"The worst line I ever wrote as a pundit... was... 'If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.'"

Says Bret Stephens — in "I Was Wrong About Trump Voters" (NYT) — about the first thing he ever wrote about Trump. That was in August 2015, and he went on to write "dozens of columns denouncing Trump as a unique threat to American life, democratic ideals and the world itself."

He now regrets attacking the Trump voters. Because it wasn't effective?

Telling voters they are moral ignoramuses is a bad way of getting them to change their minds.What were they seeing that I wasn’t?... What Trump’s supporters saw was a candidate whose entire being was a proudly raised middle finger at a self-satisfied elite that had produced a failing status quo. I was blind to this....

He was part of that "self-satisfied elite." Does he genuinely take responsibility for his failure to see from the viewpoint of the non-elite? Or is this a repositioning in the hope of regaining power over the deplorables?

""[Biden's Georgia speech] was aggressive, intemperate, not only offensive but meant to offend. It seemed prepared by people who think there is only the Democratic Party..."

"... in America, that’s it, everyone else is an outsider who can be disparaged. It was a mistake on so many levels.... If a president is rhetorically manipulative and divisive on a voting-rights bill it undercuts what he’s trying to establish the next day on Covid and the economy. The over-the-top language of the speech made him seem more emotional, less competent. The portentousness—'In our lives and . . . the life of our nation, there are moments so stark that they divide all that came before them from everything that followed. They stop time'—made him appear incapable of understanding how the majority of Americans understand our own nation’s history and the vast array of its challenges. By the end he looked like a man operating apart from the American conversation, not at its center...."

Writes Peggy Noonan, in "Biden’s Georgia Speech Is a Break Point/He thought he was merely appealing to his base. He might have united the rest of the country against him" (Wall Street Journal).

Rush Limbaugh, the "isolate."

From "Rush Limbaugh’s Complicated Legacy/He was a gifted entertainer and advocate, but in his later years certain flaws became more evident" by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal: 

To create a community of tens of millions of people in fractured, incoherent America was an astounding feat. To pretty much sustain it over 30 years was equally astounding. 

It is perhaps ironic but probably inevitable that that community was created by a man whom one of his closest friends this week called “an isolate.” Knowing him slightly over a few decades, I believe the most important thing to him was his profession, his show—three hours a day, five days a week, unscripted, with sound elements and callers....

He wasn't just isolated, he was an isolate. Isolation wasn't just a characteristic of his, in this formulation, it was what he himself was. 

I've never noticed "isolate" — the noun — used to mean a type of person. Of course, people are often referred to as "isolated," but "isolate"? It seems like "introvert" or "incel." It's all the way deep into your being. 

Yet somehow you have close friends, close enough that one of them can be referred to as "one of his closest friends." Do you have enough close friends that there's someone who'd refer to himself as "one of" your "closest friends"?! Maybe your "closest friends" are fairly distant. A person with no truly close friends still has his "closest friends." These people might not even know him well at all, just well enough to observe that he is isolated, and coldly enough to call him "an isolate." 

The noun "isolate" is a term in social psychology: "A person who, either from choice or through separation or rejection, is isolated from normal social interaction; also occasionally an animal separated from its kind" (OED).

 

People say we've got it made/Don't they know we're so afraid?

"The press reports he watches television for hours, is inattentive to briefings, doesn't read, rants, rages, nurses petty resentments..."

"... doesn't listen to those with expertise, doesn't understand the constitutional limits on his office, is increasingly alone and paranoid. Are these things true? What else is true?... Why do those who have worked with Mr. Trump so rarely if ever speak in any depth, in public, of their experience?... Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said a great deal in his resignation letter... But one letter isn't enough. The Trump supporters I know are motivated by patriotism, not spleen, bigotry or bitterness. They are so loyal to their man in part because they see all the forces arrayed against him, especially in the media. They believe, legitimately, that he gets only grudging credit for his accomplishments. And they have told themselves a story about the brave if unlikely outsider who sacrificed his own comfort to upend a corrupt system and protect the interests of the common man.... They won't believe someone like Omarosa... They won't believe the words of 'Anonymous,' author of the September New York Times op-ed that became a sensation.... They will believe only the testimony of serious people who are obviously patriots.... We need some noble rats. May they come forward, speak softly, and make their motives clear."

Writes Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. I added the boldface.

We need some noble rats.

