The reason people like Nooners still have platforms is to provide everyone with a plausible veneer that covers the actual freakshow extremism that is the current GOP. The media has to work very VERY hard to make Ron DeSantis seem like just-your-average-concerned governor while he turns his entire state into a superspreader site. And if you let any average Republican elected official speak into a microphone, what you'll hear is incoherent lunacy about covid and conspiracies, Hunter Biden and Joe brain bleeds, lizard people and Ivermectin.
But we CAN'T admit that the entire GOP has become deranged. So having "respectable Republicans" like Nooners around lets everyone relax and say "sure, there are a few extreme nuts in the GOP, but there's extreme nuts everywhere including the Democrats! So everything is just A-Okay." You can hear this play out on NPR, watch it play out on any network newscast.
I'm a cranky, cynical dotard but if there's a handful of pundits worth a bucket of shit (to coin a phrase), Noonan isn't one.
Unity post-9/11 was based on a shit ton of fear -- along with hate about all the GOP has for promotion purposes -- aided, of course, by the GOP-friendly complicit mainstream media. So, you know, by definition, a shitty basis for unity.
And using ~3,600 deaths to justify a couple of hundred thousand deaths and a pissing away of $2T in Afghanistan alone, I dunno. I have issues with that. Clearly some fine people don't.
And add to that tally a couple of hundred thousand gratuitous -- avoidable -- Covid deaths here at home in the exce[tional Greatest Nation the World has Ever Known®.
Some peoples' perspectives are really fucked up. And it's attributable to the pandering for profit of moral abominations like Noonan.
The NYT and WaPo have always been committed to giving the middle class warm snuggly versions of American fascism via hacks like Brooks and Noonan so they can continue to vote for the party that gives the oligarchy big tax cuts and guts environmental regulation while the base gleefully embraces Trump and all the lying, grifting, hate and ignorance he personifies. But Noonan et al do opinion and can be discounted by someone well-informed about reality. The bigger problem is with the rest of the NYT and WaPo, where reporters have great difficulty calling a fascist a fascist, a liar a liar, etc, unless it’s tempered with an “even-handed,” “balanced” presentation of the “other” doing something their pseudoconservative readers find distasteful.
those fuckers haven't changed in...well...forever. the difference is that they collectively decided to do away with the old nod and a wink. once the non-informed base and the big money cons got on the same page publicly, there was no longer any need for a facade. folks like noonan are simply too fossilized to be able to change except in glacial terms.
From your excellent summary, it looks like Noonan's's writing in her Lamentation for the Very Best of Us mode, which always leads to denouncing all things liberal. While she rarely stoops to Alex Jones-style conspiranoia, she's never had any problem defending the depredations of say, Rush Limbaugh, and joining right in on the latest douchery.
For all the purple prose, Noonan is a blackhearted Republican operative with one raised wet finger testing the direction of the latest flatulent wind of decaying conservatism, and she never fails to volunteer her own moldy contribution to its demise.
(P.S. The link to Noonan's column isn't a link. I probably won't be able to get past the Murdoch paywall anyway, but I'm afraid to even mention it because then I might read it.)
All this talk about "unity" is just a way to give the 32% whackadoodle minority a veto over the eminently sensible things that 60% of us want to do. It's like being part of an anarchist collective whose "consensus" decision-making process allows the most annoying jerk in the group make every decision revolve around HIM.
Christ, Peggy, I dunno. Close to a million dead of covid, we've given you plenty of chances to rally around the unity flag, but you assholes are scared off by the science and still nitpicking "Died OF covid or died WITH covid" as though you had a point. (You don't. If someone strokes out because of blood clots from covid, they died of it. If someone gets hit by a car while aysmptomatic, nobody's recording that as a covid fatality, and you assholes who are pretending 98 year old Edith dying of our bullshit food safety regulations three days after getting a covid vaccine is a vaccine fatality are in no goddamned position to pretend you're making fine distinctions here.)
You wanna rally or not. The unity's over here. Just put a fucking mask on before you try to get in here, because I'm anesthetized by your breath.
In a "know thy enemy" moment, I plowed through Peggy's autobiography. It humanized her, but made me hate her all the more. She claimed a road to Damascus moment, when she went to an Anti-Vietnam War protest. Some of her fellow demonstrators turned out to be obnoxious, ill-informed, self-important shitheads. Sort of like every young person I've ever known, myself included. She decided she had a working-class solidarity with the proles who were doing the fighting in 'Nam. So, she "turned her peace symbol into a roach clip," and went all in with Nixon and Kissinger.
In short, she preferred to see more of her contemporaries tossed into the bottomless meat-grinder than make common cause with anyone who wanted to bring them home. Fuck those hippies and college kids anyway! She was an awful person from the get-go.
*standing ovation, slow clap*
The reason people like Nooners still have platforms is to provide everyone with a plausible veneer that covers the actual freakshow extremism that is the current GOP. The media has to work very VERY hard to make Ron DeSantis seem like just-your-average-concerned governor while he turns his entire state into a superspreader site. And if you let any average Republican elected official speak into a microphone, what you'll hear is incoherent lunacy about covid and conspiracies, Hunter Biden and Joe brain bleeds, lizard people and Ivermectin.
