Peggy Noonan, a person whom I respected up until she was caught lying to her readers in a hot mic incident, digs herself a bit deeper into her hole with her own readers with her latest piece, “Palin’s Failin’.” The subtext of her article is succinctly expressed in her subtitle: “What is it she stands for? After seven weeks, we don’t know.”
Let’s quickly recount what we learned about Sarah Palin beginning with her nomination all the way through the first Vice Presidential Debate: Sarah Palin is pro-life, in favor of utilizing America’s natural resources in order to reduce our dependence on foreign energy, favors strong second amendment rights, supports capital punishment, opposes same sex marriage, and supports a preemptive foreign policy. I suppose if you exclude all of those major issues then we really don’t know much about where Sarah Palin stands.
……Well, I guess it’s pretty clear that Gov. Palin won’t be able to carry the coveted North Hampton-Ivy League-Neo Conservative demographic in the same convincing fashion that Senator Obama has. After all, Senator Obama has clearly aligned himself with the Christian realism school of philosophy, a contemporary school of philosophy that is viewed favorably this election cycle by the aforementioned demographic. Darn!
After a few more paragraphs of bashing Governor Palin and the barefoot rubes who are ignorant enough to vote for, let alone identify with, someone who is clearly too vulgar and inexperienced for the likes of the ultra-sophisticated beltway political scene, Peggy Noonan tops off an already bitter tirade with an uncharacteristically self-righteous, yet oddly tangential crescendo:
“I gather this week from conservative publications that those whose thoughts lead them to criticism in this area are to be shunned, and accused of the lowest motives. In one now-famous case, Christopher Buckley was shooed from the great magazine his father invented. In all this, the conservative intelligentsia are doing what they have done for five years. They bitterly attacked those who came to stand against the Bush administration. This was destructive. If they had stood for conservative principle and the full expression of views, instead of attempting to silence those who opposed mere party, their movement, and the party, would be in a better, and healthier, position.
At any rate, come and get me, copper.”
Ok, I’ll bite. There is no reason that you (Peggy Noonan), Christopher Buckley, Kathleen Parker, David Brooks, or any other member of the self-anointed conservative intelligentsia should be surprised at the amount of anger outpouring from your readership towards you when you write articles that appear to “pile on” an already struggling conservative campaign effort.
You dutifully qualify every criticism of Palin with some snippet along the lines of “I’m not doing this to get invited to all the cool parties,” yet the first thing you do once you’ve been booed off stage by your own readership is exactly that – you show up onto some sort of liberal haven like Hardball or The Colbert Report to apologize for how stupid and ignorant your own political movement is. You claim that your articles against the McCain campaign are written out of some concern that true conservative principles are dying, yet you express your disagreement by cheering on a man who supports out-in-the-open socialism. You all claim that you are wholly invested in traditional bread-and-butter conservatism, yet all of your actions contradict such claims.
……Ms. Noonan and other megapundit turncoats: the outrage expressed by your readers hasn’t been incurred because you’ve shifted your support away from the only conservative ticket on the ballot this November. You’re faced with reader outrage because you’ve expressed the same contempt for your readership that has traditionally been expressed solely by your colleagues on the other side of the aisle regarding conservatives – you extoll conservative virtues with one article and then damn the very candidates who embody those virtues simply with another, and not due to any substantive reason. Rather, it’s because those candidates didn’t attend a university with a high enough U.S. News & World Report college ranking and don’t articulate their positions using the same ebullient language found in the stump speeches of Senator Obama. You’re not sold on Palin or McCain out of lack of substance, but of lack of style; you claim that Gov. Palin hasn’t effectively conveyed her positions on any major issues, yet it’s apparent that you have not been listening.
Read all of it here: http://stopgloballaming.com/2008/10/17/quick-note-to-the-elite-inside-the-beltway-conservative-pundits-youre-not-martyrs/
If Obama gets elected and our worst nightmares of his socialist domestic and foreign policies come true, will the beltway conservatives who deserted their posts attribute their defections to temporary insanity?