BACK ON THE CHAIN GANG. Peggy Noonan, newly filled with a sense of purpose, tells us that people don't like Obama anymore. That is, the polls indicate a lot of them do, but the people who matter don't. Among these: columnists, and people Peggy Noonan meets in unspecified "bipartisan crowds":

As I read Ms. Drew's piece, I was reminded of something I began noticing a few months ago in bipartisan crowds. I would ask Democrats how they thought the president was doing. In the past they would extol, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, his virtues. Increasingly, they would preface their answer with, "Well, I was for Hillary."

It's amazing Clinton didn't win the Democratic nomination, with so much vital bipartisan support.

This in turn reminded me of a surprising thing I observe among loyal Democrats in informal settings and conversations: No one loves Barack Obama. Half the American people say they support him, and Democrats are still with him. But there were Bill Clinton supporters who really loved him. George W. Bush had people who loved him. A lot of people loved Jack Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. But no one seems to love Mr. Obama now; they're not dazzled and head over heels. That's gone away. He himself seems a fairly chilly customer; perhaps in turn he inspires chilly support. But presidents need that rock --bottom 20% who, no matter what's happening -- war, unemployment -- adore their guy, have complete faith in him, and insist that you love him, too.

Her model for such people might be Peggy Noonan, who once said things like "Mr. McCain is the Old America, of course; Mr. Obama the New." Remember those days? In any case it would explain her certainty in this analysis.

But Obama does have such people, despite the fact that Noonan is no longer among them. Even the Rasmussen polls favored by wingers show far more than 20 percent, in his alleged hour of darkness, strongly approve of Obama's performance. Maybe she figured someone might look this up, because she makes this move:

Obama probably has a hard 20 too, but whatever is keeping them close, it doesn't seem to be love.

What might it be, then? Personal threats if they don't answer polls the right way? It may not be "love" as Noonan experiences it for politicians, but given how loopy she can be her ardor, that only speaks well of the Obama diehards' psychological health.

When numbers fail her, Noonan retreats to memes. "The Obama bowing pictures," she asserts, "are becoming iconic, and they would not be if they weren't playing off a growing perception." She compares Obama's bows with Gerald Ford's lack of physical grace, which was also parodied on Saturday Night Live. We'll see if SNL is still working them in 2012, but Noonan is convinced they are deathless, probably because they were seized upon by conservatives who obsess on them to this day.

Noonan, not having been offered a bipartisan sinecure by the Administration despite her service, is back to reading the rightwing tea leaves and portraying them as the wisdom of the people. So, though her long years in the journalistic trenches must have shown her that some political schtick is evanescent, now that she is stuck playing the conservative on Sunday morning shows she is milking every anti-Obama talking point as if the udders were full of benedictine. You will recall she also counseled that the only thing that could save Obama from the Nobel Peace Prize was to reject it as rudely as possible; this he was disinclined to do, and now nobody gives a shit.

So Noonan grabs the Next Blog Thing. Off the pages of history and back to ordinary political cycles, she is condemned to worry each outrage du jour as if it were Watergate to infinity.

She's still offering advice to her late espoused saint, though: Lose the health care bill. "He can't afford to win with such a poor piece of legislation." That must go over big with the boys in the green room, especially among those who take morbid pleasure in the thought that she may have once imagined herself, like Bob Gates and Dana Perino, standing behind a lectern that bore the Presidential Seal.

THE BIG-LEAGUER AND THE BUSH-LEAGUER. The conservative heretic hunt proceeds apace. Witchfinder General The Anchoress thinks that Peggy Noonan, of all people, is angling for a job as Obama's Press Secretary:

Some of us have rather suspected that Peggy Noonan -- over the past few months -- has been playing pretty for a seat at the Obama table. Hey, a girl wants to be relevant, right?...

Hey, if Noonan manages -- like a few others from the right -- to successfully anchor herself within the coming regime, more power to her, I guess.

She's talking about the same Noonan who said that Obama represents the awful "New America," for whom "Politics is life," who sue smokers, and for whom "love of country is a decision... What you breathe in is skepticism" and "Tradition is a challenge, a barrier, or a lovely antique." She also asked, "Are the Obamas, at bottom, snobs? Do they understand America? Are they of it?" Hell of a way to curry favor, I'd say.

But Noonan said some bad words about Sarah Palin, which to The Anchoress is proof of treason. In a way you can't blame The Anchoress. She doesn't understand that Noonan's loyalty is not to a set of principles but to a brand. Brand Peggy is a comfort brand for conservatives and seeks to ease their minds; if something went wrong with some Republican campaign, it was not the conservatism, but some bad choice. She isn't going to work for Democrats, as her most recent column (about "flinty elderly Republicans from New England, home-schooling mothers in Ohio, libertarianish Republicans in Colorado, suburban patriots outside the big cities... the beating heart of conservatism") amply proves, any more than Tony Bennett is going to start covering the Vivian Girls.

But she is going to protect herself, and she wants to leave the impression that she has been true to the cause while others deceived themselves. Republican candidates come and go, but Peggy will be at the hearth with a blanket on her lap for years to come, talking to a large audience about the good old days.

As a crazed dead-ender, The Anchoress can't grasp this: for her every battle is Armageddon. But she works a small market. Noonan is playing in the bigs, and though she may sometimes descend among the people for effect, she will always return to the skybox when the paychecks are being distributed. Whatever she tells the rubes, she knows where the "beating heart of conservatism" is really at.

WHO THREW THE IMMIGRANTS IN PEGGY NOONAN'S CHOWDER? PARTE DOS.

One night [after 9/11], about 11 p.m., I was walking home with friends, going north on the wide, dark highway, and we came upon a woman, a thick middle-aged woman, dark skinned and dark haired. She was with a baby in a stroller. She was, I think, not the mother but the grandmother. They were there alone, in the darkness. Affixed to the stroller was a hand-lettered sign, and on the sign were these words: "American You Are Not Alone -- Mexico Is With You." All alone and she came out with that sign, at that time. I have tried to tell that story in speeches and I can never make my way through it, and as I write my eyes fill with tears...

...of laughter, Peggy? Please say they were tears of laughter, provoked by the sight of new Mexican ambassador Juanita la Loca, offering America the protection of Mexico, and perhaps a bag of peeled oranges!

No, the Crazy Jesus Lady is still Crazy and Jesus and Lady, and now she's on about immigrants, in this case Hispanics who recently marched gleefully in New York while other ethnic stereotypes labored:

In fact, I did not see a single Asian in the march. They were all working, in the shops and on the street. They had no intention of letting yet another New York march get in the way of business. And you know, the marchers seemed to sense it. They didn't spend long in Chinatown. As far as I could see they didn't make it to Little Italy, either.

Actually I understand the Italians didn't march because they were all in jail. Or was it church? I do remember that the blacks were washing their cars -- oh wait, shit! That was the Puerto Ricans!* How did this march ever get started?

In the main CJL wants to tell us Routine Twelve, aka The Responsible Republican Position That Is No Position at All: "I think those whose primary concern is preserving the Hispanic vote for the Democratic Party, or not losing the Hispanic vote for the Republican Party, are being cynical, selfish, and stupid, too." The solution being a furrowed brow, an insistence on "continuing a system of laws" (which has obviously not worked and thus means the status quo), and another round of Johnny Jameson.

