In case you missed it: Peggy Noonan trashes failing, flailing Sarah Palin!

zulchzulu

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Thu Jul-16-09 06:22 PM
Original message

In case you missed it: Peggy Noonan trashes failing, flailing Sarah Palin!

Edited on Thu Jul-16-09 06:42 PM by zulchzulu

I was having a cold one with my Republican friend with ties to the RNC and we started talking politics. He's a moderate for the most part.

Palin came up.

He never liked her or couldn't pin down why he thought she was a political weakling, but his wife (also a Republican) called him while he was on some golf junket (he was a former golf pro) to tell him to check out some article on Palin in the Wall Street Journal by the ever-beloved Reagan speechwriter, Peggy Noonan. She (his wife) sort of liked her as a mother, but there was always something afoul with Palin in her view. She advised my friend that "Peggy nailed it on Sarah". Here is but a snippet of the absolute trashing of Palin by Noonan.

What a glorious circular firing squad flame thrower of an article!

A Farewell to Harms
Palin was bad for the Republicans�and the republic.

Sarah Palin's resignation gives Republicans a new opportunity to see her plain�to review the bidding, see her strengths, acknowledge her limits, and let go of her drama. It is an opportunity they should take. They mean to rebuild a great party. They need to do it on solid ground.
AP

Her history does not need to be rehearsed at any length. Ten months ago she was embraced with friendliness by her party. The left and the media immediately overplayed their hand, with attacks on her children. The party rallied round, as a party should. She went on the trail a sensation but demonstrated in the ensuing months that she was not ready to go national and in fact never would be. She was hungry, loved politics, had charm and energy, loved walking onto the stage, waving and doing the stump speech. All good. But she was not thoughtful. She was a gifted retail politician who displayed the disadvantages of being born into a point of view (in her case a form of conservatism; elsewhere and in other circumstances, it could have been a form of liberalism) and swallowing it whole: She never learned how the other sides think, or why.

In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. 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. "I'm not wired that way," "I'm not a quitter," "I'm standing up for our values." I'm, I'm, I'm.

In another age it might not have been terrible, but here and now it was actually rather horrifying.

McCain-Palin lost. Mrs. Palin has now stepped down, but she continues to poll high among some members of the Republican base, some of whom have taken to telling themselves Palin myths.

Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124716984620819351.html#printMode

Read the article. I can't post the whole thing... it's worth the read.

:rofl: