[Peggy] Noonan, [Mike] Murphy trash Palin on hot mic: 'It's over'

CHENEY to LEAHY to you Peggy! And no, that’s not a compliment...

This doesn’t change my opinion of Peggy — I stopped liking her a long time ago.

Ha! I hope she does realize she just pretty much lost her access to McCain and Palin.

Have a good retirement, Peg!

Too bad. I used to respect her.

I’m not saying I’d go on TV and lie (I wouldn’t) but I think my rule #1 in such situations would be “Don’t talk about anything more political than the Packer’s chances with Aaron Rodgers while the camera is off.

Snobbery knows no party.

Oh Peggy. It’s a brilliant stroke by McCain. How else could he have gotten conservatives to vote for him? Just because they haven’t come knocking for you to write for them, you need to let the bitterness go.

Peggy Noonan is intensely attuned to her own feelings, as she relentlessly details in her columns, and out of touch with everything else. I really don’t care what she thinks. I do care what Palin thinks, and how she’s able to present herself. If Palin does a good job tonight and on the interview/campaign circuit, she’ll convince the only people who matter - the voters.

Peggy will say anything to get laid these days.

Obviously, the Democrats at MSNBC set Peggy up!

Exactly right! The elitists and pundits, whatever the side of the aisle they are on, are powerless against Palin’s powerful appeal... and they hate her for it. I never was thay fond of Noonan. I believe she will be proven wrong.

I revere Peggy Noonan, but this was very unfortunate. Furthermore, it’s becoming increasingly unlikely that these people don’t know that their mics are on. Murphy is a doofus, and I guess we seen now why he was left out of this McCain campaign.

She’s a big hypocrite!

Now it’s all over—for Peggy Noonan.

This is what she wrote today.

DECLARATIONS
By PEGGY NOONAN
A Clear and Present Danger To the American Left
September 3, 2008
http://online.wsj.com/article/declarations.html

Notes from the convention [Excerpted]:

“... on Palin:

Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing — who is really one of them and who is not — and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy.

She could become a transformative political presence.

So they are going to have to kill her, and kill her quick.

And it’s going to be brutal. It’s already getting there.

There are only two questions.

1. Can she take it?

Will she be rattled? Can she sail through high seas? Can she roll with most punches and deliver some jabs herself?

2. And while she’s taking it, rolling with it and sailing through, can she put herself forward convincingly as serious enough, grounded enough, weighty enough that the American people can imagine her as vice president of the United States?

I suppose every candidate for vice president faces these questions to some degree, but because Palin is new, unknown, and a woman, it’s all much more so.

***

I don’t think the most powerful attack line will be, in the end, inexperience. Our nation appears to be in a cycle in which inexperience seems something of a lure. ...

America, even as it ages, loves youth and admires its strength.

I think the left will go hard on this: Fringe. Radical. What goes on in her church? Isn’t she extreme? Does she really think God wants a pipeline? What does Sarah Barracuda really mean? They’re going to try and make her strange, outré, oddball. And not in a good way.

In all this, and in its involvement in this week’s ritual humiliation of a 17-year-old girl, the mainstream press may seriously overplay its hand, and court a backlash that impacts the election. More on that in a moment.

***

I’ll tell you how powerful Mrs. Palin already is: she reignited the culture wars just by showing up. She scrambled the battle lines, too. The crustiest old Republican men are shouting “Sexism!” when she’s slammed. Pro-woman Democrats are saying she must be a bad mother to be all ambitious with kids in the house. Great respect goes to Barack Obama not only for saying criticism of candidates’ children is out of bounds in political campaigns, but for making it personal, and therefore believable. “My mother had me when she was eighteen…” That was the lovely sound of class in American politics.

***

Let me say of myself and almost everyone I know in the press, all the chattering classes and political strategists and inside dopesters of the Amtrak Acela Line: We live in a bubble and have around us bubble people. We are Bubbleheads. .....

And when you forget you’re a Bubblehead you get in trouble, you misjudge things. For one thing, you assume evangelical Christians will be appalled and left agitated by the circumstances of Mrs. Palin’s daughter. But modern American evangelicals are among the last people who’d judge her harshly. It is the left that is about to go crazy with Puritan judgments; it is the right that is about to show what mellow looks like. Religious conservatives know something’s wrong with us, that man’s a mess. They are not left dazed by the latest applications of this fact. “This just in – there’s a lot of sinning going on out there” is not a headline they’d understand to be news.

