Posted on 01/20/2005 9:33:31 PM PST by RWR8189
Was the president's speech a case of "mission inebriation"?
It was an interesting Inauguration Day. Washington had warmed up, the swift storm of the previous day had passed, the sky was overcast but the air wasn't painful in a wind-chill way, and the capital was full of men in cowboy hats and women in long furs. In fact, the night of the inaugural balls became known this year as The Night of the Long Furs.
Laura Bush's beauty has grown more obvious; she was chic in shades of white, and smiled warmly. The Bush daughters looked exactly as they are, beautiful and young. A well-behaved city was on its best behavior, everyone from cops to doormen to journalists eager to help visitors in any way.
For me there was some unexpected merriness. In my hotel the night before the inauguration, all the guests were evacuated at 1:45 in the morning. There were fire alarms and flashing lights on each floor, and a public address system instructed us to take the stairs, not the elevators. Hundreds of people wound up outside in the slush, eventually gathering inside the lobby, waiting to find out what next.
The staff--kindly, clucking--tried to figure out if the fire existed and, if so, where it was. Hundreds of inaugural revelers wound up observing each other. Over there on the couch was Warren Buffet in bright blue pajamas and a white hotel robe. James Baker was in trench coat and throat scarf. I remembered my keys and eyeglasses but walked out without my shoes. After a while the "all clear" came,
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
mark for later review
The significant livelihoods of folks like Noonan and Frum as speakers and authors are full dependent on the perception of their inside access and the currency of their profile. This could very well be sour grapes. The golden goose was butchered.
I think you, and vaudine in post 52, have nailed it. I am particularly amused by the disingenuous screeching of some of Noonan's defenders in this thread who try to accuse her critics of making ad hominum attacks on her. They desperately demand that while we are free to disagree with her from a language and style perspective, we mustn't dare to question her motives.
This is nonsense. Noonan's criticism isn't just directed at the style of the speech, it's a rejection of its meaning. It's not a just literary criticism; it's also a political criticism. Furthermore, she is damn well aware of it, and of how her criticism will be used by the MSM to attempt to obstuct the implementation of the philosophical and moral vision laid out in the speech. If she were truly intent only in giving a literary critique from the perspective of a professional speechwriter she would have waited a few days to lessen the political impact of her comments. Instead she has chosen to sandwich an entirely justifiable professional critique between two slices of personal agenda: garnering more face-time and publicity for her career, and payback for imagined wrongs or slights.
From last summer, here's a prescient glimpse of Peggy that sheds a little light on her current behavior:
From To The Point™ - http://www.tothepointnews.com
A Spasm of Spite
Jack Wheeler Friday, June 18, 2004
In the Monday, June 14, 2004 edition of The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan wrote a despicable hit piece on her fellow speechwriters in the Reagan White House. It was entitled “The Ben Elliott Story,” supposedly a tribute to the White House Chief Speechwriter told in the context of seeing him at President Reagan’s National Cathedral funeral service – yet it ended up being a nauseating attack on her former colleagues.
The people she attacked are my friends, and it so happened that I attended President Reagan’s service with them. That she took this sacred occasion to vindictively smear them is beyond and beneath contempt. I was compelled to write the following letter to The Wall Street Journal:
To: Ned Crabb, Letters Editor, Wall St. Journal
It is a sad and bizarre spectacle to see Peggy Noonan immolate her reputation in a gratuitous spasm of spite. As someone who worked closely with the Reagan White House speechwriters for five years – 1983-1988 – I know the source of the resentment. She was never part of the team.
Peggy came late, arriving in Reagan’s second term, and was quickly identified by the other speechwriters as being dedicated to self-promotion. While the others were self-effacing and avoided taking any credit for a speech of the president’s, Peggy would never fail to call up every media contact she had to make sure any speechwriting of hers was fully publicized.
For all her self-promotion, the facts are that she never wrote many major presidential speeches and had quite limited access to the president. The Reagan speechwriters were the ultimate Reaganauts in the White House, and Peggy was an outsider. The saga of how the speechwriters got around senior Administration officials to get speeches President Reagan wanted to give in his hands is one of untold heroism.
Folks like George Schultz and James Baker desperately tried to prevent Reagan from uttering the most famous lines of his presidency, such as Reagan’s calling the Soviet Union an Evil Empire or demanding, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” The speechwriters were the focus of the effort to advocate and implement the Reagan Doctrine, the strategy that brought down the Soviet Empire. Plainly put, without Reagan’s speechwriters like Tony Dolan, Ben Elliott, Clark Judge, Dana Rohrabacher, Josh Gilder, and Peter Robinson, there would have been no Reagan Doctrine.
Peggy wasn’t a part of this and now, so many years later, she allows her resentment to trash her tribute to Chief Speechwriter Ben Elliott and disgracefully use President Reagan’s funeral service to do so. Of course, Peggy wasn’t sitting with the other speechwriters at the service. I was. Her name never came up. No one asked, “Where’s Peggy?” Her cheap, inexcusable, and completely gratuitous insults of her fellow speechwriters – describing one as a “malignant leprechaun,” another as more concerned with getting a haircut than speechwriting, and yet another as an illiterate hack -- expose a small and petty side to her character that will permanently blemish the reputation she has worked so hard to achieve.