Things were no different in the days of Pegeen's immigrant forebears, as is shown by a recent black-and-white two-reeler that has mysteriously come into my possession:

East Side, New York. Someone plays "She's the Daughter of Rosie O'Grady" on a concertina. Camera pans up from kids playing skelly and stickball in the streets, along the blackened bricks of a tenement, to the window of the Noonans' two-room apartment. We enter as PA NOONAN holds forth to MA NOONAN and their brood of 19 children:

PA NOONAN: Can yez believe it! They're givin' our jobs t'a doorty Eye-talians! An' thim livin' roight down oor strait! Ha, but tonight -- (Holds a paving stone in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other) we'll giv 'em a party, complete wit' Oirish confetti! (Drinks deeply).

MA NOONAN: (Eyes rolled back in her head) Yerra, 'tis a power o' sorrow surely! Holy Mary, mither a' Gawd, pray fer us sinners...

(Six babies cry at once. MOIKE, a fellow-bricklayer of PA NOONAN's, comes into the apartment.)

PA NOONAN: Moike, ye stink loik a brewery, ye doorty beast!

MOIKE: Is it me, is it? I t'aught it was a diaper. (Quietly) I'm after sendin' the guns to Michael Collins an' the' boys. Sure an' Oirlan' will be a Republic afore Spring, I'm t'inkin, if we spill enough innocent blood! Here's yer cut o' the loot. (hands him money.)

PA NOONAN: Saints be praised! Now I c'n buy more whiskey! An' git Thomas Nast t' do me por-trait!

MA NOONAN: Now, Pa Noonan, ye should lay that money up. We c'n be good citizens now, I'm thinkin', an' be Senators and Presidents and maybe even socially-conscious fellas as sings on th' grammaphone.

MOIKE: (pointing out the window) Look, Pat! Chinkees!

PA NOONAN: (runs to window, roaring) Ye yella bastards'll niver take jobs from proper Americans such as oursilvs!

(They heave everything but the money and the whiskey out the window as the music swells.)

* It is well-established, of course, that the Polish thought it was Sunday.

FRIDAY 'ROUND THE HORN.

Maybe I should see them tonight? Everything I've heard is good.

•   I recently noted Ross Douthat's attempt to portray the Donald Trump phenomenon as a boon to reform conservatism (i.e., the latest rightwing nerd jobs program). It appears the longer this thing goes on, the more slide-rule boys rush to offer their services. At the Weekly Standard, after some pro-forma yak about what a boor Trump is, Christopher Caldwell tells that Trump's "economic critique" -- yes, he's talking about Trump's brayings, to which he'd referred a paragraph earlier as "talking about how filthy rich the filthy rich are" -- "fits into a sophisticated attack on the present state of presidential campaign finance." Not sophisticated itself, mind you, but it fits into something sophisticated, just as Trump himself may be fitted into a $5,000 suit. Then, at Slate, Reihan Salam has all kinds of exciting ideas for Trump. Apparently inspired by single-issue candidate Larry Lessig's praise of Trump as a campaign finance reformer, Salam suggests Trump embrace Lessig's program, as this "would add intellectual heft to [Trump's] populism, which would force his media detractors to give him at least some begrudging respect." I don't know what's funnier: the idea of Trump's campaign acquiring "intellectual heft," or that of Trump showing respect for an egghead like Lessig who doesn't have his own private jet and probably eats in a school cafeteria like a schlub. Funniest of all, perhaps, is the idea of these pencil-necks hovering around Trump, telling themselves that if only they can press their policy papers into the paws of the Strongman, the Golden Dawn may be hastened.

•   And what can make Trump talk worse? Peggy Noonan! Today she explains Peggy Noonan through the avatar of that Non-Partisan Nameless Friend:

I’ve written before about an acquaintance—late 60s, northern Georgia, lives on Social Security, voted Obama in ’08, not partisan, watches Fox News, hates Wall Street and “the GOP establishment.” She continues to be so ardent for Mr. Trump that she not only watched his speech in Mobile, Ala., on live TV, she watched while excitedly texting with family members—middle-class, white, independent-minded—who were in the audience cheering. Is that “the Republican base”?

Hope so -- it'll be easy to beat an imaginary constituency. Also, Hispanics love Trump, Noonan's friend "Cesar" from the bodega tells her:

Immigrants, he said, don’t like illegal immigration, and they’re with Mr. Trump on anchor babies. “They are coming in from other countries to give birth to take advantage of the system. We are saying that! When you come to this country, you pledge loyalty to the country that opened the doors to help you..." 

I will throw in here that almost wherever I’ve been this summer, I kept meeting immigrants who are or have grown conservative—more men than women, but women too.

Take Peggy Noonan's word to the bank: Your neighbors from the DR, Trinidad, Sudan, Chile, Vietnam -- they're all raring to vote Republican so long as the party nominates a suitably aggressive TV clown.  Morton Downey Jr. gazes on this from the Hereafter and sighs at what might have been.

•   Stella Morabito, the craziest shrink since Robin of Berkeley, is back to tell us how PC is destroying everything by preventing sensible conservative discourse, like how horrible Caitlyn Jenner is:

A perfect example is how the transgender lobby has saturated the media and pop culture with its talking points through Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner and incessant Hollywood shilling. Suppression is the PC practice of quashing ideas that compete with the PC message, usually through speech codes, shout-downs, or smears... The twin processes of saturation and suppression, if diligently applied, can produce the illusion of a public opinion shift, or a “cascade.”

Fans of Morabito's work will understand that these "cascades" are bad because they make you accept homosexuals:

Consider how the Left’s propaganda machine manufactured an “opinion cascade” on the issue of same-sex marriage, by first using “surprising validator” conservatives like Vice President Dick Cheney, polling pundit Michael Barone, and especially David Blankenhorn, who was one of the most persuasive and powerful supporters of organic marriage until he broke down and published a recantation. Not surprisingly, stealth conservatives—particularly those who work in increasingly politicized professions such as psychiatry, social work, teaching, or the arts—have enormous potential if they come out as surprising validators.

Amazing what how much gay-PC we've accomplished thanks to stealth conservatives like Dick Cheney, eh? (Though personally I think it was the recantation of David Blankenhorn that really turned things around for us.)

Anyway Morabito bids her readers go out and make their own cascades:

So conservatives, engage in those polarized, gridlocked places—like the neighborhood picnic, the local swim club, the farmer’s market, the student union, etc.—and engage one on one. Come out to a neighbor or a classmate.

Oh boy! Is this where we say "I hate faggots" and wait for everyone else to do the same, like Spartacus?

Don’t bother with talking points, because the purpose is not to win the argument but to simply to put a human face on your beliefs. 

Just be who you are and be friendly. In today’s PC-saturated culture, that’s the only way to draw out the lonely like-minded person or to influence a fence-sitter. It’s also the only way to water down PC stereotypes of conservatives. Ultimately, it’s the only way to start those ripple effects that can create cascades of truth.

Wait a minute -- your war against PC is to be nice? I gotta tell ya: 1.) If that's the plan, every other anti-PC conservative I've seen has definitely got the instructions upside-down; and 2.) If your goal is to get people to like you, maybe dispense with the hysterical columns for starters?

SHORTER PEGGY NOONAN:

When I think of you godless media criticizing my Church, I think of a severed head -- yours!

UPDATE. Our commenters are carrying the freight to a greater extent than usual. "I normally ascribe Peggy Noonan's incoherence to the fact that she's plastered," says sharculese, "but I'm pretty drunk right now and I'm still not getting this." smut clyde noticed something in the Longer:

words like “gender” and “celibacy” and “pedophile” and phrases like “irrelevant to the modern world.” But when they just prattle on with their indignant words—gender, celibacy, irrelevant—

One of those words in the first list has disappeared from the second! How can this be?