But we CAN'T admit that the entire GOP has become deranged. So having "respectable Republicans" like Nooners around lets everyone relax and say "sure, there are a few extreme nuts in the GOP, but there's extreme nuts everywhere including the Democrats! So everything is just A-Okay." You can hear this play out on NPR, watch it play out on any network newscast.
"How do we get that back?"
Perhaps we could ask Al Qaeda to destroy another skyscraper since it worked so well last time?
Honestly, these people.
I'm a cranky, cynical dotard but if there's a handful of pundits worth a bucket of shit (to coin a phrase), Noonan isn't one.
Unity post-9/11 was based on a shit ton of fear -- along with hate about all the GOP has for promotion purposes -- aided, of course, by the GOP-friendly complicit mainstream media. So, you know, by definition, a shitty basis for unity.
And using ~3,600 deaths to justify a couple of hundred thousand deaths and a pissing away of $2T in Afghanistan alone, I dunno. I have issues with that. Clearly some fine people don't.
And add to that tally a couple of hundred thousand gratuitous -- avoidable -- Covid deaths here at home in the exce[tional Greatest Nation the World has Ever Known®.
Some peoples' perspectives are really fucked up. And it's attributable to the pandering for profit of moral abominations like Noonan.
Am I misremembering that 9/11 gave President Cheney an excuse to execute Plan "Project For A New American Century"?
"And what do they think is important? "
Money. That's all that matters to these people. They believe nothing themselves. Their ideology is no more than a profit center.
The NYT and WaPo have always been committed to giving the middle class warm snuggly versions of American fascism via hacks like Brooks and Noonan so they can continue to vote for the party that gives the oligarchy big tax cuts and guts environmental regulation while the base gleefully embraces Trump and all the lying, grifting, hate and ignorance he personifies. But Noonan et al do opinion and can be discounted by someone well-informed about reality. The bigger problem is with the rest of the NYT and WaPo, where reporters have great difficulty calling a fascist a fascist, a liar a liar, etc, unless it’s tempered with an “even-handed,” “balanced” presentation of the “other” doing something their pseudoconservative readers find distasteful.
Not just Caitlin Flanagan, but Susan Madrak?!?
those fuckers haven't changed in...well...forever. the difference is that they collectively decided to do away with the old nod and a wink. once the non-informed base and the big money cons got on the same page publicly, there was no longer any need for a facade. folks like noonan are simply too fossilized to be able to change except in glacial terms.
If Noonan adds a touch of class, it's a lemon twist in her gin and tonic.
From your excellent summary, it looks like Noonan's's writing in her Lamentation for the Very Best of Us mode, which always leads to denouncing all things liberal. While she rarely stoops to Alex Jones-style conspiranoia, she's never had any problem defending the depredations of say, Rush Limbaugh, and joining right in on the latest douchery.
For all the purple prose, Noonan is a blackhearted Republican operative with one raised wet finger testing the direction of the latest flatulent wind of decaying conservatism, and she never fails to volunteer her own moldy contribution to its demise.
(P.S. The link to Noonan's column isn't a link. I probably won't be able to get past the Murdoch paywall anyway, but I'm afraid to even mention it because then I might read it.)
All this talk about "unity" is just a way to give the 32% whackadoodle minority a veto over the eminently sensible things that 60% of us want to do. It's like being part of an anarchist collective whose "consensus" decision-making process allows the most annoying jerk in the group make every decision revolve around HIM.
Christ, Peggy, I dunno. Close to a million dead of covid, we've given you plenty of chances to rally around the unity flag, but you assholes are scared off by the science and still nitpicking "Died OF covid or died WITH covid" as though you had a point. (You don't. If someone strokes out because of blood clots from covid, they died of it. If someone gets hit by a car while aysmptomatic, nobody's recording that as a covid fatality, and you assholes who are pretending 98 year old Edith dying of our bullshit food safety regulations three days after getting a covid vaccine is a vaccine fatality are in no goddamned position to pretend you're making fine distinctions here.)
You wanna rally or not. The unity's over here. Just put a fucking mask on before you try to get in here, because I'm anesthetized by your breath.
"or at least their parents did"--brilliant.
In a "know thy enemy" moment, I plowed through Peggy's autobiography. It humanized her, but made me hate her all the more. She claimed a road to Damascus moment, when she went to an Anti-Vietnam War protest. Some of her fellow demonstrators turned out to be obnoxious, ill-informed, self-important shitheads. Sort of like every young person I've ever known, myself included. She decided she had a working-class solidarity with the proles who were doing the fighting in 'Nam. So, she "turned her peace symbol into a roach clip," and went all in with Nixon and Kissinger.
In short, she preferred to see more of her contemporaries tossed into the bottomless meat-grinder than make common cause with anyone who wanted to bring them home. Fuck those hippies and college kids anyway! She was an awful person from the get-go.
I'll be honest-I think "Killer Clowns " is redundant. I don't trust them fuckers.