Hell hath no fury like a Noonan scorned
By Libby
Well the love affair is finally over. TBogg takes us on a trip down memory lane to the halcyon days of Peggy's hero worship, but like the dorky girl in high school who discovers the football hero was only dating her until she helped him cheat his way to a passing grade, Peggy now understands he never really liked her at all -- and oh man, is she pissed.
Read her high praise in March 03 again and then read about this new awakening.
Update: I had an additional thought that I posted at The Detroit News. Peggy makes a good case for her own resignation.
[thanks to Gun Toting Liberal for the link]
Well the love affair is finally over. TBogg takes us on a trip down memory lane to the halcyon days of Peggy's hero worship, but like the dorky girl in high school who discovers the football hero was only dating her until she helped him cheat his way to a passing grade, Peggy now understands he never really liked her at all -- and oh man, is she pissed.
For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don't like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don't like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad.Her anger would be more credible if it wasn't so self-serving. She would like us to forget that just like any adolescent desperate to be accepted into the popular crowd, she was all too happy to join in on berating the many concerned citizens who were using almost this same language to describe every dim-witted policy this sociopathic president dreamed up for the last six years. In those glory days the cat-calling about anti-Americans and treason fell easily from her lips. Now that she's been dumped and lumped in with all us traitors, she feels betrayed because, you know, she was something special and doesn't deserve to be treated like the rest of the hoi-polloi.
But on immigration it has changed from "Too bad" to "You're bad."
The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic--they "don't want to do what's right for America." His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, "We're gonna tell the bigots to shut up." On Fox last weekend he vowed to "push back." Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want "mass deportation." Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are "anti-immigrant" and suggested they suffer from "rage" and "national chauvinism."
Read her high praise in March 03 again and then read about this new awakening.
What I came in time to believe is that the great shortcoming of this White House, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom. Just wisdom--a sense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not all there is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that are true of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes a loyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don't need hacks.Sorry Pegs, you can denounce your own hackery now, but you'll get no sympathy from us dorks who never got to date the big hero. Once you turned on us so viciously to advance your own social standing, you're not going to get any more invites to our party. Better resign yourself to Saturday nights home alone. Or maybe you can make friends with Althouse. You and Annie can sit around comparing notes on how mean the popular kids are to you while you cry into your cocktails and watch Idol reruns.
Update: I had an additional thought that I posted at The Detroit News. Peggy makes a good case for her own resignation.
[thanks to Gun Toting Liberal for the link]
posted by Libby Spencer at 9:33 AM
12 Comments:
If only disillusionment by these former groupies would lead to enlightenment instead of more of the same bitterness that lead them to become groupies in the first place.
Sadly, my local paper's on-line version has a comments section that's boiling over with demands for lynch mobs to go after Mexicans, legal and otherwise. It far exceeds any bigotry I saw in the 1950's south and it's frightening. How we are ever going to find an intelligent solution in an unintelligent country, I don't know.
Libby:
"Once you turned on us so viciously to advance your own social standing, you're not going to get any more invites to our party."
I imagine conservatives (not necessarily Republicans) feel much the same way about the far left, and their vicious attacks over the last six years.
Fogg: The folks who write the type of comments you describe are what can best be described as a loud minority. They are all talk, and have virtually no influence in the real world. Thank God. I don't think America is an unintelligent country...I think those loud minorities on either side of the aisle make it seem so from time to time.
At any rate, Noonan's article is just another indicator that the Bush administration has finally broken the GOP coalition beyond repair. That's probably a good thing, as Republicans definitely need some time in the wilderness...but believe me, I have my worries about the Democrats as well. We may be, in the immortal words of W.E.B. Griffin, "well and truly fucked".
- Joe
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I truly hope I'm listening to a vocal minority - but they're so LOUD!
But as to Republicans feeling that attacks from the left are vicious enough to warrant vicious attack, my memory seems to tell me that the Clinton years brought a dramatic increase in the politics of ruthlessness, viciousness, slander, libel and vindictiveness not seen before in my lifetime. The swift boat campaign during the 2000 campaign alone is a sufficient example of lopsided response to a simple challenge.
Perhaps a measure of paranoia is to see one's self or ilk under attack because of any criticism - an attack which justifies unlimited and unrestrained response.
It isn't only he who flung the first dung who bears the responsibility. The guy who escalates it to a nuclear war has nothing to feel good about.
Fogg:
I'm not advocating vicious attack in return for vicious attack, by any means. It's counterproductive, and those who engage in it know that already...they just don't care.
As for the Clinton hatred, yeah...I never understood that, to tell you the truth. Then again, the attacks on Reagan by the left puzzled me as well. Hell, for that matter, the reading I've done on the Stevenson / Eisenhower race indicates there was plenty of viciousness by the candidate's supporters.
So yeah. This has all happened before, and I'm sure during those previous periods, folks were saying that it was a "dramatic increase in the politics of ruthlessness, viciousness, slander, libel and vindictiveness not seen before in my lifetime".