A couple of folks also notice Noonan's surly reference to the Mohammedans, in which she complains of the media-that-is-not-Peggy-Noonan:

They think they’re brave, or outspoken, or something. They don’t have enough insight into themselves to notice they’d never presume to instruct other great faiths. It doesn’t cross their minds that if they were as dismissive about some of those faiths they’d have to hire private security guards.

I thought the whole you-don't-have-the-guts-to-make-fun-of-Mohammed thing had long since passed into wingnut oblivion, along with "Democracy Whiskey Sexy" and "That Andrew Sullivan is one of the good ones," but I guess under stress these guys tend to revert.

WELCOME TO OUR WORLD, CRAZY JESUS LADY! Peggy Noonan’s Dies Ire offers the expected laughs -- her equivalence of apocalyptic symptoms (“nuts with nukes, epidemics”) with swears on the TV; her suggestion, with “It's beyond, ‘The president is overwhelmed.’ The presidency is overwhelmed,” that if George W. Bush can’t handle the job, by God no one can; and the sort of sound bytes that, were they snipped out of the context of, say, a local cable babbler’s TV show, would be cruelly unfair, but which in Noonan’s case do not distort but rather distill her special, mad Irish poetry (“You say we don't understand Africa? We don't even understand Canada!”).

But there is a sort of poignancy there, too. For the most part I don’t feel sorry for Noonan. She made a pile of money as the Riefenstahl of Reaganism; she continues to rake it in as a propagandist; whatever discomfort her obvious mental infirmities bring her are no recompense in the cosmic scale for the confusion she has sown and the misery it has caused.

Still, the sight of Noonan Lasching herself over the revolt of the elites makes one wonder if perhaps she has glimpsed, among the stuffed goblins marked “liberalism” with which she has been accustomed to populate her dreamscapes, something like an actual demon:

Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they're living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they're going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley's off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.

There is something in this that suggests a real, if momentary and (for her) unsustainable insight: that the “elites” know the jig is up and don’t give a damn, so long as the gulf between them and us stays wide enough to keep the molten lava off their private beaches and the agonized screams faint enough to be masked by a Sound Machine.

One important thing is missing, though: any sign of awareness that any specific members of these elites brought about this state of affairs, by consciously widening that gap between themselves and ourselves – that anyone had effected a specific and dastardly plan to concentrate the wealth and power of our nation in the hands of the few, with the cover story that thence it would trickle down to the rest of us – and that Peggy Noonan had written their speeches, accepted their honoraria, and to this day speaks of them as if they were our greatest benefactors.

Perhaps, now that she is not attending so many state dinners or answering Presidential calls, she is no longer entirely sure which side of the chasm she occupies.

I don’t believe in Hell, so it may be that the vague fear which currently ruffles her fine hairs is as close to physical justice as the crack-brained hag will ever get. Well, it is not enough, but it’s something.

WELL, OK. What a story Peggy Noonan tells today! Apparently the U.S. Catholic Bishops had her over for some church talk. They were obliged to do so, Noonan says, because a previously invited group had included "only those who might be characterized as church liberals." So she and an unnamed cadre of hardcore old-church types (dressed like Knights of Columbus, chanting in Latin, and tinkling little bells, I like to imagine) were called in for balance, demonstrating once again that conservatives can indeed be convinced to support a fairness doctrine, so long as it benefits only themselves.

"In some small way the meeting was historic," says Noonan, showing her customary sense of proportion. Contrary to popular belief and outward appearances, she explains, the ermine-clad Bishops and Cardinals are a bunch of communistic, Dorothy Day types devoted to sharing the wealth and that Kiss-of-Peace thing everyone's been talking about since Vatican II, and for them to invite the likes of Peggy and her Opus Dei buddies is extraordinary -- which has me wondering: if it's really that way, then who muscled the peacenik prelates into it? Jesus? Their PR agency?

Noonan "had planned to address the teaching of Catholic doctrine" (no doubt demanding the reinstatement of metal ruler discipline in parochial schools), but the Holy Spirit gets up in that goblin-infested skull-stuffing of hers and she starts talking about predatory pervert priests. Aside from a few dollops of her patented suburban sense-memory schtik ("a man in the suburbs of America... in his Gap khaki slacks and his plaid shirt ironed so freshly this morning that you can still smell the spray starch"), this doesn't seem to be anything the Bishops couldn't have gotten from a year-old copy of Newsweek.

But then she starts talking about The Passion, Mel Gibson's Jesus epic, and how powerful she found one of its scenes. "When I said the words Christ spoke in the film," she reports, "my voice broke, and I couldn't continue speaking. I was embarrassed by this, but at the same time I thought, Well, OK. "

(And this solves a mystery for me: I had often wondered whether Noonan ever felt embarrassment at all. I thought maybe the little clouds of righteousness and Reaganism that suffocate her prose also insulate her from any awareness of her own preposterousness. Now I know how she deals: Well, OK. I plan to try it myself sometime, next time I get shitfaced drunk and embarrass myself at a party, or at a department meeting.)

And then she makes her pitch:

I said the leaders of the church should now -- 'tomorrow, first thing' -- take the mansions they live in and turn them into schools for children who have nothing, and take the big black cars they ride in and turn them into school buses... And take the subway to work like the other Americans, and talk to the people there... they could tell you how hard it is to reconcile the world with their belief and faith, and you could say to them, Buddy, ain't it the truth.

Can you imagine how this must have gone over with the Bishops? Sadly, Noonan cannot. "The response from the bishops and the cardinal was not clear to me," she writes. "They did not refer to any of my points in their remarks afterward. When the meeting ended I tried to find Cardinal McCarrick to speak with him, but he was gone."

No doubt His Eminence was hiding in the men's room, waiting for one of his aides to let him know when the crazy lady was gone.

This is Noonan's first column since June. Perhaps they haven't let her handle anything sharp in the interim, but I'm thrilled to see she's taken up the pen again. I have a feeling she's on a cusp of some truly memorable prose, comparable to Nijinsky's Diaries or De Quincey's Confessions. Remember: you heard it here first.

SHORTER PEGGY NOONAN. (to the tune of "Who Put The Overalls in Mrs. Murphy's Chowder") 

Now me Grandma came from Ireland a hundred years ago
And she had things so much tougher than them boys from Mexico
True, Mexicans risk life and limb to get into th' States
But Grandma briefly wore a card all marked with names an' dates

One night me Grandma had to sleep out in th' open air
(I guess th' campesinos, bein' campers, wouldn't care!)

Now Mexicans are runnin' wild -- Lou Dobbs showed me th' tapes -- 

And they laugh at dear old Grandma as they come to pick our grapes! 

Chorus

Who let th' Mexicans in Peggy Noonan's country?

Soon racially we'll be naught but gallimaufry

Grandma slept upon a bench

Now I'm grand as Judi Dench

No Mexicans in Peggy Noonan's country!

MORE ADVICE FROM YOUR MORTAL ENEMIES. Oh, isn't that nice: Miss Peggy Noonan is offering to write a speech for Hillary Clinton at The Wall Street Journal. It starts:

Look, let's be frank. A lot of politics is spin, for reasons we can all write books about. I'm as guilty as anyone else. But right now I'm in the fight of my life, and right now I'm not winning. I'm up against an opponent who's classy and accomplished and who has captured the public imagination. I've had some trouble doing that...

The column is full of imagined statements and interior monlogues by the former First Lady. I wonder if Noonan keeps a Hillary doll at the table where she takes her morning "tea."

