Monday, October 9, 2017

Reading the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page

Remember Peggy Noonan?  She wrote that famous speech Ronald Reagan gave after the Challenger space shuttle blew, up seconds after leaving the launch pad.

Reagan was, until President Dotard, our most recent "Teflon President."  Almost anything could go wrong under his watch and everyone, beginning with the President, would shrug it off:  Hundreds of American Marines blown up in a compound in Lebanon, having been put there for no discernible reason, apart perhaps from literally showing the flag? Well, nobody plans everything out, not even when you build a house--who finishes the basement? Yeah, well, we didn't plan for a truck bomb. You know. Things happen.
And when warnings from underlings about those O rings were ignored, Reagan went on national TV with the speech Ms. Noonan wrote and he said, among other things, in Peggy's purple prose: 
"We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and 'slipped the surly bonds of Earth' to 'touch the face of God."





So she helped everyone rise from the dismal reality to keep their eyes planted firmly on the Heavens and dreams of glory. Or, put another way, she parlayed a steal from John Gilespee Magee into a gig on the WSJ. (For my money, if you want to read a woman who knows a thing or two about slipping the surly bonds of Earth, open up Beryl Markham's "West With The Night." There is a woman who could write.)


Well, that woman who used to be Peggy Noonan has now managed to pin the blame for the mass shooter of Las Vegas on, guess who?  
The Democrats. 
Not just the Democrats but the "elites."  It's the fault of all those people who disagree with her, who she doesn't like. 
Liberals are what gave us mass shooters. Liberals drove them to it. 
And in response to the mass shooters, everyone else is quite justified in accumulating arsenals.
Now, that's even better than a guy who can shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote. Shooting has never been a problem for Republicans, but mass shooter maniacs, they have not yet figured out how to market that. 
"I think a lot of Americans have guns because they're fearful--and for good reason. They fear a coming chaos...They think it's all collapsing--our society, our culture, the baseline competence of our leadership class."

Oh, we've got a leadership class now. Well, what a relief to hear that. 
But wait:





"Americans have so many guns because drug gangs roam the streets, because they have less trust in their neighbors, because they read Cormac McCarthy's "The Road."

Well, now that is reassuring. Those gun toting, gun hoarding NASCAR fans are readers! And they read Cormac McCarthy, no less.

"Because our country's real overlords are in Silicon Valley and appear to be moral Martians who operate on some new postmodern ethical wave-length. And they'll be the ones programming the robots, that'll soon take all the jobs! Maybe the robots will all look like Mark Zuckerberg."


Ah, here we are getting to it. This is sort of a cross between that South Park episode where outer space beings from the future come back through a time warp to take the jobs of all the present day earthlings, because in the future everyone loses his jobs to robots, and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  I don't know about Cormac McCarthy novels, but I do watch South Park


And, by the by, did you notice the introduction of the manipulative Jew into the plot line?  The guy who is not guided by good American values but by Martian morals? (And remember Mars is where Barack Obama was born.)  Zuckerberg drinks the blood of Christian children, don't you know? He's into blood sacrifice, but first he circumcises them without anesthesia.

"Our leaders don't even think about technological revolution."

Well, nobody's ever accused Zuckerberg about that before. Peggy's on a roll. 

"They're too busy with transgender rights."

Well, there she's got me on board. Entirely too many Zuckerbergs thinking about transgender rights. And you know once they get to thinking about transgender rights, it just sucks all the air out of the room and their brains go all to mush.
Try not to think too much about this.

Personally, I'm no fan of Chelsea Manning or Bruce Jenner who is now somebody else, a woman on the cover of a magazine.  Unlike homosexuality, transgender people appear, from superficial evidence alone, to harbor a certain level of pathology.
Oh, are we disturbed yet?

But I digress--only to say I'm with Peggy about spending too much time thinking about transgenders, but I'm astonished to learn this leads directly to the guy in Las Vegas who mows down innocents with a bump stock converted automatic rifle.
Where's my gun?

"Those who create our culture feel free to lecture normal Americans."
Culture creator

And here I thought normal Americans created their own culture, for better or for worse. Silly me. It is a relief to hear there are extant, Normal Americans. I've been looking for them and just about given up hope.

"They sail on, oblivious to the legitimate anxieties of their countrymen who live near the edge."

Well, now I understand. With the coming apocalypse, we will all need guns and a home ammo depot and a bomb shelter, from which we can blast away at our neighbors--good guns make good neighbors--when the legions of transgender armies unleash their awful attack on our homes like those Orks in "Lord of the Rings" or the White Walkers in "Game of Thrones." 

Peggy is nothing else, if not literary. Did you catch the whiff of F. Scott Fitzgerald there? I'm sure it was intentional: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." And that is where Peggy lives--in some imagined past that never was.

Do you think Peggy Noonan has dinner with Rupert Murdoch every week?
If we invited them and the Dotard and maybe Mike Pence and Rush Limbaugh to Hampton for a cocktail party--or a beer fest--do you think it would be a good time?

Really, how about a bash at Smutty Nose?  I'm buying.

2 comments:

  1. Actually, if you read her op-eds with any frequency, you realize that she really can't write at all. Her writing is tortured and confusing - she could only have written speeches for someone with early dementia! How she parlayed this into an ongoing gig on the op-ed page is one of life's true mysteries - but I guess a loyal Republican can turn even incompetence into a personal fortune. I am impressed that you apparently made it all the way through her blabbering - I usually quit after a few of her disjointed sentences.

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  2. Anon,
    I've read her every week since my brother convinced me reading the Wall Street Journal would introduce me to the real world, of which I am manifestly ignorant.

    Mostly, I ignore the editorial pages, but, like watching Fox News it keeps me abreast of the current "thinking" on the right. Like, for example, I learned from the op ed which appears below Peggy's that Tesla is part of a neo liberal plot to destroy the fossil fuel industry and Warren Buffet is profiting from this diabolic conspiracy.

    Really, these people just keep expanding my mind.

    Mad Dog

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