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.
Yes, and I would only add that maybe the Noonans and the Douthats retain their positions, isn't to reassure the readers. It's to reassure the people who employ them.
"Sir, the GOP has morphed into an insane clown posse of fascists. Shouldn't we hire Mark Levin as an op-ed regular?"
"The devil you say! Why, look, Peggy Noonan still a place!"
Of course, Al'Qaeda cannot act til its reestablished in Afghanistan because that's the only nation in the world they can function in per the mainstream media and accepted wisdom or something.
Slight less facetiously: Why attack us again given OBL's greater than expected success in weakening the US? Waste of energy on their part.
"They hate us for our freedoms," said President George W. Bush. "And that's why I and the Republican Party are 100% committed to ending those freedoms!"
If only there were some common enemy we could all unify against. Perhaps an enemy that's already killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and continues to kill thousands every week. Yeah, that would probably do it.
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.
The "journalistic" device that's driving me nuts right now is "no evidence of widespread voter fraud." Texas does a canvass of over a million votes and find like six cases of improper voting and the best we can do is say fraud wasn't "widespread"?
Good example. There's also the complete lack of interest in why Republican governors are promoting the spread of COVID-19. It's just a mystery why they, knowing that the pandemic wrecked Trump's reelection bid, would want to keep it going and blame it on Biden.
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.
Small government and balance the budget doesn't turn out the voters anymore (and yeah, they never did those things anyway). They really needed to tear away the facade and make the racism and xenophobia and misogyny more explicit, because none of the traditional Republican messages can get a rise from the voters any more.
Do you think they're acclimated to it, or too stupid to understand dog whistles anymore? I mean, you give them some decent racism and they're suddenly off on some idiotic pizza parlor bullshit.
i'm not sure they ever did understand the dogwhistles, but even if they did, what they really responded to, and felt, was the raw anger at some undefinable power that was keeping them down and not letting them live a life like TFG, i.e. taking no fucking responsibility for anything and still somehow failing upward at every step.
"Acclimated" is an interesting idea. I'm thinking of Flamin' Hot Mountain Dew, which I just recently learned of (thanks, Roy!). If your business is pushing peoples' buttons, over time you gotta push those buttons MOAR HARDER to grow your business - or even just to run in place. Sure, Racism Original Recipe was good enough forty years ago, but today it better be XXXTREME RACISM or GTFO.
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.
Unfortunately, this working-class solidarity with the proles extended no further than an occasional "Thank you for your service" and certainly NOT to avoiding entangling them unnecessarily in such conflicts or extricating them once entangled.
Huh, interesting. Well, I will say, my first-ever war protest, I showed up psyched to show the government that millions of us did not want to invade Iraq and had great reasons for it... and was dismayed by the "Announcements at the Grammar School Fun Fest" sound system to address five city blocks packed with people, and by the speeches that shrieked and squawked out of it, which were... sometimes about the war! And about how we should Free Mumia. There were a lot of Che shirts, and people waving Soviet flags, and some Diallo posters, and I thought, these people are assholes. We're here to wake up the suburban pro-war Americans, and show them that the irrational, the lack of focus, the unreal approach to the world -- all that awfulness -- is on the side of going to war. Man. It depressed me. So I took a few photos of the biggest losers present, to stare at later, and walked home after an hour. But here's the thing. I know the cause was correct. I didn't see an unemployable dude in an EAT THE RICH t-shirt carrying a picture of Mao *exactly like the song says not to* and think "That does it, I'm changing all my ideas to the OPPOSITE ideas." No. Who would? If Noonan could flip to pro-war so easily, Noonan was always going to flip to pro-war, and it was always going to be for the stupidest reason imaginable.
When she goes Nazi it will, of course, be our fault. What choice did we leave her?
I should add that my thinking has evolved in the 18 years since that protest. I now believe some of those people saying Free Mumia and waving the flag of a defunct fantasy empire were on to something a few years ahead of me. Namely that ginning up a war is of a piece with incarcerating black people at a suspicious rate, and so on. I would probably have more fun with such a protest now than I did then. Then, I was very serious mainly because I was less experienced, and wanted persuasive speeches For The Ages instead of rallying ones For The Next 45 Minutes, and a crowd following MLK Selma rules (all show up in your Sunday best to look like a person the folks at home will be disturbed to see knocked into a pack of attack dogs by a fire hose). I'm more relaxed about protests now, because I understand crowds much better, agree more with more comprehensive changes than I used to, and am a more relaxed person in general. I am not 100% proud today of how annoyed I was in 2003.
*standing ovation, slow clap*
Thirded.
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.
Yes, and I would only add that maybe the Noonans and the Douthats retain their positions, isn't to reassure the readers. It's to reassure the people who employ them.
"Sir, the GOP has morphed into an insane clown posse of fascists. Shouldn't we hire Mark Levin as an op-ed regular?"
"The devil you say! Why, look, Peggy Noonan still a place!"
"But that's because you keep her on."
"Exactly!"
"Wait wut...?"
(HAS a place. Peggy Noonan still HAS a place.)
Of course mainstream reportage reflects what media owners want to see and how they want to see it.
"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.
A thousand likes for this.
Of course, Al'Qaeda cannot act til its reestablished in Afghanistan because that's the only nation in the world they can function in per the mainstream media and accepted wisdom or something.