So the media’s going to wait for the Christian right to rise up and condemn Mrs. Palin, and they’re not going to do it because it’s not their way, and in any case her problems are their problems. Christians lived through the second half of the 20th century, and the first years of the 21st. They weren’t immune from the culture, they just eventually broke from it, or came to hold themselves in some ways apart from it. I think the media will explain the lack of condemnation as “Republican loyalty” and “talking points.” But that’s not what it will be.

Another Bubblehead blind spot. I’m bumping into a lot of critics who do not buy the legitimacy of small town mayorship (Palin had two terms [6 years] in Wasilla, Alaska, population 9,000 or so) and executive as opposed to legislative experience. But executives, even of small towns, run something. There are 262 cities in this country with a population of 100,000 or more. But there are close to a hundred thousand small towns with ten thousand people or less. “You do the math,” the conservative pollster Kellyanne Conway told me. “We are a nation of Wasillas, not Chicagos.”

***

The mainstream media, which has been holding endless symposia here on the future of media in the 21st century, is in danger of missing a central fact of that future: If they appear, once again, as they have in the past, to be people not reporting the battle but engaged in the battle, if they allow themselves to be tagged by that old tag, which so tarnished them in the past, they will do more to imperil their own future than the Internet has.

This is true: fact is king. Information is king. Great reporting is what every honest person wants now, it’s the one ironic thing we have less of in journalism than we need. But reporting that carries an agenda, that carries Bubblehead assumptions and puts them forth as obvious truths? Well, some people want that. But if I were doing a business model for broadsheets and broadcast networks I’d say: Fact and data are our product, we’re putting everything into reporting, that’s what we’re selling, interpretation is the reader’s job, and think pieces are for the edit page where we put the hardy, blabby hacks.

That was a long way of saying: Dig deep into Sarah Palin, get all you can, talk to everybody, get every vote, every quote, tell us of her career and life, she may be the next vice president. But don’t play games. And leave her kid alone, bitch.

***

Final point. Palin’s friends should be less immediately worried about what the Obama campaign will do to her than what the McCain campaign will do. This is a woman who’s tough enough to work her way up and through, and to say yes to a historic opportunity, but she will know little of, or rather have little experience in, the mischief inherent in national Republican politics. She will be mobbed up in the McCain campaign by people who care first about McCain and second about themselves. (Or, let’s be honest, often themselves first and then McCain.) Palin will never be higher than number three in their daily considerations.

They won’t have enough interest in protecting her, advancing her, helping her play to her strengths, helping her kick away from danger. And – there is no nice way to say this, even though at this point I shouldn’t worry about nice – some of them are that worst sort of aide, dim and insensitive past or present lobbyists with high self-confidence. She’ll be a thing to them; they’ll see the smile and the chignon and the glasses and think she’s Truvi from Steel Magnolias. They’ll run right over her, not because they’re strong but because they’re stupid.

The McCain campaign better get straight on this. He should step in, knock heads, scare his own people and get Palin the help and high-level staff all but the most seasoned vice presidential candidates require.

See all of today’s editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on Opinion Journal.

"The Sarah Palin choice is really going to work, or really not going to work," Noonan wrote. "It's not going to be a little successful or a little not;..."

I liked Peggy Noonan several years ago, but since then her brain seems to be turning to mush. She used to be very insightful and sharp but now she might as well be writing for Sesame Street.

Ditto!

It’s been OVER for Noonan for years now.

All the Beltway pundits are so out of touch with that little area between Washington/New York & California.

She appears to be a person on anti-depressants.

Peggy Noonan is such a pretentious melodramatic diva-wannabe who is still living on her “shining city on the hill” cred from 25 years ago. She is a northeastern RINO who is soooo patronizing and condescending to the flyover hoi polloi. Her opinion means nothing. Sarah could wipe the floor with her. And will.

Whoops! And YES, that’s not a compliment...

I didn’t know sweet little Peggy even know such foul words.

Face it, even the best of them are elitist jerks. They can’t see past the beltway. They have know idea what the rest of the country thinks.

“Ms. Noonan, Tear Down This Candidate!”