Noonan on Clinton, Part 2

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The finest Hillary-trashing pot high of the day has already been provided, again, by the glorious Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan. It's not just a hunger for a daily Hillary hate-on that articles like Noonan's greatly satisfy, but an almost Biblical-level feeling of clarity, cleansing, righteousness. There's no way to not feel good about this.

All last night I thought about the Clinton campaign's communications director Howard Wolfson stating yesterday that, if necessary, Hillary is ready to burn the house down all spring and summer long in order to fulfill her clawing ambition. That first, the fair or decent thing second. But more and more people, thank God, seem to be understanding who she is.

"'This is death by a thousand cuts,'" Noonan begins. "That's what they keep saying about Hillary Clinton.

"Her whole life right now is a reverse Sally Field. She's looking out at an audience of colleagues and saying, 'You don't like me, you really don't like me!'

"Although of course she's not saying it. Her response to what from the outside looks like catastrophe? A glassy-eyed insistence that all is well. 'I'm tested, I'm ready, let's make it happen!' she yelled into a mic on a stage in Texas on the night of her latest defeat. This is meant to look like confidence. Whether or not you wish her well probably determines whether you see it as game face, stubbornness or evidence of mild derangement.

"In Virginia last Sunday, two days before the Little Tuesday voting, she suggested her problem is that she's not a big phony. 'People say to me all the time, 'You're so specific...why don't you just come and, you know, really just give us one of those great rhetorical flourishes and then, you know, get everybody all whooped up?'

"I thought it an acknowledgement that loss might come," Noonan writes. "But by Thursday afternoon, Mrs. Clinton was furiously stumping through Ohio using the same line of attack, but this time it wasn't a marker. The race is about 'speeches versus solutions.' Her unnamed opponent stands for the first, she for the second. He is all 'words,' she is 'action.' 'Words are cheap,' she said.

"If they were so cheap, her inability to marshal them would not have cost her so dearly."

Or as MSNBC's Chris Matthews said yesterday, there's never been a U.S. President commonly regarded as great who hasn't been a great orator. What U.S. President who wasn't a great orator and a profound uplifter of spirits is considered great by historians and the general public?

Noonan also underlines a relationship between Clinton's way of doing things and that a certain departed U.S. president. She quotes "an old Richard Nixon hand" observing that "Nixon [didn't] always think honesty is the best policy, but he [did] think it's a policy." Like Clinton, she implies, Nixon "saw it as a strategic gambit, to be used like any other."

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Posted by Jeffrey Wells on February 15, 2008 at 9:08 AM

comment #1

christian says ...

What kind of hack MSM shill are you becoming Jeff?

Matthews of the "thrill running up his leg" and Reagan love-slave Noonan are your souces of wisdom and clarity?

Might as well start quoting Kristol and Hannity.
They hate the Clintons to.

Posted by christian at February 15, 2008 9:56 AM

comment #2

Josh Massey says ...

Aww, I was just about to write "Cue the aghast post from Christian in 5... 4... 3...," but he beat me to it.

Posted by Josh Massey at February 15, 2008 9:59 AM

comment #3

MAGGA says ...

Who is this Hillary Clinton?

Posted by MAGGA at February 15, 2008 10:00 AM

comment #4

christian says ...

You should just countdown to the next "I Hate Hillary" post from Jeff. More consistent.

Posted by christian at February 15, 2008 10:02 AM

comment #5

le corbeau says ...

Today's winner of the Phrases I Never Expected To Read From Jeffrey Wells is:

the glorious Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan

At this rate, next week he'll be raving about the section on "It Takes a Village" in Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism.

Posted by le corbeau at February 15, 2008 10:03 AM

comment #6

MikeSchaeferSF says ...

Noonan is a hack and a longtime GOP apologist -- you won't think she's so "glorious" when she starts trashing Obama. Jeez, get a grip, Wells.

Posted by MikeSchaeferSF at February 15, 2008 10:06 AM

comment #7

gruver1 says ...

Wells to Christian: I'm not expressing a love for each and every view and opinion stated by Chris Matthews and Peggy Noonan. But I am experiencing a kind of evangelical exhilaration when they and others shoot their water guns at this black-garbed Margaret Hamilton figure, resulting in tiny swirls of rising steam and sounds of shrieking distress. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. I know a conservative woman from these parts who was happy when Bush was re-elected in '04. The other day I asked where she was at in terms of the primaries, and she said, "Anyone but Hillary." I almost hugged her.

