Posted 9:57 AM by Scoobie Davis

Lazy Compared To Whom?
Peggy Noonan is a media whore whose column I never miss— but not because she has anything of substance to write. I’m kind of like the character in the movie Go who hated The Family Circus (it’s “just waiting to suck”) but was irresistibly drawn to it. Noonan is an unremarkable hack writer (her “hollow punditry” was skillfully skewered by Jonathon Chait recently). But Noonan attracts mockers like me to her columns because of her tone. Her affected prose is an easy target (recently Norman Solomon mimicked her effusive manner in a hilarious column). Noonan’s serious writing rarely fails to evoke a horselaugh—whether it’s about George W. Bush’s intelligence or dolphins supposedly sent by Jesus to save Elian (why didn’t Christ’s animal act save Elian’s mom or the others on the raft?).

Noonan’s embarrassing groupie-like praise for Reagan and George W. Bush is matched by the nasty things she writes about the Clintons. Noonan wrote that Reagan would have refused to reunite Elian with his father (so much for the rule of law) because Reagan, unlike Clinton, “was a man.” Not only that, but Noonan puts her political opponents—people she doesn’t know personally—on the couch and assigns pathological psychological motives to them.

The irony of Noonan’s current column—in which she explains why Bill Clinton won’t have a talk show--is that her description of Clinton is not only contrary to established facts, but that it aptly fits her favorite recipient of fulsome praise, George W. Bush. The two main reasons Noonan gives why Clinton won’t have a talk show are 1) Hillary won’t let him (the perfunctory dig at Hillary); and 2) Bill is too lazy.

I won’t address the Hillary comment except to say that—unless one of Christ’s dolphins whispered some inside info to Noonan—this is just baseless speculation. My main beef is against Noonan’s silly argument that Bill Clinton is lazy. Here we have a hick from Arkansas who worked his butt off to go to college (where he excelled). He became Arkansas governor at a young age—both Republicans and Democrats praised his administration. Lazy? What planet is Noonan living on? You can’t come from Clinton’s background and get anywhere in life if you’re lazy. This revisionism of Clinton’s life reminds me of some horseshit from the late Barbara Olson’s The Final Days: “Contrary to the Lincolnesque myths created by their Hollywood friends, neither Hillary Rodham nor Bill Clinton rose from log cabins or poor circumstances to become America's most luminous couple. Both came from solidly middle-class families of sufficient means to enable them to attend privileged-and expensive-private educational institutions such as Wellesley, Georgetown, and Yale."

On the other hand, the qualities Noonan attributes to Clinton (e.g., “he loves to talk but not necessarily to work”) perfectly describe George W. Bush. This is a guy whose entire life embodies never having to work to achieve anything. Bush was able to get into Yale because Daddykins was able to pull strings. Daddykins’s friends were able to allow Bush to get a cushy National Guard position (Bush responded to the special treatment by not showing up for duty for the last two years of his obligation). Bush’s business career consisted of getting sweetheart deals from friends of Daddykins; when Bush’s laziness/ineptitude drove these businesses into the ground, once again, Daddykins’s friends bailed him out. When Bush’s sense of privilege led him to believe that he should become president, his brother hired a firm to scrub the voter lists of thousands of people who were entitled to vote—thus, we have someone in the Oval Office who is a lazy usurper.

Noonan’s projection of Bush’s characteristics to Clinton doesn’t surprise me. In The Case Against Hillary Clinton, Noonan writes, “Often when I watch the Clintons, I think I perceive a profound joylessness, an almost glassy-eyed containment, or distance. It's as if they don't have a facade, they've become a facade. You sense a depression on his part and an anger on hers." This is nothing more than Noonan projecting her own sour and rigid worldview onto people she doesn’t even know.