And — since I'm thinking about illustrations this morning, having just perused "The Year in Illustration 2018" (NYT) — I'll add my illustration:

The Noble Rat ("Pop").

Abstention is a valid choice.

In a comments thread earlier this morning, richlb said:

Anne [sic] - I've tried to search and find your post from a few elections ago where you make an argument about NOT voting. I can't seem to locate it. On this election day, any chance to rerun it, or reference it?

In the comments, Meade located a post of mine from June 2012, "We're sending this mailing to you and your neighbors to publicize who does and does not vote":

This is an effort to shame and pressure people about voting, and it is truly despicable. Your vote is private, you have a right not to vote, and anyone who tries to shame and harass you about it is violating your privacy, and the assumption that I will become active in shaming and pressuring my neighbors is repugnant.

Not voting is a valid choice. If you don't have a preference in the election, don't vote. If you think no one deserves your vote, don't vote.

But this is a topic I've come back to. In April 2016, seeing President Obama appear on the "American Idol" finale, I wrote:

[Obama's] congratulations to the show morphed into a lecture on voting:

"Voting is the most fundamental and sacred right of our democracy. I believe it should be almost as easy as voting on 'American Idol,' and we're working on that. But when we choose not to vote we surrender that right."

Eh. What bilge. Voting is the most sacred right? Voting in elections should be like voting on "American Idol," where you call and text in multiple votes? And you surrender your right if you don't use it? No, you don't. Just as you have a right not to speak (as part of freedom of speech) and a right not to have a religion (as part of freedom of religion), the right to vote includes the right to abstain.

64 entertainingly quotable quotes from one speech — who can do that?

Only Trump, but even as Chris Cillizza grabs eyeballs by serving up a long list of Trump quotes, he has to present them as deplorable, in "The 64 most outrageous lines from Donald Trump's untethered Pennsylvania speech."

From the list, here's the part cherry picks from Trump's discussion of how people say he should be more presidential (and he comically imitates the "presidential" version of himself):

56. "But you'd be so bored because I could stand up, right? I'm very presidential."

So so presidential. The most presidential president likely ever.

57. "If I came like a stiff, you guys wouldn't be here tonight."

Remember: Trump is, first and foremost, an entertainer. And he views the presidency through the lens of entertainment.

58. "I don't know if I'm a good speaker. But every time I have a 25,000-seat stadium, we fill it up."

Campaign rally as therapy session.

Here's that part of the speech. Look how funny it is (and he has real points to make):

"The media climate now, in both news and entertainment, is too often of a goading, insinuating resentment, a grinding, agitating antipathy."

Writes Peggy Noonan in "Rage Is All the Rage, and It’s Dangerous/A generation of media figures are cratering under the historical pressure of Donald Trump" (WSJ).

A comic posed with a gruesome bloody facsimile of President Trump's head... In a tearful news conference [Kathy Griffin] said of the president, "He broke me." She was roundly mocked for this. Oh, the big bad president's supporters were mean to you after you held up his bloody effigy. But she was exactly right. He did break her. He robbed her of her sense of restraint and limits, of her judgment. He broke her, but not in the way she thinks, and he is breaking more than her.

We have been seeing a generation of media figures cratering under the historical pressure of Donald Trump. He really is powerful. They're losing their heads. Now would be a good time to regain them. They have been making the whole political scene lower, grubbier. They are showing the young what otherwise estimable adults do under pressure, which is lose their equilibrium, their knowledge of themselves as public figures, as therefore examples -- tone setters. They're paid a lot of money and have famous faces and get the best seat, and the big thing they're supposed to do in return is not be a slob. Not make it worse....

Of course, this kind of lecturing is not going to work, but I found the florid prose interesting, especially the metaphor of dirtiness: These things are low and grubby, and people are slobs. She sounds snobby: The good people, the tone setters, are not showing the little people the right way to act.

And then you get lowly slobs like Hodgkinson idiotically acting on the grubby ideas he's been hearing from the elite. But it would be "fatuous," Noonan instructs us, to think that anyone but the shooter is responsible for the shooting. 

"It would be good if top Hill Republicans went en masse to the president and said: 'Stop it. Clean up your act. Shut your mouth. Do your job. Stop tweeting.'"

