Peggy Noonan: America's Kindergarten Teacher

I hate Peggy Noonan. It feels good to get that out of the way, so I don't have to dwell on it... For those who don't know who she is, I envy you. Her voice stays cloyingly, condescendingly soft as she brings together the fingers of one hand and appears to draw circles in order to emphasize her pointless point. I saw her again today on some morning show, and I could not help but consider her as a feckless, vapid emblem of passive-aggression that drives me, notoriously, up a fucking wall. What is it about passive-aggression that makes "type A" people go nuts?

Her cadence of speech alone makes me want to shake her like a bad au pair. Probably, she doesn't mean to talk down to whomever is unfortunate enough to find himself in her sights. Even if she does, there's a way to do that without inciting rage. Just ask PJ O'Rourke. He's funny and smart and a Republican. An old-school one, though, who admits to his liberal morality without hiding it, unlike a number of other prominent Republican politicians who prattle on about traditional values and morals and other nonsensical bullshit, only to be found much more depraved than previously thought.

For those who don't know her--again, I'm jealous. Noonan used to be a speechwriter for the Great American Swindler/Sleight of Hand Artist/Original Dunce (except for Ford, lampooned by Chevy Chase), Ronald Reagan. (Must I hear another laudatory effusion from someone who doesn't know that he is the one most responsible for the gigantic economic disparities in this country, and who credits him with ending the Cold War but neglects his insane greed and, most importantly and despicably, his coronation of the endlessly dumb religious right on the stage of American politics? I have to get out of this rant, because my anger at and hatred of Reagan is, like Chili's nachos, bottomless.) She also famously mocked Barack Obama's Senate campaign a few years ago. What a prognosticator she turned out to be: he's president now, bitch.

The worst thing about her, though, is her condescending voice. It's light and deliberately, frustratingly calm, and it pisses me off. Pat Buchanan, crazy and idiotic as he is, at least intones. And Glenn Beck, along with the other nuts at Fox News, can sound like the very children that Noonan is trying to calm. He says insane things, but she says dumb things in a voice that is Siren-like, in the Homeric sense. It placates and subdues you until you forget that her opinions are absolutely irrelevant.

When asked about health care, she said that the Congressional Budget Office said that the Obama plan was "gonna have a very bad effect on the economy." First of all, it or anyone in the CBO never said that. Secondly, you can't rely on a bobble head that once said that W was "normal" and that "intellectuals start all the trouble in the world." I think it's fair to say that Bush was clearly not an intellectual, so her point is both moot and frustratingly moronic.

That was five years ago, and she has not softened her speech, although that would reduce her to a perpetual whisper. Really, that wouldn't be so bad. Still, her aversion to national health care makes me want to scream in her face. There'd probably--definitely--be curses, which might make her blush and raise those fingers, but I would snap them like Harrison Ford's in "Blade Runner."

R