Saturday, July 5, 2008

Red, white & blues

A friend of mine helps to raise my blood pressure every week by sending me links to Peggy Noonan’s column in the Wall Street Journal. Throughout these past months she has been consistent in her constant carping about the Democratic presidential campaigns. It’s like a nightmarish endless loop, with no Escape key.

Her primary target has been Hillary Clinton—God forbid that a week should pass without Noonan flaunting her mean-spirited, bloody-minded streak, blowing poison darts at Clinton. Now, of course, she’s retooling for Obama.

So when my friend sent me today’s piece, his comment was, “Not the usual column.”

Well, not “usual” in the sense that she’s not grousing about a Democrat. That is rather a nice change.

On the other hand, her chosen “hero” is definitely a Republican—not surprising she couldn’t find anyone among the D-Day survivors who didn’t serve in the Reagan administration worthy enough to focus on. Those years were her high-water mark & it’s been hard for her to adjust to the post-Ronnie world ever since.

But frankly, her “opinion” is nothing out of the ordinary with respect to Omaha Beach. She’s about 576,344th in line to laud the boys of Omaha & use them as examples of Americans at their best. Her encomium is well within the range of “usual”, & pretty far down the scale of insightful or elegiac.

What, then, is really the point?

Oh, right—that she gets it. The point is, as always, her.

& that is indeed “usual”.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

How do you explain the near self flagellation equivalence that drives you to read, as it seems, everyone of the Noonan posts? You owe the forwarding party an fealty?