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My problem with Peggy Noonan is that she writes like someone who has always been so talented, her elegant style just flows effortlessly...and who, finally, writes effortlessly without checking to make sure the style is there. Lately a lot of her stuff seems to have been composed on autopilot.

Never mind why Mr. Baker can don his trench coat and scarf before she can find her shoes.

Good thing her name is Peggy Noonan because she couldn't get her recent stuff published if her name was, oh, Margaret Woolgather.

And Peggy, don't kid yourself that you're making a fragrant pomander when you're sticking pins in a doll. Readers who know you well, know your nuance-drenched, nuance-saturated, nuance-suffused approach here is just an exquisite's reaction to the Bush style and substance, for which he is not in your debt. Besides, whoever wrote that line about the Clinton years as "sabbatical," writes Noonan better than you do lately.

After all the times she's written lamentations about the effete, the over-nuanced, the decadent, after all the times she's mentioned the virtues of directness and red-blooded masculinity, it sounds mighty suspicious when the lady scorns the gamekeeper.