"'Stop seething. Stop wasting time. You lost the thread and don't even know what you were elected to do anymore. Get a grip. Grow up and look at the terrain, see it for what it is. We have limited time. Every day you undercut yourself, you undercut us. More important, you keep from happening the good policy things we could have done together. If you don't grow up fast, you'll wind up abandoned and alone. Act like a president or leave the presidency.' Could it help? For a minute. But it would be constructive -- not just carping, leaking, posing, cheering and tweeting but actually trying to lead. The president needs to be told: Democracy is not your plaything."

Writes Peggy Noonan in "Democracy Is Not Your Plaything/When the circus comes to Washington, it consumes everything, absorbs all energy" (in the WSJ).

Here are the top-rated comments there:

1. "Though I usually enjoy your articles, Ms. Noonan, this is way overblown. Wrenching questions? Seriously? Methinks you need to turn a critical eye to your own profession. Many of the slithering reptiles in Washington are incendiary journalists who revel in this circus. A circus of its own making. This latest piece of yours is part of the act. But do you realize it?"

2. "Nice try Peggy. It's not Trump, it's your lefty friends. And your left is not interested. They are so radical they want a coup and they are going to get it. This is a revolution and your side wants power and will get it even if we all have to get trampled in the mud. Duly elected POTUS? Doesn't matter. This is a coup. The left is not just out of control, they are severe, violent radicals. Violent times are coming, thanks to the left."

Why did Peggy Noonan win the Pulitzer Prize for commentary?

She's been around a long time, and I hadn't noticed that she was getting especially good, so why give her the prize in 2016?

The official statement credits here with "rising to the moment with beautifully rendered columns that connected readers to the shared virtues of Americans during one of the nation’s most divisive political campaigns." And it lists 10 columns, all of which can be read at the link (which is great, since they're originally published at the Wall Street Journal, where you need and probably don't have a subscription):

1. February 27, 2016 Trump and the Rise of the Unprotected
2. March 5, 2016 The Republican Party is Shattering
3. April 23, 2016 That Moment When 2016 Hits You
4. May 7, 2016 Trump Was a Spark, Not the Fire
5. August 27, 2016 A Wounded Boy’s Silence, And the Candidates’
6. September 10, 2016 Remembering a Hero, 15 Years After 9/11
7. September 24, 2016 The Year of the Reticent Voter
8. October 22, 2016 Imagine a Sane Donald Trump
9. November 26, 2016 No More Business as Usual, Mr. Trump
10. December 31, 2016 Shining a Light on ‘Back Row’ America

If I can trust the accuracy of my tagging, I only blogged about 2 Peggy Noonan columns in 2016, and neither is among the 10 the Pulitzer people liked so much.

I blogged about "What to Tell Your Children About Trump" here. I tweaked her as "Kind of vulnerable to flattery." Trump had talked to her on the phone about how she'd been "unfair to him, sometimes mean, sometimes really, really mean." I guess the Pulitzer people liked other columns — the ones where she was mean.

And I blogged about her November 11th column — "What Comes After the Uprising" — here.

"He was dignified, hilarious and modest. He told me that I’d sometimes been unfair to him, sometimes mean, sometimes really, really mean..."

"... but that when I was he usually deserved it, always appreciated it, and keep it up. He spoke of other things; he characterized for me my career. I’d heard of his charm offensive, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say how charming, funny and frank he was—and, as I say, how modest. How actually humble. It moved me. And it hurt to a degree a few weeks later when I wrote in this space that 'Sane Donald Trump' would win in a landslide but that the one we had long seen, the crazed, shallow one, wouldn’t, and didn’t deserve to. Is it possible there are deeper reserves of humility, modesty and good intent lurking around in there than we know? And maybe a toolbox, too, that can screw those things together and produce something good?"

Said Peggy Noonan after that time — 6 weeks ago — Donald Trump got on the phone with her.

Kind of vulnerable to flattery, isn't she?

Anyway, yeah, let's hope Donald Trump can screw us together... in a good way.

"It was a natural, self-driven eruption. Which makes it all the more impressive and moving. And it somehow makes it more beautiful that few saw it coming."

Writes Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal. (Get your link here.)

Noonan proceeds to talk about the "elderly, Italian-American, an immigrant" shoe-repair shopowner in her neighborhood who told her last winter that Trump would win, and she says:

In America now only normal people can see the obvious. Everyone else is lost in a data-filled fog.

So is it true that "few saw it coming" or that "normal people" saw it coming or just that there are few normal people in her circles?

