Michelle Malkin and Ilana Mercer have ripped David Brooks and Peggy Noonan for either slobbering over Obama or raking Mitt Romney, both along MSM lines, all the while impersonating or assuming a conservative guise. Something to take into consideration, too, is the heavily oracular voice, particularly notable on Noonan's part.
Well, how did PN's reading of the fiery signs and entrails fare last time around?
I went back to the Noonan's "case for Barack Obama" piece of October 30, 2008, where she possibly, coyly, maybe, maybe not joined a line of other conservative reputationists -- Christopher Buckley, David Brooks, Colin Powell, etc. -- who signed up to the follow the Obama camp.
She wrote:
The case for Barack Obama, in broad strokes:
He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing;
I guess the hedge word here was "possibility," but given the signs at the time -- Frantz Fanon, Rashid Khalidi, Rev. Wright, etc. -- it never, ever appeared that a good, pro-Western change could be in the Obama offing, and so it was not. Strike One
Noonan continued:
his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief.
Began with the fresh removal of the Churchill bust from the Oval Office, the fresh interview with Al Arabiya, the Cairo speech, nationalization of 2 of the Big Three, socialized medicine, and away we go ....
What really stands out four years later is that those lines could have been written by the Obama campaign itself. These points came out of the hype, the main set of talking points, the message that was rammed home by the Obama-MSM day after day after day. This is significant in that Noonan's current critique of Romeny seems similarly born of the MSM-Obama machine. She believes the hype.
She sure did then.
He climbed steep stairs, born off the continent with no father to guide, a dreamy, abandoning mother, mixed race, no connections.
Except Frank Marshall Davis. Then there was that Columbia BA, Harvard Law JD, tickets to non-pareil neworks.
He rose with guts and gifts.
But won't release a single grade or test score.
He is steady, calm, and, in terms of the execution of his political ascent, still the primary and almost only area in which his executive abilities can be discerned, he shows good judgment in terms of whom to hire and consult, what steps to take and moves to make. We witnessed from him this year something unique in American politics: He took down a political machine without raising his voice.
Whom to hire and consult? David Axelrod? Bill Ayers?
I think we get the picture.
Pay no attention, Mitt.