[Chris Alger]

Why is it interesting that Peggy Noonan wrote her thousandth puff piece on Bush and the Republicans? Has she ever written anything else but these strings of adjectives and adulations for her partisan heroes?

Can you imagine Murray Kempton or Walter Lippman putting their names to something like this? Of course, they were actually paid to think. Other scribes (Like Lippman) moonlit as speechwrites, but Noonan has never been anything but a sloganeer and coiner of catchy phrases. More interesting than anything she says is the Wall Street Journal's choice to feature her so regularly on one of the most widely-read op ed pages. Since our world is increasingly dominated by the seemingly inexplicable, it's important to let the PR folks provide context consisting of silly fluffed-up impressions of polticians as superheroes.

What can you say about multilayered nonsense like this?

"A recent illustration: President Bush broke through to the great middle of America and persuaded them we must move in Iraq. He didn't "break through" anything because nothing stood between the people and the official messages that dominate the airwaves. Bush and his phalanx of subordinates and supportive commentators have been on TV hourly for months saying the same thing again and again. How could it have been possible for them to fail? As a result, the vast majority of the public believe that Iraq is a nuclear power even though it unquestionably isn't, and that it was tied to bin Laden on 9/11, despite the lack of any evidence and an expert consensus that says it's bullshit He was able to do this not because the presidency is the Big Microphone (how could media concentration and technology have made TR's bully pulpit less powerful?) --President Clinton used to complain that Rush Limbaugh had the big microphone (no, Clinton complained that talk radio was dominated by right-wingers, which it unarguably is) --but because he honestly believed, in his head and his heart, he was acting to make our country and other countries safer. So it's not the White House's famous "focus" on consistency of message and the deference from the media, it's that people have a magical ability to peer inside Bush's body and soul to determine the truth of what he says. It's like she's reaching for some higher plateau of fatuousness). Maybe history will show him right and maybe not, but people can tell his passion springs from conviction." Setting aside how this applies to Hitler, how can people possibly "tell" if Bush has any passion at all, much less passion that "springs from conviction?" Voice intonation? Many people are alarmed about the things he says because he lies and exaggerates and no one calls him on it in the headlines. It isn't that people can tell he has convictions, it's that his credibility is a matter of ubiquitous assumption throughout the mainstream media. Every President gets this treatment from the media when it comes to foreign policy -- no one objected to Clinton's pointless killing in Sudan because the media didn't tell them about it -- It's the truth about illicit sex that the media are expert at ferreting out because it doesn't affect the consensus of the dominant institutions. Once that consensus gels, any glib unlearned halfwit who owns more horses than books can sell it, as Reagan and Dubya have shown.