Posted on by Californiacontrarian

A Chameleon

Peggy Noonan (Wall Street Journal) used to be one of my favorite opinion writers. I would look forward to her weekend piece, and would immediately find and read her column every Saturday morning. But then Donald Trump got elected, and Ms. Noonan became a chameleon. This must have been a truly traumatic experience for Ms. Noonan, as the quality of her writing seemed to go steadily downhill. No matter what her primary topic was, almost every week she would hit a mogul and would segue into Trump bashing. It got old, and recently I would often not read her opinion piece at all.

But then it happened. On 6/15/19 she wrote a common sense piece that was chockfull of good advice. I have taken the liberty of quoting her as follows:

“Now and then a country needs to get slapped.”

“A great nation can’t function cut in two, with half the nation at the other half’s throats. It can’t go forward in history that way; it must be one thing or the other, as Lincoln said.”

“You can’t insult the very idea off democracy and say, Oh well this is hard, so we’ll have a do-over on the vote, and hope that the people will have a different outcome. You have to accept the result and forge ahead.”
I was encouraged. Finally Ms. Noonan was coming around to a pro-Trump position! But as we all are aware it is always much easier to give advice to others than it is to apply that same advice to your own situation. “This is how you should raise your kids.” “This is how you should invest your money.” Etc.

Sure enough Ms. Noonan was finding it easy to give advice to some other country, namely Great Britain vis-a-vis on how to proceed with Brexit, when in fact she could have suggested these same bits of wisdom to our Democrat politicians . . . perhaps on border immigration, perhaps on fetal heartbeat and abortion, perhaps on the wisdom of expanding the welfare state.

Again to quote Ms. Noonan with some advice for politicians, “Stop whingeing it. You were hired to lead the people. If you are not talented enough to do that, you can at least follow them.”

Is this a one-and-done opinion piece for Ms. Noonan? Are we merely seeing another side of the Noonan-chameleon? Will she return next week to bashing President Trump?

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