A
Whoring She Will Go
By Jason Miller
03 May, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Peggy Noonan (born Margaret Ellen Noonan on September 7, 1950 in
Brooklyn, New York) is an author of seven books on politics, religion
and culture and a weekly columnist for the Wall Street Journal. She
is a graduate of Fairleigh Dickinson University in Rutherford, New Jersey,
and was a Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan.
"So begins the Wiki
entry for Noonan in one of the Web's most supposedly impartial information
platforms. In fact, who would suspect, from that innocuous sentence,
that Noonan is almost exactly the opposite of that description? Because
if there is one thing for sure about Noonan it is this: Noonan is not
a true populist, nor, for that matter, a friend of the working class.
But, then again, populist posturing has been the staple of rightwing
and fascistoid sellouts since Mussolini and Hitler opened the franchise
in the 1920s." [from the introduction to this piece as it appears
on Cyrano's Journal Online (http://www.bestcyrano.org/)]
“Let them
call me rebel, and welcome; I feel no concern from it. For I should
suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul.”
--Thomas Paine
Peggy
Noonan obviously doesn’t fear suffering “the misery of devils.”
She has whored her soul to the bourgeoisie in a bargain of Faustian
proportions. One need only chip away slightly at her façade of
compassion and moral rectitude to reveal a very contemptible human being.
With ease, delight, and ample
reward, Ms. Noonan joins a bevy of cynical pundits in sustaining the
false consciousness of the masses, which in turn paves the way for the
egregious crimes of the United States’ avaricious and malevolent
plutocracy. If this sounds hyperbolic to you, you don’t know much
about the true history of the United States, particularly its foreign
policy.
Disseminating her mendacious
apologias for American Capitalism and its myriad manifestations of criminality
from her comfortable perch as a columnist for the Wall Street Journal,
Peggy pollutes the minds of millions of readers each week. Bear in mind
that the Wall Street Journal’s editorial section is the standard-bearer
for our ruthless de facto aristocracy, having endorsed economic imperialism
through the implementation of neoliberal policies, torture of prisoners
in the “War on Terror”, raping the poor with “supply-side
economics”, and an end to the “witch hunt” against
“Scooter” Libby.
Her ties to her bourgeois
masters run deep. She was married to the chief economist for the US
Chamber of Commerce, Richard Rahn. She served Ronald Reagan (champion
of the wealthy elite, enemy of the poor and working class, and slaughterer
of tens of thousands of Latin Americans) with a gushing pride which
permeates her writing to this day. Peggy Noonan literally put the words
in the mouth of this heinous criminal as she authored a number of his
speeches. Despite her recent criticism of Bush, prior to 2005 Noonan
used the power of her pen to buttress his regime and took an unpaid
leave of absence from the WSJ to campaign for Bush’s “re-election”
in 2004.
In the September 2004 issue
of Crisis Magazine, Bently Elliot, “Noonan’s former boss
at the White House and now vice-president of communications at the New
York Stock Exchange,” said this of Noonan:
“She graduated cum
laude with a degree in English literature and newly acquired conservative
convictions—convictions that took shape when, as Elliot puts it,
her patriotism was ‘offended by the ugly, anti-American nature
of the self-described ‘peace’ movement in the 1970s.’”
(Elliot’s words in italics)
Evidently Ms. Noonan believes
that the imperialistic invasion of a tiny nation and the resultant deaths
of 58,000 US Americans and 3 million Vietnamese were both beautiful
and American. Shame on those hideous, treasonous peaceniks who opposed
our carnage in Vietnam!
In a blatantly revealing
display of her pathological worldview, Peggy trumpeted her pride at
having raised her son to consort with mass murderers. (In yet another
excerpt from the Crisis Magazine profile of Ms. Noonan):
Her son, Will, loves politics
and has grown into the sort of young man Noonan can bring to a dinner
party at Vice-President Dick Cheney’s home “and have a good
conversation with the vice president of the United States about the
war,” Noonan says. “How lucky is that kid to be exposed
to that sort of thing—and how lucky am I as a parent to take my
son to such a thing.”
