ON PEGGY NOONAN ON 4 PRESIDENTS AND A FUNERAL
- by Mia T, 2.10.06
will preface this by saying that Peggy Noonan is not my cup of tea. Her writing leaves a cloyingly sweet aftertaste. (Her speaking, too.) Worse, it is too often metaphor in search of a thought.
That said, I thought her analysis of Coretta Scott King's funeral provided an interesting and coherent--if disputable--point of view.
That is, until I came to this jumbled mess: (Noonan is in blue.)
Amid all the happy bombast [bill clinton] was the one who pointed at the casket and said, "There's a woman in there." He talked about Mrs. King in good strong plain terms. Yes, he caused a quarter-second of awkwardness when he said of the beautiful Coretta that even at age 75 she still had the goods, but in moments of exuberance we all forget our own history.
ASIDE: Surely Ms. Noonan understands that clinton's mummy-redux moment wasn't an example of a momentary event-induced lapse but rather a slip, a disclosure, a demonstration in real time of this depicable misogynist's real opinion of women.
The real news was how the Clintons used the funeral to unveil how they will run in 2008: Together, side by side, with beautiful hairdos. I haven't seen them like this--both standing at the podium--since 1992, when they were new.
ASIDE: Superficial. And wrong.
What is happening here is not the clintons 'side by side,' but rather, the clintons conflated.
Meanwhile, back in the Senate, the missus, the other half of the clinton construct, maintains her hawkish pose (though not without bird problems of another sort).
Yet another example of the clinton conflation ploy, (see SCHEMA PINOCCHIO: how the clintons are handling the hillary dud factor), this variant allows "clinton, the construct" to hold two mutually exclusive positions simultaneously, thereby enabling the missus to avoid in '08 the trap that repeatedly ensnared the ever 'nuanced' Kerry in '04.
Do you now understand how stupid the clintons think you are?
A CALL TO IMPEACH CLINTON IN ABSENTIA
Having failed to snare the Nobel Peace Prize by ignoring terrorism, clinton has apparently decided to intensify his America-bashing on foreign soil, the method employed by Jimmy Carter to great (if somewhat belated) effect. (The Nobel committee, sufficiently mollified only after 24 years of the peanut president's America-bashing, awarded Carter his 1978 Peace Prize finally in 2002.)
Mia T, 11.17.05
REINVENTING HILLARY... AGAIN
(clinton machine dumps Geena Davis for Margaret Thatcher)
how the clintons are handling the hillary dud factor2
Mia T, 11.23.05
Miss hillary of the 'plantation' wouldn't do here. 'The First Black President? was providing a warm body if not soul.
And as for the 'beautiful hairdos,' they tell us something about the clintons that is quite different from the glamour suggested by Noonan. The precision cut is counterproductive after a certain age. It can only serve to make all the crags and sags more evident. And the incongruity is wiglike, artificial.
So the precision cut, rather than a glamour marker, says 'old and fake'... and ultimately, 'clueless.' Just like the clintons, themselves.
In the years since, after the health-care failure and the Whitewater scandals, the West Wing attitude toward the president's wife was a quiet and respectful "Get that woman off the podium!" Not anymore. All is new again. Mrs. Clinton has clearly been working on her public speaking, and attempted to use her hands as her husband uses his, now in an emphasizing arc, now resting on her chest. But his are large, long and elegant, and hers are puffed and grasping.
ASIDE: Missus clinton is a dud and no amount of money or training or spin will change that plain fact.
Everyone knows this--that is, everyone except Noonan.
And as for the utility of missus clinton's gesticulation training, check out the hands in my latest flash movies.
I am amazed that Noonan would romanticize clinton. Not even Esquire missed the hands and their connection to the phallic.
clinton's hands are grotesquely large, clawlike, threatening. They are not the elegant hands of, say, a surgeon or a pianist. They are the viselike hands of a rapist.
Yes, all of missus clinton's appendages are puffy and much too short even given her squat, low-center-of-gravity torso. But both clintons have grasping hands. They may be grasping for different things, but they are grasping.
Both Clintons spoke in the cadence and with the imagery of the Bible. Mrs. Clinton's first words, in which she referred to Mrs. King's brave decision to continue her husband's work after his murder, were steeped in religiosity. "As we are called, each of us must decide whether to answer that call by saying, 'Send me.'" She ended with, "The work of peace never ends. So we bid her earthly presence farewell. We wish her Godspeed on her homecoming. And we ask ourselves, 'Will we say, when the call comes, "Send me"?'"
Oh I think we will, Ms. Meanieface!
If you don't understand that Mrs. Clinton was rehearsing her 2008 announcement speech, then you are a child and must go home and have a nice cup of cocoa.
This is what is coming: I have had a blessed life. And like so many people I could choose, after all these years, a life of comfort. Watch it from the sidelines, tend to my own concerns, watch the garden grow. But our nation calls out. And if we are to be Americans we must meet the call. "Send me."
With Bill nodding beside her, his hands clasped prayerfully in front of him, nodding and working that jaw muscle he works when he wants you to notice, for just a second, how hard it is sometimes for him to contain his admiration.
God I love them.
Four Presidents and a Funeral
Peggy Noonan
02/10/2006
ASIDE: Even here she doesn't quite get it. The clintons aren't merely analogizing. They are setting up false equivalences with heroic figures. It is one of their favorite methods of legacy inflation, second only to posthumous misappropriation.
And how much truth and how much facetiousness are in that last sentence, anyway?
Hypocrisy abounds in this Age of Clinton, a Postmodern Oz rife with constitutional deconstruction and semantic subversion, a virtual surreality polymarked by presidential alleles peccantly misplaced or, in the case of Jefferson posthumously misappropriated...
Yesterday, Daniel Patrick Moynihan died. Today, the clintons are arrogating his soul. Hardly surprising. In 1999, the clintons were not at all shy about seizing his still-warm senate seat.
One has merely to recall the Jefferson double-helix hoax to understand that posthumous misappropriation is, for the obvious reason, the clintons' preferred method of legacy inflation….
Standard-Issue clintonism
If misappropriation of Jefferson's alleles hinged on a broken line of descent, misappropriation of Moynihan's endorsement depends on a broken line of dissent. Like Sally Hemmings' progeny, Moynihan's later acquiescence is of dubious lineage
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COPYRIGHT MIA T 2006
... While America appears not to be ready for a female president under any circumstances, the post-9/11 realities pose special problems for a female presidential candidate. Add to these the problems unique to missus clinton. The reviews make the mistake of focusing on the problems of the generic female presidential candidate running during ordinary times.