Noonan: Hillary Clinton is a prissy sissy

I heard Pat Schroeder whining about this on NPR this morning. What a living anachronism! She complained bitterly about jokes on late night television comparing Hillary to Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. The jokes are hilarious! These old guard feminists are still as humorless as ever.

Peggy Noonan is my favorite political writer. Rod is pretty close though :-) That line about Golda Meir buying up Golda nutcrackers by the boxes and giving them out as party favors made me fall out of my chair. Vintage Noonan :-)

recovering ex-Pentecostal: Why not try to lighten up a bit and be a little nicer to our Peggy?

To paraphrase Tom Hanks's character in "A League of Their Own": There's no crying in politics!

On the other hand, she has shown herself willing to fight on in a doomed campaign when lesser men might, and did, throw in the towel.

Noonan quotes Thatcher quoting Churchill quoting a poem in one of his famous speeches:

When daylight comes, comes in the light;
ln front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.

So I felt compelled to look up the Churchill speech:

http://www.churchill-society-london.org.uk/LngHrdWr.html

What an amazing speech! I was actually moved to tears reading this section:

"What a triumph the life of these battered cities is, over the worst that fire and bomb can do. What a vindication of the civilized and decent way of living we have been trying to work for and work towards in our Island. What a proof of the virtues of free institutions. What a test of the quality of our local authorities, and of institutions and customs and societies so steadily built."

Can anyone imagine any politician today offering such stirring oratory to his or her nation?

Obama essentially polishes platitudes into pretty phrases, and is given credit for his incredible speechifying. He pales beside this.

And humor is in the eye of the beholder. I still think Ann Richards did some of the best political one-liners in history.

Pat Schroeder an anachronism? Didn't her first term coincide with McCain's?

These posts are full of statements that would be considered totally irrelevant to the topic if the subject were male.

I am reminded of why I decided not to subscribe to First Things--I had the misfortune to be introduced to the magazine shortly after Bella Abzug's death, which Neuhaus memorialized by insulting her politics, her looks and her voice.

Astorian @ 12:42 P.M.

"Apparently, no matter who wins, the American voter gets condemned for being insufficiently progressive."

Precisely.

Your servant,

Lord Karth

This is Noonan at her blinding best, so brilliant and scintillating that all the light coming off that column will probably induce migraines and seizures. The line that was fall-off-the-seat funny: "One wants to be sympathetic to Mrs. Clinton at this point, if for no other reason than to show one's range." Delicious stuff.

Marian, I think you misunderstood the poster who mentioned McCain--it was a supporter who supposedly used the b*** line, not McCain himself. Besides, b**** is quite unlike n****, at least to me: the one denigrates an entire race of people, but the other is usually quite specific; in other words, that a man (or even a woman) calls a particular woman a b*** doesn't mean he thinks *all* women are, just that one.

I think you have to look pretty hard to find actual misogyny directed at HRC, as opposed to specific dislike of her--and I don't buy for a minute that disliking Hillary is somehow proof of the disliker's general hatred of women. She's a remarkably unlikable person, something that her supporters may have failed to realize until much too late in the game; but saying that isn't an indication of misogyny, is it?

Real misogyny would be to exempt Hillary from the usual rough and tumble of campaign life and rhetoric on the grounds that a woman can't handle such stuff. Oddly, Hillary's complaints seem almost to be suggesting as much--that she's somehow been the target of much more vitriol just because she's a woman, unlike her opponent....but you can't go very far with that line of thinking, can you? One would think that Obama would have more reason to complain of discrimination and prejudice than Hillary, who, after all, is a former First Lady who came into this campaign with a great deal of name recognition and a lot of willing supporters. Frankly, this race was hers to lose from the beginning.

"Who on earth believes anything Ms Noonan says?"
Posted by: recovering ex-Pentecostal | May 23, 2008 11:19 AM

"I'd hate to have seen what recovering ex-pentecostal was like before he got better.
…"
Posted by: Hunk Hondo | May 23, 2008 12:10 PM

Hunk, that's positively Noonanesque of you, and ever so much better than the reply I was was forming to recovering ex-Pentecostal.