Noonan somehow manages to get out and about and to encounter people who represent what we need to know now:

The past few days I’ve heard from a young man who fears Jews will be targeted and told me of Muslim friends now nervous on the street. There was the beautiful lady with the blue-collar job who, when asked how she felt about the election, told me she is a lesbian bringing up two foreign-born adopted children and fears she will be targeted and her children somehow removed from her.

Many fear they will no longer be respected. They need to know things they rely on are still there. They don’t understand what has happened, and are afraid. They need—and deserve—reassurance. Trump apparatus: Find a way.

So... from inside the elite, where people are "lost in a data-filled fog" and did not see what was coming, Noonan is able to report that there's fear and to demand reassurance. Her prescription is: Hire the elite insiders!

The president-elect should make a handful of appointments quickly, briskly, with an initial emphasis on old hands and known quantities. Ideological foes need not be included but accomplished Washington figures, especially those from previous administrations, should be invited in. It is silly to worry that Mr. Trump’s supporters will start to fear he’s gone establishment. They believe in him, are beside themselves with joy, and will understand he’s shoring up his position and communicating stability.

... [T]here are former officials and true experts with esteemed backgrounds who need to be told: Help him.... Donald Trump doesn’t know how to be president...

Trump needs help, she says. And these people need jobs and power, she doesn't say. The elite, her people, lost the election, but they should have the victory anyway, because a "young man" and a "beautiful lady" spoke of fear. Throughout the whole political season, Trump was battered with the fear of fear, and now he's won and he's told to pander to the people who said whatever they could to oppose him, the people who stoked the fear that he needs to prioritize calming. As if it could ever be calmed, as if his opponents will ever stop stoking it.

Not only does Donald Trump not know how to be President, in Noonan's view, he didn't even know how to run for President. He just happened to be there in the midst of a people's movement, an "uprising":

His presidential campaign was bad—disorganized, unprofessional, chaotic, ad hoc. There was no state-of-the-art get-out-the-vote effort—his voters got themselves out. There was no high-class, high-tech identifying of supporters—they identified themselves. They weren’t swayed by the barrage of brilliantly produced ads—those ads hardly materialized. This was not a triumph of modern campaign modes and ways. The people did this. As individuals within a movement.

Ah, so it wasn't "high-class"! It wasn't slick in the glossy professionalized style that the elite sell at a high price. These fine people in her circle — the kind of people she'd like Trump to hire on to assuage the fears of the young men and beautiful ladies — these people "lost in a data-filled fog," who didn't see what was coming — since they weren't running the campaign, the campaign that was run could not be the cause of what happened. "This is how you know" it was a movement of the people: The campaign was bad, and therefore what happened must be understood as the people identifying themselves and getting themselves out to vote.

Trump didn't do that. You didn't build that. 

"It was a natural, self-driven eruption."

Incredible! Trump didn't run a high-class, high-tech campaign. That's correct. But that doesn't mean he did nothing! He did something bold and unique, combining wild social media — tweeting — with big rallies in the manner of an old-time "whistle-stop" campaign — not with a train but that big Trump plane. How many rallies did he do? I couldn't find a list of all the locations, but he spoke rousingly to tens of thousands of people at a time, in all sorts of places, lighting up enthusiasm, touching off word of mouth.

Who is Peggy Noonan to say this is just "bad"? It's bad because it's "unprofessional"? Maybe it was good because it was unprofessional. 

Here was one man who looked at America and saw it his own way, jumped into something for the first time, and played it instinctively, screwing up sometimes, but standing strong and barreling on. It's the most amazing political performance I've seen in my life.

And Peggy Noonan would like to deem it nothing and to say it was the people who did it all. And now, as she sees it, Trump threatens to take his nothing performance into the White House. He didn't know how to campaign, and he "doesn’t know how to be president." So he needs help from the professionals, from Noonan's circle of highly educated, elite, befogged friends. He needed them before, and he's only lucky he won without their help. He stumbled into a people's movement, a "natural" uprising of "normal people." So he'd better bring in the abnormals who didn't see what was coming but who are finding it "somehow... more beautiful" because they didn't see it coming. They didn't position themselves properly to seem as though they belong close to the new President, but perhaps if Peggy strings enough words together Trump will see the strange, wonderful way that they really do belong.