Posted by gruver1 at February 15, 2008 10:11 AM

comment #8

christian says ...

"and she said, "Anyone but Hillary." I instantly melted. I almost hugged her."

Huh? As if somebody stupid enough to re-elect Bush wouldn't already hate the Clintons? So she's going to vote for McCain. Oh joy!

What are you smoking and can you get me an ounce?

Posted by christian at February 15, 2008 10:14 AM

comment #9

MAGGA says ...

The irony is that Jeffrey will vote for Hillary if she is nominated. In other words, no Obama, no joy for the next four years regardless of national election. But then again Obama will be the next president, I am almost certain. Not because he is qualified (which I think he is), but because when this much sentimentality spreads in the US, Titanic numbers follow. Hope so...

Posted by MAGGA at February 15, 2008 10:17 AM

comment #10

Dave says ...

Hey Mgmax, don't joke. "Liberal Fascism" might be the best book I've ever read that I *know* half the country won't even bother to read just because of the title.

What's so amazing is that the whole book reads at first glance like it's about the ideology that led to Hillary, but now that it came out, it fits Obama's emtpy messianic "the State will give you hope!" pablum so much better. Uncanny.

Posted by Dave at February 15, 2008 10:20 AM

comment #11

le corbeau says ...

Arguably Obama is more liberal than Hillary, in the sense of policy in abstraction. But on a practical basis, I find her idea of government as nanny state run by experts who always know better than you, and administered by interest groups and identity group leaders who each get a cut to ensure their cooperation, much more suffocating and repulsive toward the last shreds of individualism in the American character than I would just having a smart, pragmatic liberal in office. That's a page from The Road to Serfdom come to life. And I think, even as America clearly swings left (or swung long ago, with the touchy-feely compassionate conservatism), that a lot of it has less to do with specific policies than with an instinctive revulsion toward her whole Nurse Ratched I-always-know-best persona, which grownups know cannot be good for them in the long run unless they're willing to become permanent wards of the state.

Posted by le corbeau at February 15, 2008 10:21 AM

comment #12

christian says ...

"the State will give you hope!"

Hilarious coming from the guy who thinks the federal military-industrial complex is our nation's best and brightest hope.

Posted by christian at February 15, 2008 10:24 AM

comment #13

le corbeau says ...

Hilarious coming from the guy who thinks the federal military-industrial complex is our nation's best and brightest hope.

You say that like it's self-evidently wrong. I'd say even if you greatly dislike the idea, it's pretty hard to refute, based on the 20th century. What branch of government, precisely, did something more significant than stopping Hitler and the Soviets?

Posted by le corbeau at February 15, 2008 10:26 AM

comment #14

christian says ...

Wasn't that the people branch, Mgmax? Those who actually were drafted and fought?

That's what the government is (or used to be): citizens trying to help other citizens.

And sorry, Vietnam, Falklands, and Iraq are examples of the military-industrial fucking up.
Not to mention all the CIA dirty wars like Chile and El Salvador. But you TRUST THEM.

Posted by christian at February 15, 2008 10:31 AM

comment #15

Beaucoul says ...

would hilary's presidency be all that much different from bill's? probably not. and by most standards, his was a very popular reign that was relatively peaceful and relatively prosperous.

nevertheless, i'm still on the fence between hil and obama. i'm still trying to figure out where all this hate for hilary is coming from, and i'm still trying to figure out if obama's got enough seasoning in him.

i seriously doubt whether peggy noonan has the answer. she sounds like she's just adding to the noise.

Posted by Beaucoul at February 15, 2008 10:33 AM

comment #16

le corbeau says ...

That's what the government is (or used to be): citizens trying to help other citizens.

It takes a village, Christian.

Posted by le corbeau at February 15, 2008 10:33 AM

comment #17

le corbeau says ...

Also, the Falklands? Maybe you want to doublecheck who that one was actually between...

Posted by le corbeau at February 15, 2008 10:34 AM

comment #18

christian says ...

Hre's how Obamacan say something and nothing at the same time. Way to triangulate!

MILWAUKEE (AP) - Barack Obama said Friday that the country must do "whatever it takes" to eradicate gun violence following a campus shooting in his home state, but he believes in an individual's right to bear arms.

Obama said he spoke to Northern Illinois University's president Friday morning by phone and offered whatever help his Senate office could provide in the investigation and improving campus security. The Democratic presidential candidate spoke about the Illinois shooting to reporters while campaigning in neighboring Wisconsin.