Whenever I feel out of sympathy with Clinton, a Peggy Noonan column can always get me back on her side. If Clinton gets the nomination, I hope the Journal takes Noonan's column daily. It may be the best chance the Democrats will have.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the "normalization" of Trump, and the rightbloggers' resistance to any indication that Trump is anything but normal (or superhuman).

In the column I noted Peggy Noonan pretending to be mortally offended by Trump's multiple conflicts of interest. Had I room I would have also treated her later, even worse column, "What to Tell Your Children About Trump." I should mention here, for readers who have not long followed the woman I used to call the Crazy Jesus Lady, how absolutely full to bursting Noonan is with shit. In an earlier, post-election column, she whimpered that "Donald Trump doesn’t know how to be president" and implored the citizenry, "Help him," as if the practiced grifter would not cheerfully help himself every chance he got.

Then came the column I cited, professing to keep an eye on the fellow lest he (inadvertently, no doubt) rob the Treasury. "What to Tell Your Children About Trump" probably came after many cocktails and/or stern warnings to get normalizing if she knew what was good for her. It came with this peculiar illo:

The attempt to make the vicious, hate-faced Trump look avuncular in this image is, amazingly, even more repulsive than the actual Trump's real-life rictus when clutching horrified children, because it shows a more benign countenance than Trump has ever managed to show at any time; it's as if he had died, and had his face wrestled by an undertaker into a cheerful, Uncle Toby grin for the casket, and then someone thought it would be nice if, before he was planted, he could be crunched into a seated position, then surrounded by children who have been promised $10 not to scream in terror while the scene was photographed.

Even more artificial is Noonan's historical analysis. "The legacy media continues its self-disgrace," she claims, because they aren't showing Trump the proper deference -- "Any journalists who are judicious toward Trump, who treat him fairly or even as a human being, are now accused of 'normalizing' him." And what could be abnormal about a crooked grifter elevated to our highest office? Instead, decrees Noonan, the media should "respect" the "happiness" of "60 million people" who "haven’t taken to the streets... they haven’t broken car windows..." which I guess is Noonan's way of saying they're all white, though they are in a sense a minority.

Then comes the kind of Noonan bullshit that makes you proud to be an American, where even the most unbelievable I-walked-with-an-immigrant bullshit can net you seven figures:

Five days after the election I met an Ethiopian immigrant on a street in Washington.

"Hello, drunk white lady! Let us share our stories."

We got to talking. He spoke of how bad it was in his old country, all the killing. He’d been here 15 years. “I love America,” he said. “It gave everything to me.” But he was deeply concerned by the election. He has two sons, 8 and 6. The younger got up Wednesday morning, saw the TV and burst into tears. Trump won! The boy calls Trump “the mouth man.” How could a bully be president? “He wept,” said the Ethiopian. “How do I explain it to him?” 

I thought. Finally I said, “Tell him to trust America.” Tell him that we are the world’s oldest democracy, that we are a good people, that we’ve been through shocks and surprises, and that we have checks and balances. “If it turns out good,” I said, “we’ll be happy. If it turns out really bad, America has a way of making your stay in the White House not too long. But tell him to trust America as you did, and it gave you everything.”

Later Noonan tells us about what a lovely chat she had with Trump -- "how charming, funny and frank he was—and, as I say, how modest. How actually humble," and I see the people who can afford a Wall Street Journal subscription nodding and thinking, of course, he addresses the crowds as the idiots they are, but when he speaks to one of us he is probably as charming as I am when I joke with my caddy about his inferior genes!

I wonder if she'll get to share this touching story with the Ethiopian before he's thrown out of the country to make a swing-state honky feel better about his employment prospects.

Meanwhile the Next Noonan, Megan McArdle, says for Thanksgiving you should be nice to people different from yourself. No, not liberals, silly -- they're scum! But:

...the first thing I’m choosing to be grateful for this year is the strangers I’ve met who were nothing like me, but nonetheless did me some extraordinary kindness. The people who hate everything about my politics, but who have reached out, again and again, to wish me well and even offer me money or expert help when I was going through some sort of crisis. Those people I’m grateful for, and America, you have a lot of them.

Someone offered McArdle money? Did her Thermomix break down?

(Do read the column, it's pretty good.)

PROS BEFORE HOS. In her recent Obama column in the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan slaps the main stream media, then disingenuously describes herself as a "proud member since 2000." In a way, that's quite true; she wrote speeches for Reagan, fatally setting the tone for what we still describe as the liberal media, which has done nothing since then but cosset her old boss, amplify and exacerbate every half- and quarter-baked scandal-story about Bill Clinton, and treat subsequent Democratic Presidential candidates as if they were third-party radicals. In that sense there is no one more mainstream than her.

So let us in this instance give Noonan the credit she deserves as a big-time operator. Her praise of Obama, before the knife-twist, is almost as syrupy as her Reagan encomia from back in the day. She does not tip her hand too soon, as this well-regarded amateur does. Executive summaries of the sort he offers ("While I was impressed by his argument, I could not help but return to the central question of his candidacy...") may impress other right-wing internet essayists, but Noonan has been to the Show, and knows to keep the forkball hidden until it's time to release it. Her depth-charge is truly deep:

But "a similar anger exists within segments of the white community." He speaks of working- and middle-class whites whose "experience is the immigrant experience," who started with nothing. "As far as they're concerned, no one handed them anything, they've built it from scratch." "So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town," when they hear of someone receiving preferences they never received, and "when they're told their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced," they feel anger too.

This is all, simply, true. And we are not used to political figures being frank, in this way, in public. For this Mr. Obama deserves deep credit. It is also true the particular whites Obama chose to paint -- ethnic, middle class -- are precisely the voters he needs to draw in Pennsylvania. It was strategically clever. But as one who witnessed busing in Boston first hand, and whose memories of those days can still bring tears, I was glad for his admission that busing was experienced as an injustice by the white working class. Next step: admitting it was an injustice, period.

I have already mentioned the "You already admitted black people have prejudices, now insult some black parishioners" approach of such as Andrew Sullivan, but Sullivan is a mere columnist, and not so accustomed to dishing the poisoned treacle as a practiced operative like Noonan.

Sullivan could never find room in his columns for a call to revival of the Louise Day Hicks doctrine. He has staked too much on his "post-racial" angle. To call for Obama to revisit and renounce busing would harsh Sullivan's modish and studiously-established cross-cultural mellow.

Noonan, on the other hand, is old school. She recalls the ancient racial wars, and knows from long experience how to make segregation look reasonable to white people. Though in the current state of play it would look bad to endorse white mobs screaming at buses full of black children, Noonan knows she can, in the cacophony and confusion attending to Obama's speech, reframe that disgusting episode as a legitimate white grievance. And she knows that no one on her side, least of all Sullivan, will raise a demurrer.

I have to say Noonan's rancid, racist gambit is well-played. I only wish there were someone with establishment credentials and balls to refute her, or to plainly state why they won't.

THE RETURN OF THE CRAZY JESUS LADY, TRUMP EDITION.

It's been a while since we had fun with the Crazy Jesus Lady -- which is what I used to call Peggy Noonan, but that was before she stopped being so Jesusy and just leaned on the received wisdom like a one-legged drunk on a bar rail, which is probably what got her the Pulitzer. Well, I recently snuck behind the Wall Street Journal paywall and got a load:

The Missing Order in American Politics
I grow wistful as I watch the congressional chaos while reading Kissinger’s forthcoming oral history.

If only we were murdering civilians, invading Cambodia, and assassinating leaders we didn't like again! One out of three just isn't good enough.

