Peggy Noonan: Sarah Palin Jealous

American Thinker ^ | 7-18-09 | Stuart Schwartz - Commentary

[smoothsailing]

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July 18, 2009

Peggy Noonan: Sarah Palin Jealous

By Stuart Schwartz

You're Peggy Noonan and you're jealous. But it's not the normal kind of jealous, the kind reserved for girlfriends who can squeeze into size 2 jeans. No, it's the kind of jealous that hurts, that grabs your gut and twists, that has you howling with rage into your pillow in the middle of the night, screaming "It's not fair" like a two-year-old denied another piece of cake. It is Sarah Palin jealous...and it is consuming you.

You're Peggy Noonan and you're jealous. You are a card-carrying member of the intellectual conservative elite, a PBS-anointed expert on family values who worked for both Ronald Reagan and Dan Rather, a talented speechwriter and wordsmith. And you are fuming: Sarah Palin refuses to be yesterday's news. You just can't get her out of your mind.

And, what's worse, everyone continues to talk about her. You've tried everything, using your mainstream media platforms, your Wall Street Journal columns, and powerful friends -- so many of them -- to savage her, to give her a rhetorical beating so fierce that it would bring a smile to the face of Vince McMahon -- if you knew who he is, and if you had ever watched a WWE wrestling match, which he heads. "She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon," you wrote, your $300 manicured fingers shaking on the keyboard.

You're Peggy Noonan and you're jealous. So you loosed a multi-column primal scream: Palin is an idiot who is "out of her depth in a shallow pool", a woman who has no sense of personal limits because she is not even smart enough to realize she is "a ponder-free zone." Whoa-good one! The rhetorical equivalent of the chickenwing camel clutch, where you come up behind and twist her arm behind her back, and then force her face to the mat. Or, in her case, to the snow. That's what they have in Alaska, don't they? You don't know, of course-Martha's Vineyard is about as far north as you venture, and then only to observe humanity-you know, the common folks-from "a little pier" before strolling over for dinner with two of the more brilliant stars in your friends firmament, television personalities Diane Sawyer and Katie Couric.

You're Peggy Noonan and you're jealous. You pal around with Sawyer and Couric, Jane Fonda, Marlo Thomas, Lily Tomlin -- the world is your aging oyster -- and The New York Times (which is sort of iffy on your writing) admires you for the company you keep. The Manhattan and beltway salon denizens love you. Brian Williams even said he'd nominate you for a Pulitzer, calling your writing "sparkling." Yes, THE Brian Williams, He Who Anchors NBC News, who had an audience with President Obama, to whom he bowed when leaving.

You hang with the grandees, and they understand the world. Unlike Sarah Palin, who uses a pier simply to fish and wouldn't know a winsome observation if it jumped into her net. And you just don't understand the crowds, the admiration for someone who owns the kind of fishing boat that is not equipped with a champagne cooler. Oh, the unfairness of it all!

You're Peggy Noonan and you're jealous. You don't understand it. Sure, maybe she has accomplished a few things (like the $26 billion dollar natural gas pipeline deal, restructuring Alaskan government, and taking an ice pick to corrupt politicians). But she has no style, no pizzazz -- she just does stuff. But so do you -- and you can't understand why you don't get the same adoration. After all, didn't you go before the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission and not just protest, but elegantly protest -- so said The New York Times -- a 16-story tower a developer wanted to build in your ritzy Upper East Side Manhattan neighborhood? Sarah Palin wouldn't have done that; she's not brilliant enough to understand preservation. She probably would have looked at the jobs the construction would create and given it a déclassé "Hell yeah!"

But you're Peggy Noonan and you're jealous. Why didn't you get acclaim for your accomplishment? You're every bit as go-get'm as that baby mama from the tundra. You went before the commission hand-in-hand with actor Kevin Kline and Woody Allen -- just a couple of guys from the ‘hood -- and protested this outrage. You looked those preservation commissioners in the eyes, and quoted Prince Charles. Yes, THE Prince Charles, of Princess Diana fame, who -- you told them -- once called a facelift for the National Gallery in London ''a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved and elegant friend.''  Can you imagine Sarah Palin resisting with such elegance?

You're Peggy Noonan and you're jealous. You don't understand it: Sarah Palin has never stood in front of bulldozers with Kevin Kline, and yet they cheer her. And she wouldn't stand anywhere near Woody Allen, who she'd probably insist register as a pedophile. The assorted celebrities -- neighbors all -- cheered your courage in noting that your wealthy enclave, filled with the best and brightest, did not need a building that was the equivalent of low-income housing, what with units starting at a mere $7 million. Talk about slumming.

You called attention to how the new construction would block the sun on Woody Allen's nearby $24 million mansion, not to mention annoy Robert De Niro and Jerry Seinfeld, as if they weren't annoyed enough by the notoriety given to the neighborhood by the television hit Gossip Girl.  Not in my backyard! Workers of the Upper East Side unite -- you have nothing to lose but your carbuncle! And so the developer agreed to a smaller building, more a boil than a carbuncle. Success! Take that, Sarah Palin, you "bulls**t" outsider!