The senator, a former constitutional law instructor, said some scholars argue the Second Amendment to the Constitution guarantees gun ownerships only to militias, but he believes it grants individual gun rights.

"I think there is an individual right to bear arms, but it's subject to commonsense regulation" like background checks, he said during a news conference.

Posted by christian at February 15, 2008 10:49 AM

comment #19

Dave says ...

"Hilarious coming from the guy who thinks the federal military-industrial complex is our nation's best and brightest hope."

What Mgmax said. The greatest guarantor of human liberty over the last hundred years has been the United States armed forces-- populated by the draftees AND the volunteers who comprise it.

But I kinda/sorta agree with you, Christian. I *do* think that citizens helping citizens is a good thing. But citizens helping citizens under federal order-- directly by the law, or indirectly through the tax code-- is far different than human decency and charity.

Taxation and government are necessary evils, because in the absence of that social contract, we get shit on. But there's a happy medium between Hobbesian Rwanda, and nanny state North Korea.

I've always been an "enumerated powers" conservative. I'd be plenty happy if we went back to the original four cabinet agencies-- Defense, State, Treasury and Justice, just like the good Founders intended.

So when I hear Obama and Clinton tell me, each in their own unique way, that the answer to every problem in America is yet another Washington-managed program, a little part of me dies inside.

Posted by Dave at February 15, 2008 11:12 AM

comment #20

Beaucoul says ...

"The greatest guarantor of human liberty over the last hundred years has been the United States armed forces"

does anything say "reductio ad absurdum" more clearly then that sentence?

Posted by Beaucoul at February 15, 2008 11:24 AM

comment #21

candidate says ...

Y'know Jeffy, I used to think you were just an idiot with regards to cinema. It turns out you're ambidextrous -- you're equally stupid when it comes to politics! Hailing "the glorious Peggy Noonan" in the context of showing off your oh-so-cool anti-establishment 'tude -- truly the most dimwitted hipsterism I've witnessed since the hippie kids at my local organic market extolled the virtues of the borderline-racist wingnut Ron Paul.

Posted by candidate at February 15, 2008 11:26 AM

comment #22

le corbeau says ...

Thank you Dave, for saying (very well) what I just didn't have the energy to.

Again, Beaucoul, if it seems wrong to you, what alternate candidate would you name?

Posted by le corbeau at February 15, 2008 11:28 AM

comment #23

George Prager says ...

Hillary Clinton is Pearl Bailey compared to Peggy Noonan. Didn't she say that God sent dolphins to save Elian Gonzalez (the little bastard)?

Posted by George Prager at February 15, 2008 11:39 AM

comment #24

christian says ...

Oh and JOsh, recall your bold statement that global warming dosnot exist in anyway? Please to read today's front page news:

A review of all available ocean data records concludes that the low-oxygen events which have plagued the Pacific Northwest coast since 2002 are unprecedented in the five decades prior to that, and may well be linked to the stronger, persistent winds that are expected to occur with global warming.

In a new study to be published Feb 15 in the journal Science, researchers from Oregon State University outline a "potential for rapid reorganization" in basic marine ecosystems and the climatic forces that drive them, and suggest that these low-oxygen, or "hypoxic" events are now more likely to be the rule rather than the exception.

"In this part of the marine environment, we may have crossed a tipping point," said Jane Lubchenco, the Wayne and Gladys Valley Professor of Marine Biology at OSU, and the lead scientist for PISCO, the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans. ...

"People keep asking us, 'Is this situation really all that different or not?'" Lubchenco said. "Now we have the answer to that question, and it's an unequivocal 'yes.' The low oxygen levels we've measured in the last six years are abnormally low for our system. We haven't seen conditions like this in many, many decades, and now with varying intensity we've seen them in each of the last six summers."

Posted by christian at February 15, 2008 11:39 AM

comment #25

le corbeau says ...

"Didn't she say that God sent dolphins to save Elian Gonzalez"

Yes, I thought of that indelible moment when Jeff got spiritual on us in the first graf.

"and may well be linked to the stronger, persistent winds that are expected to occur with global warming"

And what could be more definite than that?

Maybe Obama can save the Loch Ness monster from global warming and ride it to victory.

Posted by le corbeau at February 15, 2008 11:48 AM

comment #26

fartballs says ...