Like the malignant socioeconomic
system she so tenaciously defends, Ms. Noonan’s clever spin is
riddled with irreconcilable contradictions and souless priorities, which
require layer upon layer of sophistry, speciousness, and prevarications
to maintain an illusion of rationality and decency.
Let’s examine some
of the “best propaganda bourgeoisie money can buy” as we
peruse some choice analyses Peggy has composed for the Wall Street Journal
in the name of God, country, and free markets:
From her September 22, 2000
“Dumb-Good vs. Evil-Smart” we have this astute observation:
“Mr. Bush, as we all
know, has a tendency to mispronounce words, like a bright and nervous
boy trying to show the admissions director that he's well-read. His
syntax is highly individualistic. He's bouncy and affectionate and funny
in a joshy way as opposed to a witty way.
But he is, almost transparently,
a good man. He cares about children; he wants government to be honest;
he wants to protect his country from bad guys; he wants to stand up
for those who protect us. He is a good governor, he has a natural sympathy
for those--the hardware store owner and the woman who starts her own
housecleaning company--who are taxed and regulated to death in America.
He thinks this abusive. He wants to liberate them. If he becomes president--when,
I believe, he becomes president--he will drive conservatives to distraction
with his tendency to think with his heart, and not his brain.”
In her 10/23/2000 WSJ opinion
piece, subtitled “George Bush is Reaganesque. Now America Knows
it”, she wrote of George Bush:
“George W. Bush not
only won the debate Wednesday night, but in a way that damaged a central
assumption of the Gore campaign. That assumption is that Mr. Bush doesn't
know very much. But Mr. Bush demonstrated that he knows a lot, and that
his common-sense views and observations can be spoken in a common-sense
language accessible to all. He sat back in his chair, spoke of America's
role in the world, and made it clear that that role should be grounded
in moral modesty and strategic realism. He suggested that the various
forces at work in the world should be met not with American hubris but
with moderation, and with attention to the kind of example we can, as
a great power, set. He seemed thoughtful, knowledgeable, and he buried
the memory of the less-seasoned Gov. Bush who one day in Boston flailed
when pressed by an interviewer who insisted he name the ruler of Pakistan.”
The following week Peggy
scribbled a column entitled, “The Loyal Opposition” and
further glorified the future Nuremberg-class war criminal:
“….He is a good
man. He'd be a better man if his life had been harder. But you can't
have everything…..I was thinking the other night: Mr. Bush seems
the least radical politician in America. He lives in the middle of the
land of the possible. He is by nature moderate, by habit and thinking
a moderate man…..”
Evidently prognostication
and character assessments are not Ms. Noonan’s strengths. Or perhaps
it would be more accurate to conclude that George Bush was the best
man to serve as the “democratically elected” front man for
the criminal enterprise we call a government, and that Ms. Noonan is
a highly paid shill for our deeply entrenched oligarchy.
In February 2007, the WSJ
published her, “Happy Birthday, Mr. Reagan”, subtitled “He
was a man of determination and good cheer---one of America’s greats”:
“Lesley Stahl of "60
Minutes" was CBS's White House correspondent during the Reagan
administration, and I asked her what she remembered most. She said,
"We reporters would stake out 'the driveway' to see who was going
in to see the president. In the first few years there was a stream of
people who came to argue against his budget-cutting proposals. They
would march up that driveway in a huff, smoke coming out of their nostrils
as they rehearsed their angry arguments about why he was destroying
the lives of poor people, or schoolkids.
‘I remember specifically
a group of mayors from big cities, livid about cuts to their welfare
programs, school-lunch programs, etc. They were there to give the president
a scolding; they were going to tell him. And in they'd march. Two hours
later, out they came. We were all ready with the cameras and the mikes
to get their version of the telling off. But they were all little lambs,
subdued. . . . He had charmed them. . . . The mayors told us Reagan
agreed with them. That they had persuaded him. . . .