You're Peggy Noonan and you're jealous. You do stuff, too -- and yet all you hear is Sarah, Sarah, Sarah. Don't they read your columns, don't they understand that she's "dropping her G's," that she is "faux down-home, patronizing-and infantilizing"? You have ten, maybe a hundred times the vocabulary she has, and yet they're talking about her. Don't you read my columns, people!?  She is a "dope and unqualified," representative of "a new vulgarization" and still, they talk about her.

You're Peggy Noonan and you're jealous. You started a new venture, "The Women on the 
Web" website, a very conservative, free-enterprise thing to do and still you are not 
appreciated. They talk about the Palin family fishing business-big deal. Anyone can get 
a couple of fish -- just call Leonards' on Third Avenue and they will deliver. But Palin is 
not the only savvy executive type. You got together with your closest friends, all the kind 
of women who, unlike Sarah Palin, live in the real world where women wear "Channel 
jackets" and "long, flowing pants with heels," and understand life, as Reuters noted, "on 
a level that goes beyond the mundane."   

You're Peggy Noonan and you're jealous. Your "beyond the mundane" co-founders -- 
"buds" as the Sarah Palin types so crassly put it-for your new venture are the essence of 
your kind of middle America: they include "60 Minutes" reporter Lesley Stahl; actresses 
Candice Bergen (actress, Democratic and Planned Parenthood spokesperson), Whoopi 
Goldberg (dropped by advertisers after a nasty Bush joke at a Democratic fundraiser and 
then hired by The View, a Barbara Walters talk show on ABC ), and Marlo Thomas 
(a major Democratic donor who is married to Bush-hater Phil Donahue), your type of 
conservatives, which puts them a bit to the right of Hugo Chavez. But after a year the 
audience is less than 20 percent of what you defined as success, your investors are worried, 
and the same women who pack Sarah Palin rallies are ignoring your venture, which features 
such pieces as "Michelle Obama's Scintillating Style" and "French Fashion Designers Churn 
Out Stylish Burqhas."

What is wrong with this country? Isn't anyone a real conservative anymore? Don't they listen 
to you? Can't they read without moving their lips?

You're Peggy Noonan and you're jealous. And, worst of all, Sarah Palin is not.

Stuart H. Schwartz, Ph.D., is a former newspaper and retail executive. He is on the faculty 
at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/07/peggy_noonan_sarah_palin_jealo.html at July 18, 2009 - 01:21:17 AM EDT

[Clock King]

Smackdown!

[Bob Eimiller]

Bump

[Darkwolf377]

The writer really gets it, especially here:

But she has no style, no pizzazz -- she just does stuff.

Noonan has always been a star-worshipper. The things she most loved about Reagan were, to me, interesting little details that decorated his substance. For Noonan, they WERE the substance, and I couldn't understand that.

While reading her last trashing of Palin, I reflected on her backpedaling from the "open mike" moment. How the mighty have fallen.

[ccmay]

Ouch! ouch! ouch! Very nicely done. What a miserable old shrew.

[Running On Empty]

Wow! What a great piece!

And she had it coming! :-)

[Liberty Valance]

[meadsjn]

Yep!

[grey_whiskers]

NOT GUILTY!

vs.

GUILTY ON ALL COUNTS.

"You're Peggy Noonan, and you're jealous."

Any questions?

Cheers!

[Darkwolf377]

Wow, Peggy looks like the love child of Katherine Hepburn and Emperor Palpatine.

[Rose in RoseBear]

Ping-a-ling!

[eyedigress]

You're Peggy Noonan and you're jealous. So you loosed a multi-column primal scream: Palin is an idiot who is "out of her depth in a shallow pool"

Sounds like Peggy is miffed about where her intellect has taken her. She doesn't get it. Conservatives do not want Gov't control over every aspect of our lives.

[smoothsailing]

Peggy Noonan is even more jealous now, thanks to you! Ya big meany!

[grey_whiskers]

You iz SOOOOO rite.

I picked up on the Palpatine, and the Hepburn was on the tip of my mind's eye, so to speak ;-)

Thanks for pointing that out.

Cheers!

[PhilDragoo]

I collected and read four books by women on Hillary.

Joyce Milton was well researched.

Laura Ingraham had sensitivity.

Barbara Olson was incisive, effectively deconstructing the Alinskite beeyatch.

Peggy Noonan must've been coming off a Romilar-Rohypnol weekend.

And so it goes.

Ignorance and arrogance
in perfect harmony.

Friends don't let Peggy Noonan write drunk.

[Mamzelle]

Smackdown!

ROF LOL. Take that, you old PRUNE.

[aruanan]

Oh, Peggy. You helped Reagan write some good speeches in your relative youth, but, like other aging things, you’ve gone off, you’ve gotten that elderly funk, you’re exuding the intellectual equivalent of moth balls, prune juice, and constipated colon so characteristic of the elderly female guardian of cat.

[grey_whiskers]

Yr. obdt. srvt,
g_w

[freedumb2003]

noonan exposed once again for being the small-minded, slow-witted fool she is. Now that she is getting long in the tooth, she is hitting the “couric line” where she can’t sleep her way into relevance.

Sarah Sarah Palin has qualities noonan can only see from a distance (and never attain): lasting beauty, principles, morals and guileless straight talk.

[hsalaw]

Noonan lost me when she started being very snotty about Pres. Bush - just because he didn’t want her as a speechwriter. And he dropped some of his “gs’ so Noonan thought he was just a dumb hick, too, just like Sarah. So long, Noonan. You won’t be missed.