Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

The Miami Heat are orchestrating the most dramatic heel turn since Shawn Michaels gave Marty Janetty a dose of the ol’ Sweet Chin Music.

Longtime readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun will recall my antipathy toward Wall Street Journal columnist and Beltway insider Peggy “Some of life just has to be mysterious” Noonan. (If not, here’s a refresher.) Ms. Noonan peddles in a particularly insidious brand of Vaseline-lensed, pearl-clutching, hand-wringing sanctimony. Combine that with the ultimate conservative comfort food, Reagan worship, and you can imagine how I responded to Ms. Noonan’s most recent offering, on the occasion of the unveiling of a statue of President Ronald Reagan in the Capitol rotunda.

There’s a dozen things to hate about this particular column, be it Ms. Noonan’s invocation of “the street in small towns” in describing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s countenance (as if the highly paid media elite has so much experience with how older women in Winchestertonfieldville, Iowa smile at you); or the way she revels in the obscurity of Thomas Starr King, before casually dismissing the ousting of his statue from the Capitol. (King was a minister whose sermons railing against the evils of slavery were credited by Abraham Lincoln himself for helping to keep California in the Union at the outset of the Civil War. Appropriate, that King is being replaced by a statue of the leader of a movement that has done so much to stoke racial antipathy and cultural warfare.); or the veiled and obtuse way she manages to somehow not directly say what she really feels about our current president: “Does he understand, fully, all that is at stake in his new approaches to the Arab world? Are we spending ourselves into bankruptcy? Will California’s government be the first terrible test case of the new era?” (My answers are yes, no, and probably. What do you think, Ms. Noonan?)

Precious reader, if you actually waded through the dreck and made it to the end of the column, you know the bit that really ground my gears. If you’ll let me indulge in a money quote:

Congressmen hear choirs sing patriotic songs all the time and grow used to it. The rest of us do not and are stirred. Tourists walk through the Rotunda and think to themselves that they’d die for the signs and symbols of this place. Lawmakers experience the Rotunda as a connecting point between House and Senate that’s too often clogged by overweight tourists in shorts from Bayonne. We need term limits. When the music no longer moves you, you should leave. When you cannot leave, you should be pushed.

Pardon?

I know how to read. Ms. Noonan here is taking shots at the cold-hearted, Sahara-eyed monsters that roam the marble halls of our bicameral legislature. It’s clear to anyone with even the most minuscule powers of reading comprehension that the object of her ire here is the same group of politicians whose elbows she rubs at dinner parties and fundraisers throughout D.C. on a weekly basis.

However, comma, when she was forced to come up with a caricature that would succinctly and effectively epitomize the ultimate rube, she gave us “overweight tourists in shorts from Bayonne.” Now, you can argue, “Timmy, that’s not fair! Peggy Noonan is only describing how out-of-touch, influential Beltway elites view ordinary Americans. She’s not really insulting Bayonne!” To which I respond, Peggy Noonan IS an out-of-touch, influential Beltway elite! That’s exactly why she can speak so authoritatively for them. And if you want to deny that this is a carefully crafted image bred of Bayonne contempt, then we’re witnessing pure Beltway id, where Ms. Noonan’s first instinct is that the Bayonnaise are fat cretins with poor fashion sense. (It doesn’t really matter to Ms. Noonan, for instance, that New Jersey consistently ranks among the least obese states in the country. No, those chumps from Bayonne are overweight gawkers, and they wear shorts! Probably jean shorts!)