Thirty minutes later Larry
Speakes was in the press room telling us the numbers would not in fact
change. The mayors had 'misunderstood' the president. Still, I'll bet
anything if you talked to those mayors today, they would tell you Reagan
was a great guy.’"
Peggy is right. America needs
more “greats” who can subdue people like "little lambs"
when they dare to demand we use public money to provide assistance to
the poor or to hungry children. One with the guile to defuse the anger
of those fighting for social justice with lies and false promises most
certainly qualifies as a “great guy”.
When Gerald Ford died, Ms.
Peggy opined in her 12/29/06 WSJ piece, “Ford Without Tears,”
“The first is that
when he pardoned Richard Nixon, he threw himself on a grenade to protect
the country from shame, from going too far. It was an act of deep political
courage, and it was shocking. Almost everyone in the country hated it,
including me. But Ford was right. Richard Nixon had been ruined, forced
to resign, run out of town on a rail. There was nothing to be gained--nothing--by
his being broken on the dock. What was then the new left would never
forgive Ford. They should thank him on their knees that he deprived
history of proof that what they called their idealism was not untinged
by sadism.”
Thank you, Peggy, for having
the courage to be the voice of reason. Ford’s pardon of Nixon
was a noble act indeed. Imagine if he hadn’t cut a deal with Alexander
Haig to become president in exchange for the pardon. We might actually
have seen a US President tried, convicted and imprisoned, for crimes
both foreign and domestic. (Let’s not forget Nixon’s secret,
illegal bombings in Cambodia that annihilated 600,000 human beings).
Compliments of Gerald Ford, the US ruling elite can continue running
rough shod over the Constitution and committing mass murder with impunity.
Peggy offered us this gem
on the notoriously reactionary Rick Santorum in November, 2006. She
called it, “We Need His Kind”:
“Mr. Santorum has been
at odds with the modernist impulse, or liberalism, or whatever it now
and fairly should be called. Most of his own impulses--protect the unprotected,
help the helpless, respect the common man--have not been conservative
in the way conservative is roughly understood, or portrayed, in the
national imagination. If this were the JFK era, his politics would not
be called "right wing" but "progressive." He is,
at heart, a Catholic social reformer. Bobby Kennedy would have loved
him.”
She actually characterized
Rick Santorum as a progressive. Displaying such utter disregard for
truth in a widely read column took some real chutzpah! My hat is off
to her on that one.
Just a few days ago, our
gal Peggy lamented that "We’re Scaring our Children to Death”:
“This week saw a small
and telling controversy involving a mural on the walls of Roosevelt
High School in Los Angeles. The mural is big--400 feet long, 18 feet
high at its peak--and eye-catching, as would be anything that ‘presents
a colorful depiction of the rape, slaughter and enslavement of North
America's indigenous people by genocidal Europeans.’ Those are
the words of the Los Angeles Times's Bob Sipchen, who noted ‘the
churning stream of skulls in the wake of Columbus's Nina, Pinta and
Santa Maria.’
What is telling is not that
some are asking if the mural portrays the Conquistadors as bloodthirsty
monsters, or if it is sufficiently respectful to the indigenous Indians
of Mexico. What is telling is that those questions completely miss the
point and ignore the obvious. Here is the obvious:
The mural is on the wall
of a public school. It is on a public street. Children walk by.
We are scaring our children
to death. Have you noticed this? And we're doing it more and more.”
How could that school have
been so reckless? What could possibly have compelled those hopelessly
irresponsible school administrators to reveal the truth about the genocide
waged by Western Europeans against the indigenous people of Turtle Island?
How dare they expose our children to such heresy! Leave Hollywood and
video game manufacturers to saturate our youth with heaping portions
of gratuitous fantasy violence to distract them from the horrific decimation
we US Americans have been inflicting on the rest of the world for many
years.