And don't worry. Those people — the "natural, self-driven eruption" that's the only reason you're there to dole out all these jobs — they won't think you've "gone establishment." It's "silly to worry"! Those people are so "beside themselves with joy," they'll accept anything. The idiots. The normal people. The ones who saw what was coming. They'll never notice.

Hillary's problem of "insularity and... arrogance" — "there was no one around her who was willing to tell her that she was wrong."

The quotes are from Ron Brownstein of "The Atlantic" in a panel discussion on today's "Face the Nation" about the inspector general's report on Hillary's email. The moderator, John Dickerson, had pointed to the finding that "When her staffers were asked about her private server system, they were told, do not ask about it again." Brownstein said:

BROWNSTEIN: That's what's the most troubling, I thought, in this report. I mean kind of the insularity and the arrogance. Not so much the specifics of the e-mails, but about the kind of leadership style and what it says about how you might be as president. I did a panel a couple of years ago when Jim Baker and George Mitchell were winning the Lifetime achievement Award from the National Academy of Public Administration, and they each said the same thing, the toughest thing was to find someone who could tell a president they were wrong. And what was -- what was -- what was, I thought, most apparent in this report was that there was no one around her who was willing to tell her that she was wrong. And when people tried to raise questions, they were told to be quiet. That is a -- that was ominous traits for a president.

But what about Trump? Are people around him able to tell him he's wrong? Peggy Noonan brought that up:

NOONAN: We talked about people around Hillary can't tell -- tell her the truth.... Who around Donald Trump says to him, boss, stop this, don't do that anymore, it's not nice?

Speaking of Noonan, she also said this:

NOONAN: When you look at the tape of Mrs. Clinton saying things about the e-mails that have been shown to not of them true in the IG thing, she has been -- I hate to say lied, but she has lied coolly and -- in a creamy, practiced way. It doesn't look good.

Creamy... I wrote that word down to search for in the transcript. Hillary lied in a coolly... creamy, practiced way.

ADDED: On the ABC show "This Week," Dianne Feinstein, the Hillary Clinton proxy, was confronted by Jonathan Karl:

What if ISIS hit us here in the homeland: What would all the presidential candidates be saying we should do?

From yesterday's "Face the Nation" transcript. Peggy Noonan threw something forth as an idea — or as the transcript has it "fourthism (ph) idea":

[S]uppose ISIS hit the United States, as everybody fears. What would we all be thinking the next day was absolutely the right, urgent, strong thing to do?... What would that look like to us? And what would be the proper response at this point?

WaPo's David Ignatius gave this answer:

I -- certainly if we're hit directly, the public will support and even demand retaliation. I think there -- there are two roots [SHOULD READ: routes] that -- that we would follow in that case and should think about following now. One is to augment the direct action strikes that our special forces are already making every day inside Syria and Iraq. We are killing dozens of people who get back in touch with would-be attackers in the United States, who come in on -- on social media. And if you call -- if you get a call back, if you're one of those people who's trying to direct an operation, we'll try to kill you. And so -- you know, that's already going on. It should -- it should be augmented. The second, harder question is, whether to add ground troops. I mean from all the talk from McCain and Graham [who were on the show earlier], there is not an Arab ground force that can clear Raqqa or any of these places reliably. Are we going to provide that? Will we do that with NATO, with the -- with air -- a coalition of Arabs? Those are the kinds of questions that we would ask the next day and we should ask now.

In short, what we'd do then is what we should do now.

Peggy Noonan said: "Cesar, you’re supposed to be offended by Trump, he said Mexico is sending over criminals, he has been unfriendly, you’re an immigrant."

"My friend Cesar works the deli counter at my neighborhood grocery store. He is Dominican, an immigrant, early 50s, and listens most mornings to a local Hispanic radio station, La Mega, on 97.9 FM."

Their morning show is the popular “El Vacilón de la Mañana,” and after the first GOP debate, Cesar told me, they opened the lines to call-ins, asking listeners (mostly Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican) for their impressions. More than half called in to say they were for Mr. Trump. Their praise, Cesar told me a few weeks ago, dumbfounded the hosts. I later spoke to one of them, who identified himself as D.J. New Era. He backed Cesar’s story. “We were very surprised,” at the Trump support, he said. Why? “It’s a Latin-based market!”

“He’s the man,” Cesar said of Mr. Trump....