Maybe we *are* too stupid to learn to fix it.
I love this:
"Perhaps a measure of paranoia is to see one's self or ilk under attack because of any criticism - an attack which justifies unlimited and unrestrained response.
It isn't only he who flung the first dung who bears the responsibility. The guy who escalates it to a nuclear war has nothing to feel good about."
And I may steal it, with your permission, to base a long post on as soon as I have time for long posts again :-)
LOL Joe. Fogg's command of the language is already legendary around here.
On a more serious note, I'm also appalled at the unmitigated bigotry inherent in so much of the debate over this bill and you don't just see it in the south. It's nationwide. I don't understand why people spend all this hate on the workers instead of on the owners that enticed them in the first place by hiring them.
As far as vicious attacks go, maybe it's just selective memory but I don't recall such viciousness in my lifetime as I've witnessed these last six years. I remember much bitter disagreement but I don't recall any president or his high ranking officials suggesting any American was a traitor for exercising simple dissent as this one has. I think that's what set the over the top tone and temper of these times, more so than anything else.
hey peggy we're in a TIME of WAR. the enemy is listening!!! everything you say about our commander in chief during wartime is heard by osmam bin laden and Iran!
LOL Lester. Good point. That's exactly what she was saying not so long ago.
I have a semi-long rant riffing on sweet Peggy’s demure piece entitled “PN sees Bush Deranged” which exaggerates her ire:
“Peggy is being too kind. GWB has the lack of depth and perspective a C-student at Yale who never cracked a book might be expected to have. Although his reasons for invading Iraq were not ironclad, we gave him the benefit of the doubt. But he devolved the peace after the war into the hands of a total arrogant incompetant named Rumsfeld, who grabbed the development of democracy from seasoned “professionals like Jay Garner and his team, and gave it to a loyalist hack named Bremer. And GWB was somnambulent as Ken Lay was at Enron, allowing “experts” like Cheney and Rumsfeld to overrule Shinseki and do a peace on the cheap. Of course, it was new wine into old wineskins and the seams broke.”
“Peggy does a somber sum-up that reflects my own misgivings—especially about Poppy Bush and his singular insouciance about taxes and the economy that led to Perot. Then his son squandered trillions with a Republican Senate resembling Ali Baba and his forty thieves. GWB is now realizing that the Dems write the history books and is trying to salvage his reputation by serving as Teddy Kennedy’s tea-boy, the same Kennedy who in ‘65 promised that that Immigration Law would “not allow a million immigrants a year nor change the ethnic composition of the country.” both of which it eventually did. [ditto ‘86]”
“Now REAL conservatives will have to latch onto a real Republican of the Reagan/Goldwater stripe—not transplanted Rockefeller Easterners affecting drawls and down-home cowboy charm. Like Fred Thompson or Romney. Peggy continues with a sad summary of the Bush Betrayal Family Tradition, both father and son wobbly and spineless…”
But to keep the SCOTUS from turning us into a Eurabian dystopia, I’ll hold my nose and vote for Giuliani, as long as he has Fred or Mitt on the ticket.
Well now that I think about it, I remember a smear campaign against Eisenhower based on the alleged "jewishness" of his name, but I honestly think Reagan is the most overrated president we've ever had. He was there when we needed a hero so we decided he was one and I've often said that heroes are neither made nor born, but invented.
I have to agree that there's nothing new in politics other than the scale allowed by new media.
But the roots of Clintonhate were in Watergate, I think. The endless investigations were almost verbatim reenactments and even today I see people pass into hysterical foam-flecked hate fits when his name is mentioned. But no matter who started it, it's going on and the fury of the anti-immigrant wave is as bad as anything I've seen, if not worse. I am not exaggerating when I say they're calling for lynchings and mass deportations and very few of these nouveau know-nothings seem to recognize the difference between dual citizenship, work visas and illegal status. Mexicans and Guatemalans here are slinking around in the dark like the Jews in 1937 Germany and I'm worried about what's going to happen.
fogg- disagree about reagan being over rated. if you look at carter and nixon and the depressing 70's, his upbeat and small gtovernment approach was just what the doctor ordered. the "great society" programs of LBJ had led to more urban riots than anythign else. and both nixon and carter tried and failesd to address critrical economic issues by price controls and creating new departments and that sort of thing.
I think 1980-2000 were pretty good years in this country. some of it, like our middle east policy would eventually come back to haunt us. but there were not the types of problems we have now or that we had before then. liberals didn't like reagan, conservatives didn't like clinton but all in all it was a relatively amazing era i believe.
Dave I can't conceive of a worst ticket than the one you're willing to vote for, at least I don't want to.
Fogg, I agree that Reagan was way over-rated and actually one of the worst presidents we had.
Lester - I guess that means I disagree with you except that I didn't think Clinton was so hot either.
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