But even before she gets to the war criminal it's gold. First, no regular reader of my work will be surprised to know that, after some early raised-pinky tut-tuts about Trump's lack of polish, Noonan is fully aboard the JustTheTipTrump express and hell, she might just let him shove in another inch.

First of all, the Democrats are really overstepping with all the "Congressional oversight" nonsense:

But there is such a thing as context, and the Democrats seem to be ignoring it. This is a country divided. 

Almost half the country is for Mr. Trump—truly, madly, deeply. Half is against him—unequivocally, unchangeably. There is no resolving this. Or rather to the extent it can be resolved, it will be resolved at the ballot box. The presidential election is 18 months from now, on Nov. 3, 2020. 

Until then, people are where they are and hold the views they hold, and don’t push them too hard.

Don't push them too hard or what? Support for impeachment has actually gone up since House Democrats started acting like they have some guts -- why, it's almost as if people respect that! Also there is such a thing as acting on principle, but for Noonan that's just something Republicans do, while Democrats just pretend to believe things -- "We’ll see how well Speaker Nancy Pelosi can dance right up to the edge to appease some in her caucus, and not over it," she stage-whispers. Soon Nancy and Donald will be telling each other dirty jokes just like Tip and Ronnie!

[Trump supporters] sometimes tell reporters he’s a man of high character but mostly to drive the reporters crazy. I have never talked to a Trump supporter, and my world is thick with them, who thought he had a high personal character.

Noonan's world is thick with Trump supporters? You mean Republicans? Big shock. But after years of "Character Above All" palaver, you'd think she'd be embarrassed to admit that her party supports scumbags.

Well, turns out Noonan has an escape clause, or at least an escape adjective:

On the other hand they sincerely believe he has a high political character, in that he pursues the issues he campaigned on. They hired him as an insult to the political class, as a Hail Mary pass -- we’ve tried everything else, maybe this will work -- and because he agreed with them on the issues.

"Pursues the issues he campaigned on"? I remember when we were going to be filing our income taxes on postcards. And that the deficit would go down. And so would prices. And... well, to be fair, he still hates brown-skinned people. Noonan doesn't want to get into this, so she talks about how the people -- the same people that loved St. Ronnie! -- love Mr. Trump, and how when they scream obscenities and act like a lynch mob and cheer shooting immigrants, that's just sly American wit:

When they jeer the press during rallies at the president’s direction, they don’t really mean it. They’re having fun and talking back. They’d be happy if their kids became reporters -- an affluent profession, and half of them are famous.

???????????

The president doesn’t really hate the press either, he wants their love and admiration. You don’t need the admiration of people you truly disdain.

If Noonan thinks Trump doesn't disdain his suckers... well, she thought Reagan was on the level, too.

As for her Kissinger tongue-bath, I can't bring myself to touch it, though I will risk vomit damage to my keyboard to mention this bit about Kissinger's hardscrabble, pre-genocide youth:

The tough Italian-American men he worked with teased the German refugee and took him to Yankee Stadium to learn to be an American. There he first saw the man who years later on meeting him struck him dumb: Joe DiMaggio.

I like to imagine these guys telling Li'l Henry, "Remember Joe DiMaggio, and also that you're a white man, and only kill gooks, spades and spics!" [Patriotic music swells] Young Henry Kissinger never forgot. I tell ya, it's kind of a Cassandra curse to see the people you always knew were shit not only proving it over years but actually getting worse.

PLAYING PARTISAN WHEN POST-PARTISANISM DOESN'T WORK. At the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan says she wants McCain and Obama to explain to people why they are respectively a Republican and a Democrat. I expect Noonan is influenced by the current bailout situation, in which Republicans who built and prospered from the go-go, lightly-regulated economy are positioning themselves for the moment as rebels from its bailout -- though, as tipped by McCain's remarks tonight, they will cave as soon as they think they are sufficiently covered politically. It's standard-issue Noonan jiu-jitsu -- to call for something that can't possibly happen because of her own party's tactics, and hope the uninformed will find her lofty and wise rather than disingenuous.

Of the many things that are ridiculous about this, a few scream to be mentioned. First, as we just saw, the Presidential debates, which McCain lately endeavored to evade, are meant to explain this -- or, more usefully, to explain why the parties are properly represented by them. Second, I recall that Noonan used to swoon over George Bush, who was allowed to distance himself from his party as a "compassionate conservative" before he went on to embody Republican principles so thoroughly as to discredit them for all time, and even force Noonan to renounce both Bush and the Republicans (though I think their refusal to hire her had something to do with it).

Both parties have evolved, not to say been shifty, and their candidates have prospered by playing for them and against them as they see fit. I can't imagine Noonan, who despite the paucity of her paying gigs with the GOP of late is still a reliable tool, would be suggesting this party-identification program if McCain were leading strongly. Then, as always, she and her colleagues would be doing the identifying -- Democrats treasonous and spendthrift, Republicans butch and economically sound, and so forth.

It must also be mentioned that Noonan wonders at Obama's slim lead, and attributes to it to Obama being "unusual, singular," "not your basic Dem," and "exotic," without ever mentioning that he's black. This too is audacious, but only in a familiar way.

FORM FOLLOWS FUCKWIT. The new Peggy Noonan column at the Wall Street Journal is too lame to deconstruct -- it's the usual bullshit about how Bush betrayed her and all America longs for a Leader who is exactly like whoever will next pay Peggy to write speeches.

But as I keep angrily declaiming from the brass rail, it is by their usages that ye shall know them. (In my old age I'm turning into a cracker-barrel deconstructionist -- the corruption of language interests me more than the corruption of Senators, probably because it is less obvious and the damage more serious.)

One of Noonan's fave rhetorical tropes is the invented quote -- you know: "I bet this horrible person says to himself I'm a big stupid liberal and I hate the American people and love Satan," that sort of thing. Of course, we all do it, but it can get old very quickly (one tends to lose the distinction between the genuine stupid ideas and the merely attributed ones) and Noonan reeeeeally overdoes it -- in fact she has devoted whole columns to it, as when she channeled the late Paul Wellstone, whose consciousness was clearly incomprehensible to her, but whose usefulness as an object of Republican propaganda she understood all too well.

But this bit from today's column contains that schtick's equivalent of a Triple Lutz:

The White House is exploiting American alarm at uncontrolled borders to get its way. This of course has added to the sense of national alarm. They believe the alarm works for them: If you don't pass our bill we'll never control your borders--yes, "your"--and you'll suffer!

That's right -- in the middle of an invented monologue, Noonan actually stops to comment indignantly at the words she has put in someone else's mouth!

Though Noonan has many distinguishing neuroses as a propagandist, I think this one reflects a common tendency among her whole tribe: the ever-increasing certainty that one's straw men are in fact real people. It's sort of like what happens to some artists and the characters they invent, except, you know, totally evil.

PEGGY'S ON A BUMMER.

Peggy Noonan:

Near the end of the campaign I wrote a column called “Imagine a Sane Donald Trump,” lamenting that I believed he was crazy, and too bad. Too bad because his broad policy assertions, or impulses, suggested he understood that 2008 and the years just after (the crash and the weak recovery) had changed everything in America, and that the country was going to choose, in coming decades, one of two paths—a moderate populism or socialism—and that the former was vastly to be preferred, for reasons of the nation’s health. A gifted politician could make his party the leader toward that path, which includes being supportive and encouraging of business but willing to harness government to alleviate the distress of the abandoned working class and the anxious middle class; strong on defense but neither aggressive nor dreamy in world affairs; realistic and nonradical on social issues while unmistakably committed to protecting the freedoms of the greatest cohering force in America, its churches; and aware that our nation’s immigration reality was a scandal created by both parties, and must be redressed.

