Greenwald v. Nooners

It's been obvious for some time now that Peggy Noonan isn't quite playing with a full deck. I formulate that claim carefully, and express it with some trepidation. I formulate it carefully because Noonan isn't stark, raving, frothing-at-the-mouth bonkers like, say, Ann Coulter. Rather, she seems more like your daft old aunt who has allowed herself to lose contact with those parts of reality that contradict the view of the world she formulated back in the '30's. I express the claim with trepidation because charges of mental instability are, first, serious and, second, made by the right against the left with such frequency these days that...well, I suppose I worry that this will sound Pee Wee Hermanesque (I know you are, what am I?).

But this is probably an excess of caution. I suppose it's no secret that Noonan lost it--or at least a significant bit of it--some time ago. She now lives in some Narnia-esque fantasy land where Ronald Reagan routinely vanquishes the evil forces of Socialism--lead by the evil wizard Jimmy Carter--and where Reagan dies briefly by the hand of the evil Clinton, only to be reborn as George W. Bush, thus proving his divinity. Or something like that.

Part of Noonan's bizarre fantasy world is that the right is more civil than the left. Of this charge we can safely say that:

(a) It's obviously absurd.
(b) It's false
(c) It can easily be refuted
(d) It has been refuted many times
(e) The right itself, is, after all, providing us with most of the relevant evidence
(f) Fer chrissake.

I've whacked this charge around in the past--you can look it up--and Glenn Greenwald does a pretty good job of it here. It's not as good as some of his other stuff...but we're all sort of bored with this debate. We won it a long time ago, and no reasonable person thinks its worth discussing anymore.

But look: if anybody's still interested in this, the thing to do is to devote a web page to it. Carefully formulate the charges, gather and link to the evidence, and then just refer to that page every time the right tries to fly in the face of this particular fact. Every time somebody like Noonan throws out this laughable old chestnut, hundreds of liberal bloggers go to work shredding it. But it practically comes pre-shredded. We're wasting our time on this crap.

But maybe that's their insidious plan...