Thursday, September 04, 2008

Pundits are more honest when they think they're off the air

Peggy Noonan and Mike Murphy say what they really think about Sarah Palin. Why couldn't they be honest about it on the air?

3 comments:

Hume's Ghost said...

"Why couldn't they be honest about it on the air?"

Because they're partisan hacks. Which is why our "news" networks need to quit using so many spinsters and political operatives for analysis and commentary.

Hume's Ghost said...

Noonan two days later in the WSJ:

She has the power of the normal. Hillary Clinton is grim, stentorian, was born to politics and its connivances. Nancy Pelosi, another mother of five,often seems dazed and ad hoc. But this state governor and mother of a big family is a woman in a good mood. There is something so normal about her, so "You've met this person before and you like her," that she broke through in a new way,as a character vividly herself, and vividly genuine.

Her flaws accentuated her virtues. Now and then this happens in politics,but it's rare. An example: The very averageness of her voice, the not-wonderfulness of it, highlighted her normality: most people don't have great voices. That normality in turn highlighted the courage she showed in being there, on that stage for the first time in her life and under trying circumstances. Her averageness accentuated her specialness. Her commonality highlighted her uniqueness.


I really find it sickening that transparent propaganda is passed off as opinion journalism.

Hume's Ghost said...

At the top of her Sept. 3 column Noonan says that she was taken out of context in the clip, that she meant that the time when Republicans can assume the thinking of the base matches the thinking of the American public is over. Chuck Todd apparently confirmed this take.

I still have my reservations given Noonan's chameleon like ability to hold at any moment the belief that is most convenient for to have.

And that would still not change the fact that two days after she called Palin's choice a "bullshit" attempt at selling a narrative she was busy selling that exact narrative - the narrative that Noonan always sells about Republicans having such strong, saintly virtuous character while Democrats do not - in her column.