You could discern, listening to his interviews and speeches, that this was more or less where Donald Trump stood.

Really? She got that from Trump's belligerent yammerings? I suppose you could also "discern" from them that he was the seventh son of the seventh mother, or Death Destroyer of Worlds, if you had taken enough Diviner's Potion at P.J. Clarke's.

Well, 70 days in, Noonan has decided oh my, this Administration is not going well at all. And you know what the problem is? No, it's not that a pack of cheap grifters seized the White House and, in furtherance of its crimes, allows rightwing psychos to destroy the country -- It's the servants!

His staff has failed to absorb the obvious fact that Mr. Trump was so outsized, colorful, and freakish a character that their primary job, and an easy one it was, was to be the opposite—sober, low-key, reassuring. Instead they seemed to compete with him for outlandishness.

It's sort of like Benson, if the Governor were a vicious psychopath.

As for the President himself, Noonan can only shake her head and wonder what went wrong:

It amazes me that in his dealings with the health-care bill Mr. Trump revealed that he has no deep knowledge of who his base is, who his people are. I’ve never seen that in politics.

Honey, he has no deep knowledge of anything except ways to separate suckers from their money.

...But Mr. Trump’s supporters didn’t like the bill. If they had wanted a Republican president who deals only with the right, to produce a rightist bill, they would have chosen Ted Cruz. Instead they chose someone outside conservatism who backed big-ticket spending on infrastructure and opposed cutting entitlements, which suggested he’d be working with Democrats, too.

As I have noted many times, Noonan is all kinds of disingenuous and will sometimes play dumb to look cute, but these days I'm genuinely beginning to question the arterial flow to her brain. She seems to think voters carefully weigh multiple policy vectors -- "hmm, Trump says 'Ahma gunna kill Obamacare Ahm so great' in such a way that I expect my particular health care needs will be met" -- instead of just going "Big TV Star yell at Messicans, Me hate Messicans, Negro eat T-bone steak, me like way he yell," etc.

But of course Noonan has to pretend that, because to admit that the Trump tide is an id monster would be to admit that the electorate, or at least the new Republican section of it, is beyond her prissy ministrations and passive-aggressive bullshit; they won't be swayed by tea-cakes now they've tasted blood. Being prudent, she now has to prepare for a possible anti-Trump backlash -- but instead of portraying them as a mob turning on its master, she has to suggest they were misled -- by Hollywood!

...Their sense of how a White House works came from news shows and reading, and also from TV shows such as “House of Cards” and “Scandal.” Those are dark, cynical shows that more or less suggest anyone can be president. I don’t mean that in the nice way. Those programs don’t convey how a White House is an organism demanding of true depth, of serious people, real professionals. A president has to be a serious person too, and not only an amusing or stimulating talker, or the object of a dream.

Yes, somewhere along the way the yeoman farmer was corrupted by premium cable. I wonder how she'll react if, whatever happens with this administration, she must confront the fact that her people no longer feel the need to even act as if they care about her good opinion.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Hard to pick a favorite Nilsson song but this one has been giving me chills for 43 years.

•  I've been telling you guys that the longer Trump hangs in there, the greater the dilemma he presents for mainstream conservatives -- they have to disown him because he presents such an ugly picture of their real beliefs, but they also can't disown those beliefs. This is breeding some fascinating fleurs du mal. Attend Peggy Noonan today at the Wall Street Journal, who has gone further faster in that direction than even I would have expected. Noonan is a master of lipsticking the pig and silk-pursing the sow's ear, and here she goes all-out:

What a year of wonders. For a good portion of it there were three Republican presidential candidates who, if you added up their polling numbers, had the support of more than half the voters—and they had never, not one of them, won a political office in their lives.

You and I see Carson, Fiorina and Trump as malevolent clowns merrily stomping the reputation of the Party into the mud with their elongated shoes, but Noonan sees them as sunny populists. And she's not sweating a Trump nomination -- she thinks it could be great. She fantasizes a future headline: "Trump Expands the Base—Trump Grows the Party!” (I'm so sorry she wasn't around to tell us about the miracle of Wendell Willkie.) And if "Mr. and Mrs. Longtime Republican in the suburbs" don't like it, says Noonan, then "they’d better get ready to press the viable non-Trump candidates to stay, and all others to leave." Sound advice! Will eeny-meeny-miney-moe work? Oh, and get this:

Jeb Bush, by stepping down, could become what he wanted to be this year -- a hero, a history changer, a man who enhanced his own and his family’s legacy.

In the Hall of Bushes, Jeb!'s statute will be inscribed, "I don’t want to be elected president to sit around and see gridlock just become so dominant that people literally are in decline in their lives... I've got a lot of really cool things I could do other than sit around, being miserable, listening to people demonize me..." Then Noonan tells us, gosh, Democrats aren't like they used to be, i.e. losing:

This is not like the Democratic Party! It was once a big brass band marching through the streets—loud, dissonant, there. “I’m not a member of any organized party,” Will Rogers famously said. “I’m a Democrat.” For generations Democrats repeated that line as a brag. They knew disorganized meant vital, creative, spontaneous, passionate—alive. 

Now that party acts like this tidy, lifeless, fightless thing, a big, gray, dead-hearted, soul-killing blob. “I have the demographics,” it blobbily bellows, “I have the millennials.” Maybe it doesn’t have as much as it thinks. It is no honor to the Democratic Party that it is not fighting things through with a stage full of contenders this epochal year. 

The Republicans are all chaos and incoherence, it’s true. But at least they’re alive. At least they’re fighting as if it matters.

In 1984, when the Democratic primaries were contentious, the New York Post ran a front page with a picture of Jesse Jackson, Gary Hart, and Walter Mondale under the headline BEST OF ENEMIES. Parties love it when the opposition is in disarray. But in the last ditch, Noonan tells us the Democrats should be so lucky to be fractured and led by an unstable demagogue! She's got them right where she wants them!

•   A cautionary tale:

The self-driving car, that cutting-edge creation that’s supposed to lead to a world without accidents, is achieving the exact opposite right now: The vehicles have racked up a crash rate double that of those with human drivers. 

The glitch? 

They obey the law all the time, as in, without exception. This may sound like the right way to program a robot to drive a car, but good luck trying to merge onto a chaotic, jam-packed highway with traffic flying along well above the speed limit. It tends not to work out well. As the accidents have piled up -- all minor scrape-ups for now -- the arguments among programmers at places like Google Inc. and Carnegie Mellon University are heating up: Should they teach the cars how to commit infractions from time to time to stay out of trouble?

If you made it up it would be too on-the-nose, eh? And I don't mean about driverless cars. I have long believed, with Bob Dobbs, that we Americans suffer from a lack of slack. I say this not only out of personal preference (or, as some might say, laziness), but out of longtime observation of what happens to humans who are deprived of it. We see the endless and pernicious efforts to take up and tighten slack at every level of society, from the illegalization of the homeless to the prosecution not only of legal behavior but of legislation itself -- it's as if we all have to be on guard all the time, lest society collapse. (Nothing typifies this better than the professionalization of just looking for a goddamn job, which gets more absurd all the time.)  Now we have these driverless cars which, at first blush, would seem to be a slack-enabling devices that would leave us free to chill in the car like we would at the bar. But because they are not gifts from a beneficent society, but part of the usual slack-averse bullshit, they have created this problem -- the automatons can't behave like humans -- they can't draw outside the lines -- they have no slack in the nature. And now the scientists are trying to find way to emulate it, presumably with an algorithm. You know what comes next, right?



