"She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence.
"In another age it might not have been terrible, but here and now it was actually rather horrifying."
"In another age it might not have been terrible, but here and now it was actually rather horrifying."
— Peggy Noonan
Read more, if you dare
I don't think anybody has put it any better, except when Noonan put it even more succinctly, very early on, when she was caught on a live mike last year calling "political bullshit" on the Palin pick for VP.
Chuck Todd: "Yeah, I mean is she really the most qualified woman they could have turned to?"
Peggy Noonan: "The most qualified? No! I think they went for this — excuse me — political bullshit about narratives."
Chuck Todd: "Yeah they went to a narrative."
Mike Murphy: "I totally agree."
Noonan also reads the beads of people who make excuses for the rise and fall of Sarah Palin, "some of whom have taken to telling themselves Palin myths. To wit..."
"I love her because she's so working-class." She is not working class, never was. Her father was a teacher and school track coach, her mother the school secretary. They were middle-class figures of respect, stability and local status. I think intellectuals call her working-class because they see the makeup, the hair, the heels and the sleds and think they're working class 'tropes.' Because, you know, that's what they teach in 'Ways of the Working Class' at Yale and Dartmouth.
I'm reminded of my sister's harangue. She's in education and says "kids today" are taught that everybody's a little prince or princess, everyone's a winner, except Noonan aims directly at OUR generation:
"The media did her in." Her lack of any appropriate modesty did her in. Actually, it's arguable that membership in the self-esteem generation harmed her. For 30 years the self-esteem movement told the young they're perfect in every way. It's yielding something new in history: an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy.
And here's an instance of power speaking truth to power.
"The elites hate her." The elites made her. It was the elites of the party, the McCain campaign and the conservative media that picked her and pushed her. The base barely knew who she was. It was the elites, from party operatives to public intellectuals, who advanced her and attacked those who said she lacked heft. She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon.
Are you listening Bill Kristol? Do your party a favor. Stop dumbing down to them. Enough of these Dan Quayle-esque dumbasses you keep digging up!
Read of Noonan's scathing eulogy at the WSJ.
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