In June 2002, Ms. Noonan
wrote “Capitalism Betrayed” for the Journal:
“I have been reading
Michael Novak, the philosopher and social thinker and, to my mind, great
man. Twenty years ago this summer he published what may be his masterpiece,
"The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism." It was a stunning book
marked by great clarity of expression and originality of thought. He
spoke movingly of the meaning and morality of capitalism. He asked why
capitalism is good, and answered that there is one great reason: Of
all the systems devised by man it is the one most likely to lift the
poor out of poverty.
Mr. Novak answered by quoting
the philosopher Jacques Maritain, who once observed that affluence in
fact inspires us to look beyond the material for meaning in our lives.
"It's exactly because people have bread that they realize you can't
live by bread alone. ‘In a paradoxical way, said Mr. Novak, the
more materially comfortable a society becomes, the more spiritual it
is likely to become, "its hungers more markedly transcendent.’"
If capitalism is the system
“most likely to lift the poor out of poverty”, it is strikingly
counterintuitive that millions plunged into inhuman working conditions,
wage slavery, child labor, and economic misery when the United States
practiced a much “purer” form of capitalism around the turn
of the Twentieth Century. Interestingly, now that US capitalism has
been “tainted” through evolution into a “mixed economy”,
working conditions and wages have improved significantly. Yet our unimaginably
wealthy nation still has over a million homeless, a high infant mortality
rate, nearly 50 million people without viable means to attain health
care, and about 13% of our population living in poverty. Apparently
these wretched souls must wait for the materially comfortable members
of our society to evolve spiritually and begin ministering to the poor.
On Thursday, August 25, 2005,
Peggy cautioned us to “Think Dark”:
"The Pentagon says this
huge and historic base-closing plan will save $50 billion over the next
two decades. They may be right. But it's a bad plan anyway, a bad idea,
and exactly the wrong thing to do in terms of future and highly possible
needs.
The Pentagon has some obvious
logic on its side--we have a lot of bases, and they cost a lot of money--and
numbers on paper. They have put forward their numbers on savings, redundancies,
location and obsolescence.
But they're wrong. What they
ought to do, and what the commission reviewing the Pentagon's plan ought
to do, is sit down and think dark.
In the rough future our country
faces, bad things will happen. We all know this. It's hard to imagine
some of those things on a beautiful day with the sun shining and the
markets full, but let's imagine anyway.
Among the things we may face
over the next decade, as we all know, is another terrorist attack on
American soil. But let's imagine the next one has many targets, is brilliantly
planned and coordinated. Imagine that there are already 100 serious
terror cells in the U.S., two per state. The members of each cell have
been coming over, many but not all crossing our borders, for five years.
They're working jobs, living lives, quietly planning.
Imagine they're planning
that on the same day in the not-so-distant future, they will set off
nuclear suitcase bombs in six American cities, including Washington,
which will take the heaviest hit. Hundreds of thousands may die; millions
will be endangered. Lines will go down, and to make it worse the terrorists
will at the same time execute the cyberattack of all cyberattacks, causing
massive communications failure and confusion. There will be no electricity;
switching and generating stations will also have been targeted. There
will be no word from Washington; the extent of the national damage will
be as unknown as the extent of local damage is clear. Daily living will
become very difficult, and for months--food shortages, fuel shortages.
Let's make it worse. On top
of all that, on the day of the suitcase nukings, a half dozen designated
cells will rise up and assassinate national, state and local leaders.
There will be chaos, disorder, widespread want; law-enforcement personnel,
or what remains of them, will be overwhelmed and outmatched...
…And all this of course
is just one scenario. The madman who runs North Korea could launch a
missile attack on the United States tomorrow, etc. There are limitless
possibilities for terrible trouble."
In this example, Peggy’s
Janusian stance and shameless fear-mongering on behalf of the military-industrial
complex are beyond the pale. Typically, Ms. Noonan extols the virtues
of small government through fiscal conservatism, cuts to federal programs
to uplift the poor, and progressive tax decreases. Yet when her cronies
in the defense industry face the potential of diminished profits, Ms.