Informed by Noonan that he's supposed to be offended by Trump, Cesar said:

No, you have it wrong. Immigrants, he said, don’t like illegal immigration, and they’re with Mr. Trump on anchor babies. “They are coming in from other countries to give birth to take advantage of the system. We are saying that! When you come to this country, you pledge loyalty to the country that opened the doors to help you.... We don’t bloc vote anymore.... The elite have different notions from the grass-roots working people.”

So she says. Read the whole thing. If you're not a WSJ subscriber, the link won't work, but if you Google some text, you'll be able to get in.

"Here’s an idea: Why don’t you leave the grieving alone right now? Why don’t you not impose your agenda items on them?"

"Why don’t you not force them to debate while they have tears in their throats? Don’t politicize their pain. Don’t turn this into a debate on a flag or guns. Don’t use it to make your points and wave your finger from your high horse. These people are doing it right without you."

Says Peggy Noonan.

ADDED: I was saying something similar earlier this morning, specifically criticizing the way Chuck Todd interviewed the family of Daniel Simmons Sr. on "Meet the Press," and this makes me want to extract one more thing from the transcript. The question is addressed to the dead man's granddaughter:

CHUCK TODD: Alana, a lot of people want to use this incident to have a bigger conversation to try to do something. Racial reconciliation, guns. There's a lot of issues that people want to grab onto. What do you want the country to take away from this? And what do you want the country to be having and our political leaders to be having a conversation about?

ALANA SIMMONS: Well, we elect not to talk about politics, or policies, or race issues at this time. At this time, we just want to focus on our grandfather and the other victims and making sure that the communities and the families heal and move on from this tragedy.

I've got a different theory about "How the Clintons Get Away With It."

Here's Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal:

I wonder if any aspirant for the presidency except Hillary Clinton could survive [a book like "Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich"]. I suspect she can because the Clintons are unique in the annals of American politics: They are protected from charges of corruption by their reputation for corruption. It’s not news anymore. They’re like . . . Bonnie and Clyde go on a spree, hold up a bunch of banks, it causes a sensation, there’s a trial, and they’re acquitted. They walk out of the courthouse, get in a car, rob a bank, get hauled in, complain they’re being picked on—“Why are you always following us?”—and again, not guilty. They rob the next bank and no one cares. “That’s just Bonnie and Clyde doing what Bonnie and Clyde do. No one else cares, why should I?”

My theory is that Hillary Clinton is only getting away with it now. The evidence against her should utterly destroy her, but not yet. The stars are aligned in her favor now, but the alignment will end some time in 2016.

Who is motivated to use this evidence now? Basically, no one.

Democrats still believe she will be their candidate, and they don't want to attack her. It might be useful to test her and allow her to topple early enough to open the field to other candidates. But who? That's a risky strategy, and it takes nerve. The better approach seems to be to allow all the new things to get old and to hope people will forget or at least get bored enough to swallow the argument that the subject has already been fully discussed and only toxic weird people still talk about it.

Why should Republicans attack? They have great material, but if they use it now, they might end up with someone else whom they'd have to find ways to demolish. Save it. Hold it in reserve. Wait until the Democrats lock her in as the candidate, and then let loose with all the attacks you've had so long to meticulously prepare.

I say she's not getting away with it. Not in the end. 

"Did she seem to you a happy, hungry warrior? She couldn’t make eye contact with her questioners..."

"... and when she did she couldn’t sustain it. She looked at the ceiling and down at notes, trying, it seemed, to stick to or remember scripted arguments. She was shaky. She couldn’t fake good cheer and confidence. It is seven years since she ran for office. You could see it.... This wasn’t high-class spin. These were not respectable dodges. They didn’t make you grudgingly tip your hat at a gift for duplicity. "

Peggy knocks Hillary.

"Face the Nation" laugh line: "When you're in Madison, Wisconsin, and you make a mistake nobody notices."

On yesterday's show, the host John Dickson asked Republican strategist Kevin Madden about that line in Scott Walker's CPAC speech. ("If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the globe.") 

Madden said:

Look, I mean, I think too much was made of that. I think one of the lessons that Scott Walker has to take on this will be the test of whether or not his candidacy is up to par. Is when you are -- when you're in Madison, Wisconsin, and you make a mistake nobody notices. When you are a potential presidential candidate everybody notices, the Democrats jump in, and three or four other campaigns that see to their advantage will seek to elevate that....

