Learning to Loathe Yourself: Peggy Noonan and How To Be a Conservative Pundit

Chris Kelly
from the Huffington Post

Chaucer, like I need to tell you, says you have to take the rough with the smooth. And that's how I've always felt about the Wall Street Journal. You get to read some of the best reporting on Earth, and the price is an editorial page that appears to be reprinted from the walls of padded cells, and originally composed in the excrement of its authors.

The roughage with the smooth. It's a little like buying Playboy for the articles, but instead of also getting pictures of naked girls, some trust fund scumbag lectures you about meritocracy.

It's like Cracker Jack, only instead of a prize with your popcorn, you get a human thumb.

I accept that. The way, in The History Boys, the students don't mind that their favorite teacher also molests them.

I guess I could also just skip that section.

But if you only read the Journal for the uncrazy, fact-based parts, you miss things like Friday's column by Peggy Noonan. And you don't get to enjoy writing like:

Suddenly an armored British army vehicle slowly rounded the corner...

("And when did you first notice this sudden/slow vehicle, Mrs. Noonan?" "Why, one fine day in the middle of the night, your honor.")

(I mean, sweet heaven, that's awful.)

But I should let her finish. (She's talking about Northern Ireland in the '80s.)

Suddenly an armored British army vehicle slowly rounded the corner, and the street came alive with kids pouring out of houses, grabbing the heavy metal lids of garbage bins, and smashing them against the pavement...

A woman came out. She was 35 or 40, her short hair standing up, uncombed. It was late afternoon, but she was in an old robe, and you could tell it was the robe she lived in. She stood there and smirked as the soldiers went by...

And I thought: Those kids banging the lids on the pavement, they are going to wind up like her...

They would grow up and assign their misery to outside forces. The boy humiliated because he's never sent to school with a clean shirt will turn that into 'Britain Get Out of Ireland.'

See? That's why you have to read the opinion pages, too. If you only read "facts" you could waste your time with 400 years of Irish history since the Battle of the Boyne. When it's actually all about laundry. Blah-blah-blah, the Easter Uprising and William of Orange. The real problem with the Irish is that their mothers don't get their whites very white.

It's not Bloody Sunday. It's mom not getting the bloodstains out.

(Continued here.)