Noonan rolls out her propagandistic Howitzer and blasts her readers
in the face with a heavy dose of dread.
Painful as it is, let’s
have one final look at an excerpt from Noonan’s loathsome agitprop.
From March 30, 2001, we have “The Haves vs. the Will-Haves”:
“Class warfare, says
Mr. Barone, is at odds with Americans' hopeful nature. ‘We don't
identify ourselves as permanently downtrodden; it is not the American
experience that you're kept down and can't move up.’ In America
you can not only move up, but do so quickly. The divorced single mother
of this year gets a job or remarries and suddenly she and her children
are not the bottom line on anybody's statistical readout anymore.
It is the fantastic fluidity
and hopefulness of Americans, their enduring sense that in only one
generation they can go from nothing to everything and nowhere to anywhere,
that contributes to some surprising statistics on the death tax. Only
2% of Americans pay the levy, but in the polls 70% are consistently
against it. Maybe this is because, as Steve Forbes used to say, they
think it unfair that anyone should have to deal with the undertaker
and the taxman in the same week. But it's also probably a good bet that
this majority opposes the death tax because they believe that some day
they'll have money, or their kids will, and they won't want to pay it.
We all think we can make
it. We all think we can work hard and succeed, or win the lottery, or
our cousin's new restaurant will be a big success and he'll hire us
as greeter or maitre d'. We all dream. The inheritance tax seems antidreamer
because it seems anti-American dream. A lot of Americans think that
when you bash the rich you're bashing their future ZIP code.”
Whoa there, Peggy! Someone
needs to rein you in before you become hopelessly lost in the nether
regions.
In actuality, Ms. Noonan
is far too educated to actually believe the tripe she has written here.
The meritocracy myth is a cornerstone of the opulent class’s relentless
yet nearly invisible grip on wealth and power in the United States.
Once can cite numerous examples of individuals who “pulled themselves
up by their boot-straps” and “made something of themselves”
in this land of “unlimited opportunity”.
Yet we live in a nation of
300 million people and statistics expose these “Horatio Alger's”
for the anomalies that they are. The top 1% of the US population boasts
ownership of 40% of the nation’s wealth while the bottom 80% “hoards”
about 9% of our riches. A child born into the bottom 20% of the US income
stratification has a 1% chance of joining those in the top 5%. Those
born into the middle class have a “greatly enhanced” 1.8%
chance of enjoying such upward mobility. For every Larry Ellison or
Bill Gates there are tens of millions of “won’t-haves”.
Incidentally, the reason
many poor and working class US Americans oppose the “death tax”
is precisely because media whores like Ms. Noonan have convinced them
that the ESTATE TAX is “anti-American dream” and have bamboozled
them into believing that there is more than an infinitesimal chance
they will acquire enough financial wealth to face such a tax. The purpose
of the estate tax is to limit the perpetuation of the very entrenched
aristocracy Ms. Noonan would have us believe does not exist in the United
States.
While Ms. Noonan is merely
one soldier in an army of mendacious propagandists waging war on behalf
of the moneyed elite in the United States, her incestuous ties with
government, her veil of respectability, and her platform from which
she penetrates the consciousness of millions who are intellectually
unprepared to fend off her toxic perversions of the truth combine to
make her quite formidable.
So the next time you are
reading one of her columns or books, or listening to her speak, remember
that Peggy Noonan is probably weaving a clever, subtle, and sophistic
argument to advance the agenda of thieves and murderers. But it’s
too late to worry about her soul. She made a whore of that long ago.
Jason Miller is a wage slave of the American Empire
who has freed himself intellectually and spiritually. He is Cyrano's
Journal Online's associate editor ( http://www.bestcyrano.org/).
He welcomes constructive correspondence at [email protected]
or via his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/.
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