LOL. We were laughing in Madison, Wisconsin, where for the last 5 years everyone has been jumping on every damned thing that could possibly be jumped on. The idea that Scott Walker has been hanging out in a cushy locale not really getting tested is beyond ludicrous. The national arena is certainly much larger, but I think, with the greater number and multiplicity of voices, it's easier to get through the process of explaining and contextualizing inept remarks.

 In any case, it's ridiculous to say that nobody notices, unless Madden is himself making a politically inept remark and revealing that he thinks the people out here in the hinterlands are nobodies. Wisconsin people notice like hell. And anything — anything — that could be used against Scott Walker has been used. If you don't believe me, Google the phrase "kind of the last hurrah before we dropped the bomb."

On "Face the Nation," Peggy Noonan was asked about Chris Christie, and she said:

One of the joy of politics, he's a natural campaigner. Can I point out Chris Christie has the opposite problem of Scott Walker. Scott Walker gets to say things in Wisconsin, the press doesn't notice. Chris Christie is across the river from Mark [Halperin of Bloomberg Politics]. He's across the river from the mainstream media. And they kill him every day.

Mainstream media, such coasties. 

"'American Sniper'... had the power to leave a packed Manhattan movie house silent—really, completely silent..."

"... as they stared at the closing credits and tried to absorb the meaning of what they’d seen. They filed out silently, too.... The movie seems to have pinged off something in the American psyche... [Navy SEAL Chris] Kyle, the movie makes clear, joined up to defend America after al Qaeda began making its moves. When he was a boy his father taught him not to be a sheep or a wolf but a sheepdog—a protector of others. The movie is a meditation on this. It is interesting that Americans want such a meditation. On the Iraq war it takes no stand. While the film glorifies war—all battlefield heroics, by being admirable, glorify war—there is a persistent antiwar presence, and not only because depicting the damage and dislocation done to those visited by war is an antiwar statement. Chris Kyle’s brother, on leaving Iraq after his own tour, makes a statement suggestion [sic] the U.S. is in the wrong place. A heartbroken mother at a stateside funeral seems to cry out for peace. Kyle’s close friend shares his doubts. Kyle doesn’t share them but he hears them, and Eastwood lets them echo out. This is a fair-minded movie. It is not anyone’s propaganda...."

Writes Peggy Noonan.

ADDED: How do you know that people staying to read the closing credits are "tr[ying] to absorb the meaning of what they’d seen." Maybe they're looking to see who played some bit part and what that song was and so forth. And don't people who are still sitting and watching remain silent? I think talking about a movie is something that you do as you're walking out of the theater. Did those Manhattanites, walking out, turn to each other with the usual "So what do you think?" or whatever it is people say nowadays to start the after-movie conversations?

And that's assuming the moviegoers were not alone. And if these moviegoers were really in a position to talk to someone else and delaying in some abnormal way, it might not be about the "meaning" of the movie as a "meditation" on the military, it could be the more mundane question whether this is a good movie. Did I like it as a movie? That's sometimes a puzzle. Sometimes you withhold judgment until you see the end and need more time to have an opinion worth stating.

When I read the first half of Noonan's piece, I thought: I should see this movie. But when I read the second half, I thought: I don't need to see this movie. It's not good enough. It's got formulaic scenes in boot camp and with a tedious wife character. I don't need to spend my time on moving pictures of something that's easily and more authentically accessible in book form.

"I have never seen a president in exactly the position Mr. Obama is, which is essentially alone."

Writes Peggy Noonan in "The Loneliest President Since Nixon/Facing adversity, Obama has no idea how to respond."

He’s got no one with him now. The Republicans don’t like him, for reasons both usual and particular: They have had no good experiences with him. The Democrats don’t like him, for their own reasons plus the election loss.... No one at [his post-election lunch with congressional leaders] looked at him with colder, beadier eyes than outgoing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who clearly doesn’t like him at all. The press doesn’t especially like the president; in conversation they evince no residual warmth. This week at the Beijing summit there was no sign the leaders of the world had any particular regard for him....

The last time we saw a president so alone it was Richard Nixon, at the end of his presidency, when the Democrats had turned on him, the press hated him, and the Republicans were fleeing.... But Nixon had one advantage Obama does not: the high regard of the world’s leaders, who found his downfall tragic (such ruin over such a trifling matter) and befuddling (he didn’t keep political prisoners chained up in dungeons, as they did. Why such a fuss?).