What life could be if we were just allowed to be human.

•   Speaking of automatons, at National Review Stephen L. Miller bitches about SJWs and that Star Wars thing the kids are all talking about. Apparently people on the internet are speculating on the sexuality of that little ball robot, talking about the black guy in the white whatchamacallit suit, etc. Killer finds this intolerable, and imagines other people find it intolerable too. Key passages include, "We can surely expect our celebrity president to weigh in as well," and "the scourge of Social Justice Media tempts us to give in to our anger and aims to tear us apart." "Can Star Wars survive such an onslaught launched from the Social Justice Media’s veritable Sarlacc Pit — more commonly referred to as Twitter?" Miller asks. Yes, but can your underoos survive this wedgie?

SHOT BY BOTH SIDES. I am a citizen of two Americas. No, not John Edwards' -- Peggy Noonan's. And to hear Noonan tell it in the Wall Street Journal, these Americas are not separated by anything so tiresome as income or class, but by the lingua franca of the commentariat, attitude and political affiliation ("Mr. McCain is the Old America, of course; Mr. Obama the New").

Noonan implies we must cleave to one America or the other, but I am torn:

In the Old America, love of country was natural. You breathed it in. You either loved it or knew you should.

In the New America, love of country is a decision. It's one you make after weighing the pros and cons. What you breathe in is skepticism and a heightened appreciation of the global view.

Like all citizens who have sung the National Anthem, attended a 4th of July picnic, taken an American History class in America, or just noticed what an amazing place this is -- that is to say, nearly everyone who lives here -- I grew up an America-lover. But eventually I also learned skepticism, which is apparently the opposite of patriotism, and awareness that there are other countries on the planet with their own interests, which forbidden knowledge, Noonan seems to think, makes it impossible for me to place my own country's interests first.

Old America: Tradition is a guide in human affairs. New America: Tradition is a challenge, a barrier, or a lovely antique.

The guidance of tradition, even as interpreted by such presumably patriotic persons as Supreme Court Justices, may take us in directions unexpected by Wall Street Journal writers. But by Noonan's lights, New Americans consider such generous readings of civil rights to be a refutation of the Old America. Where might they have gotten that idea?

The Old America had big families. You married and had children. Life happened to you. You didn't decide, it decided. Now it's all on you. Old America, when life didn't work out: "Luck of the draw!" New America when life doesn't work: "I made bad choices!" Old America: "I had faith, and trust." New America: "You had limited autonomy!"

After decades of sunny Reaganism -- promulgated in large part by Noonan herself -- that told us bad choices led to poverty and that each atomized citizen was the master of his entrepreneurial fate, this is rich to the point of vomitousness.

She goes on, and on, and on ("The Old: Smoke 'em if you got 'em. The New: I'll sue"), even dropping in the ridiculous but not unprecedented notion that Obama followed community organizing as a path to riches. What it all comes down to is something I've noticed before: that the old leftist slogan "the personal is the political" has been appropriated wholesale by conservatives. And in the last ditch, where they have reason to believe they currently reside, they will lean on the personal as never before. Because, really, it's all they have left.

UPDATE. There is some discussion in comments as to whether patriotism, even the wiseguy-leaks-furtive-tear kind cynically practiced here, is invariably toxic. Well, any kind of loyalty can be dangerous, but it's pretty hard to imagine life without it. Even personal loyalties can lead to ruin, and we can see that loyalty to something as large as a nation leaves that much more room for untoward consequences. But it also grants (in the ideal case, to which America-love is closer than most) room for dissent. That I can sometimes assert, as I have, that I hate this fucking country and wish to see it defeated by militant Islam (which totally rocks) without being torn to pieces by an angry mob shows that membership in America isn't quite the same thing as allegiance to a death cult.

Of course, membership has its privileges, and we can argue that it is what the United States does to other people, in all our names, that is the real moral problem. I hope we can address that in the election, but I don't deceive myself that the Democrats will wipe all traces of blood from our honor.

So what's my alternative? Japan stubbornly refuses to appoint me as a Living Treasure, though they may just be having trouble reading my application. I guess I'm stuck with the land in which I was born and the culture in which I am steeped, and will have to make the most of it.

THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT. Attend the new conservative meme: liberals get their idea of war and everything else from movies.

Peggy Noonan gets the ball rolling: Mark Steyn rewrites her column, giving it a Steynian flavor with frequent references to homosexual rape. And in today's Wall Street Journal online, Andrew Cline explains New Hampshire's Democratic trend thusly: "The [mostly Republican] Massachusetts émigrés shop at Wal-Mart, eat at 99, a local family restaurant chain, and watch the Patriots. The mid-Atlantic émigrés shop at boutiques, eat at small cafes and watch Roger Altman films. They're the ones tipping the state Democratic."

Culture war as usual, in other words, but with an intriguing twist. Noonan and Steyn contrast the media-centric libs unfavorably with old-timers with real-world cred. Noonan exalts "the Murrow boys" and "the rough old boys and girls of the front page" whose influence on the news media, of course, Noonan has spent her career trying to erase and supplant with the emanations of right-wing think tanks and the wit 'n' wisdom of make-believe soldier Ronald Reagan; Steyn cites Bob Dole, who couldn't replace the draft-dodger Clinton in the affections of the electorate, and whose nearest equivalent in current Presidential politics would be John McCain, whose unique experience of combat among Republican contenders helped rocket him to 1.4 percent in the Value Voters poll.

As for Cline's New Hampshire Republicans, they "tend to be middle- and lower-class tax refugees" from Massachusetts, whose exodus is not really comparable to the Bataan Death March.

The portrayal of Democratic voters as effete, Altman-watching sybarites is straight out of the culture-warrior playbook, and the tactic has stood them well for decades. It's a little trickier, however, for them to declare with a straight face that their own partisans have a clearer, earthier view of life. Given that very few of us (thank God) have direct experience of combat, how do today's Republicans understand war better than Democrats? From Toby Keith concerts? John Wayne movies? The affectation of military parlance ("Real Debate Wisconsin -- Deployed!") on rightwing blogs?

Noonan complains that the experiences of today's young'uns and middle-aged'uns are not as authentic as those of previous generations, because we "grew up in a time when media dominated all." "All" is the key word. Even Republican watch movies. The culture warriors know this, which is why they're always ranting about the double-plus-ungood entertainments they think are poisoning our minds, and proposing double-plus-good alternatives. But if you're trying to influence an election, a movie is a very roundabout way to do it. Ask Michael Moore.

Maybe I'm wrong, though: maybe the box-office dominance this weekend of Saw IV means that Americans are moving toward a pro-torture position. On the other hand, Borat was the top movie the weekend before the 2006 election, and it didn't seem to do much for George Allen.

CRAZY JESUS LADY'S CRISIS OF AUTHORITY.

Peggy Noonan has reanimated Robert Taft so that he may opine on the recent shutdown. I gotta tell you, folks, I hardly know what to do with this thing. Back when Noonan created a monologue for Paul Wellstone, for example, in which the recently-deceased Democratic Senator basically told people to vote Republican because Wellstone supporters were assholes -- well, that was so spectacularly evil and vicious that one could almost admire it, especially as it came wrapped in that cloying Crazy Jesus Lady manner that convinced readers (at least those whose ears had been trained by Bob Bartley's Mighty Wurlitzer) that Noonan only meant the best for everyone.