Slight less facetiously: Why attack us again given OBL's greater than expected success in weakening the US? Waste of energy on their part.
"They hate us for our freedoms," said President George W. Bush. "And that's why I and the Republican Party are 100% committed to ending those freedoms!"
I remember actual people, like Jonah Goldberg and Ben Shapiro, saying basically that. "They hate us because we don't murder gays. So we should start."
If only there were some common enemy we could all unify against. Perhaps an enemy that's already killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and continues to kill thousands every week. Yeah, that would probably do it.
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.
The "journalistic" device that's driving me nuts right now is "no evidence of widespread voter fraud." Texas does a canvass of over a million votes and find like six cases of improper voting and the best we can do is say fraud wasn't "widespread"?
Good example. There's also the complete lack of interest in why Republican governors are promoting the spread of COVID-19. It's just a mystery why they, knowing that the pandemic wrecked Trump's reelection bid, would want to keep it going and blame it on Biden.
Maybe because Donnie did well in their state and because the #MAGAts need to be won over to win primaries?
Not just Caitlin Flanagan, but Susan Madrak?!?
Withholding judgment - it was that Harper's letter signed by a lot of writers who are not Flanaganesque. That was a weird event.
"Flanaganesque" is a great word! S
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.
Small government and balance the budget doesn't turn out the voters anymore (and yeah, they never did those things anyway). They really needed to tear away the facade and make the racism and xenophobia and misogyny more explicit, because none of the traditional Republican messages can get a rise from the voters any more.
Do you think they're acclimated to it, or too stupid to understand dog whistles anymore? I mean, you give them some decent racism and they're suddenly off on some idiotic pizza parlor bullshit.
i'm not sure they ever did understand the dogwhistles, but even if they did, what they really responded to, and felt, was the raw anger at some undefinable power that was keeping them down and not letting them live a life like TFG, i.e. taking no fucking responsibility for anything and still somehow failing upward at every step.
"Acclimated" is an interesting idea. I'm thinking of Flamin' Hot Mountain Dew, which I just recently learned of (thanks, Roy!). If your business is pushing peoples' buttons, over time you gotta push those buttons MOAR HARDER to grow your business - or even just to run in place. Sure, Racism Original Recipe was good enough forty years ago, but today it better be XXXTREME RACISM or GTFO.
If Noonan adds a touch of class, it's a lemon twist in her gin and tonic.
Touch of Glass. "Another one just like the other one."
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.)
“ I'm afraid to even mention it because then I might read it.”
I had the same thought. Some eldritch writings are best left unread.
[rotting voice] “Have you read the Gin Queen in Yellow?”
Okay, I'm just gonna die over here, because that was funny.
Ugh, well I fixed the link, thanks for the tip.
Or, thanks for just the tip.
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.
By definition there’s no middle meeting ground between reasonably sane, normal people and the deluded and unhinged.
"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.
Unfortunately, this working-class solidarity with the proles extended no further than an occasional "Thank you for your service" and certainly NOT to avoiding entangling them unnecessarily in such conflicts or extricating them once entangled.
Or paying for their trauma care after they get home.
Huh, interesting. Well, I will say, my first-ever war protest, I showed up psyched to show the government that millions of us did not want to invade Iraq and had great reasons for it... and was dismayed by the "Announcements at the Grammar School Fun Fest" sound system to address five city blocks packed with people, and by the speeches that shrieked and squawked out of it, which were... sometimes about the war! And about how we should Free Mumia. There were a lot of Che shirts, and people waving Soviet flags, and some Diallo posters, and I thought, these people are assholes. We're here to wake up the suburban pro-war Americans, and show them that the irrational, the lack of focus, the unreal approach to the world -- all that awfulness -- is on the side of going to war. Man. It depressed me. So I took a few photos of the biggest losers present, to stare at later, and walked home after an hour. But here's the thing. I know the cause was correct. I didn't see an unemployable dude in an EAT THE RICH t-shirt carrying a picture of Mao *exactly like the song says not to* and think "That does it, I'm changing all my ideas to the OPPOSITE ideas." No. Who would? If Noonan could flip to pro-war so easily, Noonan was always going to flip to pro-war, and it was always going to be for the stupidest reason imaginable.
Can't wait for her to go Nazi because of CRT.
When she goes Nazi it will, of course, be our fault. What choice did we leave her?
I should add that my thinking has evolved in the 18 years since that protest. I now believe some of those people saying Free Mumia and waving the flag of a defunct fantasy empire were on to something a few years ahead of me. Namely that ginning up a war is of a piece with incarcerating black people at a suspicious rate, and so on. I would probably have more fun with such a protest now than I did then. Then, I was very serious mainly because I was less experienced, and wanted persuasive speeches For The Ages instead of rallying ones For The Next 45 Minutes, and a crowd following MLK Selma rules (all show up in your Sunday best to look like a person the folks at home will be disturbed to see knocked into a pack of attack dogs by a fire hose). I'm more relaxed about protests now, because I understand crowds much better, agree more with more comprehensive changes than I used to, and am a more relaxed person in general. I am not 100% proud today of how annoyed I was in 2003.
I'll be honest-I think "Killer Clowns " is redundant. I don't trust them fuckers.