capable of putting it into words without denigrating it at the same time.
Since when is winning a sacred Republican principle?
I’ve found a Strange New Respect for Peggy Noonan since she started
writing things I agree withmaking sense.I always used to read her because she’s not only a fine prose writer but I also figured she was giving me the true opinion of the beltway elite.
If she has now at long last finally noticed that something is wrong in Uncle Sugar’s long forgotten North American backlot then maybe, just maybe some fraction of the ruling class has managed to get a clue, without the country having to bleed our way through a Revolution Francaise.
Maybe, just maybe, some of her beltway friends are telling her they’ve screwed up, and they’re worried about the future. Maybe they’ve read Codevilla, and know they’ve painted a target on their back. Maybe the witless globalism of the gop isn’t as popular in the establishment as we’ve been told, and maybe the dam is about to burst, and we’ll finally a real debate about the direction of the country.
I doubt it, but if true that’s a hopeful sign for the country.
“Since when is winning a sacred Republican principle.”
Winning is always preferable to losing in this context. Do you think we will be able to ‘manage’ Hillary on any level?
We may be able to manage Trump, to say nothing of all of the ancillary considerations: Federal judgeships, the Supreme Court etc.
Or “precious,” as my mother puts it.
I was thinking maybe “mawkish,” but precious works.
Yes I agree with that