[Cicero]

Peggy Noonan has written a few really horrible columns, but most of the time she's pretty good. This one's certainly a good one.

She does have a speech-writers habit of simplifying and writing down to her audience, which I find a minor annoyance. I prefer someone like Steyn who writes with sharp intelligence and the hell with you if it's over your head. It's not that Peggy is stupid, it's just the way she has trained herself to write.

Unlike, let's say, Maureen Dowd, who writes in an atrocious, pseudo-pop style because she's a conceited idiot.

[Paladin2]

Maureen Dowd

You got a picture to back that up?

[Mia T]

Interesting take.

Her tendency to simplify seems more a function of her thinking than her style, tho.
(As opposed to Steyn. I love Steyn.)
Style aside, she is a lot like Dowd, I'm afraid.

[Mia T]

She does have a speech-writers habit of simplifying and writing down to her audience, which I find a minor annoyance. I prefer someone like Steyn who writes with sharp intelligence and the hell with you if it's over your head. It's not that Peggy is stupid, it's just the way she has trained herself to write.--Cicero

 

'Speeches in our culture are the vacuum that fills a vacuum.' --John Kenneth Galbraith




She seems like someone who might calculatedly go to war, or not, based on how she wanted to be perceived and look and do. She does not seem like someone who would anguish and weep over sending men into harm's way.... Hillary is like someone who would know she should be moved but wouldn't be because she couldn't be because . . . well, why? That is the question. Maybe a lifetime in politics has bled some of the human element out of her. Maybe there wasn't that much to begin with. Maybe she thinks that if she wept, the wires that hold her together would short.

PEGGY NOONAN
Stop Spinning
Contrarian thoughts on Hillary

The 'girl who wrote the poetry' was the Peggy-Noonan putdown of choice by some on Reagan's staff.

'Thousand points of light' ¹or 'if she wept, the wires that hold her together would short,' that is, the 'poetry,' suggests a thinking process that is more visual than analytical.

---

1. See W. H. Auden, Charles Dickens and Thomas Wolfe, among others.

[Mia T]

Unlike, let's say, Maureen Dowd, who writes in an atrocious, pseudo-pop style because she's a conceited idiot. --Cicero

 

 

Affectation can take various forms....

One high school friend of Noonan asks: "[W]here did she get that affected unctuous delivery that sounds like a gene splice between William Buckley Jr. and Thurston Howell III?"¹

Another observes, "Somewhere along the way she developed the 'snot style' of talk that she uses now.  While an intense talker during high school, at that time she didn't speak as if she were to the manor born--the affectation seems to have arisen out of a desire to become a female William F. Buckley, Jr."²

Noonan graduated from a New Jersey high school, (a B student), and attended the local NJ college (FDU). Yet she never mentions Jersey. Says she's from Long Island.

Maybe Peggy's 'snot style' of speech was the mechanism by which she distanced herself from her 'Joisey' origins, much as it was for Martha.

 

1. "Peggy, We Hardly Knew Ye", Part I, Peggy Noonan: The High School Years, Gloria R. Lalumia

2. "Peggy, We Hardly Knew Ye", Part II, Peggy Follows the Path to Success and We Meet Along the Way, Monica Finch