Here’s the question she needs to ask herself: Do you think that President Reagan would think more or less of you for writing what you did, Peggy? You know the answer. He would be ashamed of you. The knowledge of that shame will stain your soul, Peggy. You owe your fellow speechwriters the deepest of apologies - just as you owe an apology to the memory of Ronald Reagan.
Peggy noonan is a nut case who has had previous nervous breakdowns, maybe she's due for another. To take on God, as though you can have too much, is asking for it.
Ops4 God Bless America
Noonan's folly is that her column gives ammunition to the liberal voices that hate our President's vision of spreading freedom.
I, too, am very disappointed at this column. Frankly, it permanently damages her in my eyes. She has written a few catty columns about Bush before, but this on appears at an absolutely critical moment in our history. We don't need this kind of silly jealousy now. This column will be remembered for a long time. The liberals will use it to damage and to undermine the War on Terror.
But I want to make just one point after what so many other Freepers have said.
The division she draws between the moralists and the realists in foreign policy is simply false in this case. Sometimes the moral position is also the realist position. That was true with Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War. Like it or not, his moral fervor helped win the day. Was the Monroe Doctrine moralist or realist? It was both. Was the Truman Doctrine moralist or realist? It was both. Is the Bush doctrine moralist or realist? It is both.
Will we succeed in turning the Arabs into perfect Democrats? Of course not. Nobody expects we will, least of all George W. Bush. But we need to go in there and change things nevertheless while we still can. And the promise of freedom is a powerful promise. It's one of the few ideals that can work against Islamic fanaticism. It is a promise that already has a long record of bringing down kings and tyrants. You need such an ideal to sway men's minds, not some kind of complex Kissingerian Realpolitik which nobody but a Political Science PhD can understand.
She does have a knack for writing the worst articles at the most important times in history. Thanks for the reminder of that article written during Reagans funeral.
If GW had settled for a mediocre speech, Noonan would have slammed him for having a mediocre vision. GW unveils a radical vision for the benefit of peoples from Cuba to Tibet and she poo-poos that it reeked of too much God talk.
Peggy Noonan. So fashionably erudite. So well connnected. So pompous. So over.
I think she has some issues in her life she needs to deal with.
Very interesting.
Perhaps I'm just old-fashioned but I loved the music - both at the Inauguration ceremony and this morning at the National Prayer Service.
Is there another article she has written? I'm lost. Or, are you talking about her comments on TV afterwards? I haven't seen another article, so I can't compare and respond. I did see her afterwards, briefly. I didn't pick up anything extraordinary.
It is not 'disagreement' with the President, nor committing some imaginary 'cardinal sin.'
It is that very condescending attitude I am referring to. There have been several uncalled for, presumptuous and snide remarks made on this thread about Noonan. There have been numerous caddy remarks made on this thread, and others, to people who disagree with the President. I could careless. My mind won't be changed by belittling comments and I am not entering into silly, petty arguments that are not only silly but embarrassing. Debate... that is another story.
It is that we think her first opinion of the speech was right, and that this revised (for whatever reason) one is wrong.
She has her opinion, and obviously you have yours. And, I have mine. Which, concerning the speech, I have not addressed. It is the name calling of conservatives to other conservatives who disagree that I find disconcerting. This is hardly McCain.
FRegards---EM
Rush just said and I agree that Noonan has a God problem.
Good post.
She has written some tacky columns about Bush and I think we (or at least I) were willing to cut her some slack because when she's good, she's good.
The Reagan business was bad enough. But this is far worse. Undermining the president on Inauguration Day when he is giving the clearest and most public presentation of what has come to be called the Bush Doctrine was exceedingly short-sighted and foolish.
And she could not have chosen two more damaging ways to undermine it, which I am sure was entirely deliberate.
She tries to split the conservatives by saying that Bush's speech is pie in the sky foolishness.
And she tries to give the liberals ammunition with that stupid business about "too much God," even though Bush only mentions God twice. You can be sure we'll be hearing her complaint repeated in the liberal press for the next 20 or 30 years and written into the history books by all the good little liberal historians.
They will say, "Even religious conservatives complain that GWB talks too much about God, and that he is faking it for rhetorical purposes." Great. We really needed that. Thanks, Peggy.
If nothing else, it brought attention to her ...
Trying to twist it around and make it my condescension won't work.
She's a little not right in the head. Strange she finds a few references to God too much.
That's exactly what Susan Estrich said about Zell Miller after his convention speech.
Bringing attention to Peggy has always been what Peggy is all about. It's been her modus operandi for twenty years.
Rush should be a little careful about throwing other conservatives under the bus. A lot of self rightous theocons considered Rush a crackhead after his admission of pain killer medication. Most level headed conservatives gave Rush the benefit of the doubt - he should do the same.
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