She seems to want to do something similarly sneaky with this latest necro-ventriloquist act, with "Robert Taft" speaking from the other side to convince the Tea Party crowd there's nothing wrong with the Grand Old Party that some wisdom from a long-dead party hack can't fix. It's about as successful as Jeff Goldblum's final transformation in The Fly. I mean, get a load of this:

What is the purpose of a party? 

"A theater critic once said a critic is someone who knows where we want to go but can't drive the car. That can apply here. It is the conservatives of the party, in my view, who've known where we want to go, and often given the best directions. The party is the car. Its institutions, including its most experienced legislators and accomplished political figures, with the support of the people, are the driver. You want to keep the car looking good. It zooms by on a country road, you want people seeing a clean, powerful object. You want to go fast, but you don't want it crashing. You drive safely and try to get to your destination in one piece."

If "Taft" were delivering this at a Kiwanis dinner, when he got to telling them that institutions were driving the car that is the Republican Party, the hosts would be getting nervous -- and around the time "Taft" was giving these instructions to the Tea Party, they'd have cut his mike and dragged him from the dais:

Get smart about this. Don't let the media keep killing your guys in the field. Make it hard for them. Enter primaries soberly. When you have to take out an establishment man, do. But if you don't, stick with him but stiffen his spine.

Jesus Christ, sounds like Spencer Tracy's closing speech from Guess Who's Coming to Dinner as performed by James Lileks. It also conjures a vision of deranged Birchers in tricorners and knee-breeches gang-tackling Mitch McConnell as "Taft" nods sagely; when McConnell escapes they chase him, brandishing a metal pipe to ram up his ass.

But the weirdest, and slightly sad, thing is the spectacle of Noonan selling Washington authority to the kind of people who think Ted Cruz is Presidential timber. She brings up Allen Drury -- Allen Drury, for chrissakes! Couldn't she have at least lightened things up with Art Buchwald? -- as if it'll mean something to them. (If she'd picked None Dare Call It Treason instead, she might have stood more of a chance. Their past is not Bourbon-at-Clyde's, but fluoride-in-water.) She figures the upstarts want power, just like the Brash Young Comers in old movies, and like those characters they will respond to a salutary scolding so long as the scold is an old white man in a suit. At one point she even has "Taft" say, "Stop acting like Little Suzie with her nose pressed against the window watching the fancy people at the party. You've arrived and you know it." That's like telling Castro, "OK, kid, Batista has heard you and he's offering you a nice suite at the Hotel Nacional. Try not to screw up!"

She thinks the Mau Maus can be converted, but she's just catching flak.

Plus there's this, from "Taft"'s Epistle to the Establishment Men:

Deep down, do you patronize those innocents on the farms, in the hinterlands? Or perhaps you understand yourself to be a fat, happy mosquito on the pond scum that is them?

I suppose you could say there is genius in it, as there is absolutely no one else on God's green earth besides Noonan who talks this way or thinks anyone else does.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

John Lennon was fully within the continuum of mid-20th-century pop.

•   Let's get to this week's Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies first: A call for patriots to do something positive about the growing shortage of problematic cartoon characters, and a meditation on the days when a worker had a little slack and why he doesn't anymore.  (Subscribe! Cheap!)

•   Peggy Noonan:

That wasn’t just a high-charged celebrity interview that everyone talked about and then it went away. Oprah Winfrey’s conversation last weekend with the duke and duchess of Sussex will reverberate and last. It was history, a full-bore assault on an institution, the British monarchy, that has endured more than 1,000 years.

To me, it was this week's stupid tabloid bullshit, which will be replaced by next week's, but I don't absolutely have to fill this space every week, and my audience is not largely comprised of gossip-addicted fossils for whom the doings of Lord Bollocks and Lady Hammerhead are of intrinsic interest. After some snide cracks (“That must be a comfort to them") to let the punters know she's with the Dear Old Queen on this one, Noonan does some deepthink:

Public life has gotten extremely, unrelentingly performative. Have you noticed you keep hearing that word? It means everyone is always performing—the politician, the news anchor, the angry activist. This gives natural actors an edge, and leaves those who aren’t by nature actors at a disadvantage. 

I would say the Royal Family are actors by training, indeed by heredity, like the Flying Wallendas. They're in the paper and on the telly all the time, and they don't have any function or skills rather than to Play Royal. Maybe Noonan refers instead to her preference of performance style?

Meghan was a professional actress.

Both Meghan and Harry speak a kind of woke-corporate communications language that is smooth and calming but also slippery and opaque. 

Ahhh I see the problem now -- Meghan and Harry are part of the wokemob cancelculture all the senior citizens are snarling over! Noonan is even moved to do some sleuthing on behalf of the House of Windsor: 

Some of what was said beggared belief. Meghan claimed that going in she didn’t really have any idea what the royal family was, didn’t Google or do any research... [Princess Diana's] funeral was watched by 2.5 billion people. Meghan Markle, home in California, was 16, presumably loved media, and went on to study acting. Is it believable she didn’t know this story, follow it, see who had the starring role?

What little girl didn't obsess over the People's Princess? Noonan obviously did, and she was 47 years old when Diana snuffed it. 

Why should an American care about any of this? 

Ugh here it comes.

I suppose we shouldn’t. In a practical way we’re interested in the royal family because we don’t have one, don’t want one, and think it’s great that you do. 

We do?

...But I think there’s something deeper, more mystical in our interest, a sense that however messy the monarchy, it embodies a nation, the one we long ago came from and broke with. The high purpose of monarchy is to lend its mystique and authority to the ideas of stability and continuance.

It's bells and smells for Proddys! 

Henry VIII, Mad King George, Victoria—these names still echo. It is rare and wonderful when you can say of a small old woman entering a large reception area, “England has entered the room.”

I cannot, as the kids say, even. 

Someday Elizabeth II will leave us and the world will honestly mourn, not only because of what she represented but because she was old-style. She performed but wasn’t performative

When my avatar steps out of her castle and does her jar-opening gesture to the crowd, it is performance; when yours does it, it's performative. I really think this is more in the realm of nostalgia and perhaps senile dementia than the realm of politics, but the worship of these living totems whose long-running show only serves to slightly distract from the clownish chaos that is Britain today does seem very conservative.

•   LOL, Andrew Cuomo quoted at The Hill :

“People know the difference between playing politics, bowing to cancel culture and the truth. Let the review proceed, I’m not going to resign, I was not elected by the politicians, I was elected by the people.”

This is yet another proof point for the position that crying "cancel culture" was always the last refuge of a scoundrel or a Substack (except mine! Subscribe, cheap!).  As in most other much-blubbered-over cancellations, the putative victim is a powerful man accused by liberals of an "unwoke" offense such as molesting subordinates. Cuomo obviously expects some wingnuts to rush to his defense on those grounds -- and he may be right, because if there's one thing conservatives believe, it's that a white man accused of crimes against the lesser breeds should always have the benefit of the doubt. 

That's why conservative propagandists like Bethany Mandel are rushing out the message that "They're Trying to Impeach Andrew Cuomo for the Wrong Thing" -- because getting Cuomo for a nursing-home cover up would further the Republican talking point that Democrats really killed those half-million COVID victims while Tubby heroically held superspreader events to try and protect them with herd immunity. Whereas getting him for groping girls -- now, who does that help, I ask you? 

The difference, of course, is that Democrats have the muscle in New York to bring Cuomo down, and history shows they're willing to expel even one of their own for such offenses -- something you can under no circumstances say about Republicans.