Posted 9:45 PM by Scoobie Davis

Fulsome Praise Update
I read Peggy Noonan's cloying praise for Ronald Reagan (and now George W. Bush) for the same reason others slow down to look at car accidents. My favorite unintentionally funny lines by Noonan were from her Wall Street Journal column denouncing the Clinton administration's raid to recover Elian Gonzalez: "And the last one in the house to hold [Elian], trying desperately to protect him, was the fisherman who'd saved him from the sea -- which seemed fitting as it was Eastertide, the time that marks the sacrifice and resurrection of the Big Fisherman." Also, this gem: "Mr. Reagan would not have dismissed the story of the dolphins as Christian kitsch, but seen it as possible evidence of the reasonable assumption that God's creatures had been commanded to protect one of God's children."

Norman Solomon's Media Beat column provides a good parody of Noonan's effusive rhetorical style: "Are we to become a land of mediocrity or meritocracy? I see a shining city on a hill. May the spirit of America, with its free enterprise and hard-working God-fearing citizens, lift our hearts to rejoice in our nation's triumph over the slow suffocation of envying freedom's apostles. Yet some wish to tarnish the legacy of saintly Ronald Reagan, while disparaging me in the process. Forever is the memory of one spring morning when I met with President Reagan in the Oval Office, and I gazed into his eyes, crystalline windows of his spiritual magnificence..."