I just think Wells is sick of being involved in "the party of losers". Only the Democratic party would actually have the nerves to potentially nominate a candidate for which a proven 47% of the US population have clearly stated they would not vote for under ANY circumstances. ThatÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s how dumb Democrats are. Just plain stupid.

Posted by fartballs at February 15, 2008 11:54 AM

comment #27

George Prager says ...

Only on HE would someone named "fartballs" call someone stupid.

Posted by George Prager at February 15, 2008 12:01 PM

comment #28

Josh Massey says ...

Christian, I've never said global warming doesn't exist, I've said man-made global warming doesn't exist, and that nothing we do to become "green" can control the temperature of the sun.

And lookie, actual scientists agree, which Mr. Gore won't admit.

Posted by Josh Massey at February 15, 2008 12:58 PM

comment #29

Beaucoul says ...

Mgmax: as i said before, i'm undecided.

i'm wondering how you can claim that this country is leaning to the left or has swung to the left many years ago. ever since the Reagan administration, liberalism has been a dirty word in american politics. there is a streak of extreme conservatism in this country that set the stage and mandated eight years of neo-mccarythyism. the net result is that america is far less of a liberal democracy than most other liberal democracies in the western world.

do you really think Hilary Clinton is like Nurse Ratched? statements like that make me wonder what's really on the minds of her detractors.

finally, i just don't understand what "nanny state" is supposed to mean. the words sound great together, but on closer examination, they are empty of meaning, like so many other snarky catchphrases devised by some unctuous pundit.

Posted by Beaucoul at February 15, 2008 1:02 PM

comment #30

le corbeau says ...

Okay, so your response to me is, I can't mean what I said, do I really mean what I said, and what I said doesn't mean anything?

I'm not exactly motivated to try to explain more under those circumstances. It takes a reasonable good faith effort to assume that the other side has some thoughtfulness to what it's saying and might even have a point or two going for it.

Posted by le corbeau at February 15, 2008 1:18 PM

comment #31

Beaucoul says ...

oh dang; and i was so looking forward to your response.

Posted by Beaucoul at February 15, 2008 1:37 PM

comment #32

le corbeau says ...

Now I'm really glad I didn't bother.

It's not like I invented the concept of the "nanny state." There are all manner of books one could read on the subject, if one was really interested in understanding one's world.

Posted by le corbeau at February 15, 2008 1:46 PM

comment #33

Sean E says ...

Wells praising Peggy Noonan! The left and the right coming together because of Hilary Clinton! Who says Obama is the only uniter in this race?

Posted by Sean E at February 15, 2008 2:04 PM

comment #34

Beaucoul says ...

oh wow; i had no idea i was in the presence of someone who understands the world.

i am truly chastened.

Posted by Beaucoul at February 15, 2008 2:07 PM

comment #35

le corbeau says ...

And I made the mistake of thinking for a moment that I was in a sincere discussion, not playing snarkupsmanship with some 12-year-old on the Internet.

Posted by le corbeau at February 15, 2008 3:22 PM

comment #36

Beaucoul says ...

just as well it ends here; it's my nap time.

Posted by Beaucoul at February 15, 2008 3:50 PM

comment #37

D.Z. says ...

Mgmax: "What branch of government, precisely, did something more significant than stopping Hitler and the Soviets?"

You do know our forces got their asses kicked by the Reds during the Russian civil war, right? (Not to mention the civil wars in China, N. Korea and Vietnam...)

"Also, the Falklands? Maybe you want to doublecheck who that one was actually between..."

The guy behind the Falkland War was backed by Reagan.

Dave: "The greatest guarantor of human liberty over the last hundred years has been the United States armed forces--"

Except for during the Holocaust, Rwanda, Darfur, Indonesia, Kurdistan...

Posted by D.Z. at February 15, 2008 4:39 PM

comment #38

kitdafos says ...

Wells: Or as MSNBC's Chris Matthews said yesterday, there's never been a U.S. President commonly regarded as great who hasn't been a great orator. What U.S. President who wasn't a great orator and a profound uplifter of spirits is considered great by historians and the general public?

Well, for starters, THOMAS JEFFERSON, stutterer extraordinaire. Stick with movies, Jeff. You only occasionally embarrass yourself in that arena.

Posted by kitdafos at February 15, 2008 8:03 PM

comment #39

christian says ...

Of course, that would have to imply that only great orators are great presidents but despite the historical revisionism, Reagan was not a great president. Bush can't even speak English and there are those here that claim he's Abraham Lincoln...

Posted by christian at February 16, 2008 1:00 AM

comment #40