RrrROWL! Peggy Noonan Unloads On Sarah Palin

Peggy Noonan takes the gloves off:

Her history does not need to be rehearsed at any length. Ten months ago she was embraced with friendliness by her party. The left and the media immediately overplayed their hand, with attacks on her children. The party rallied round, as a party should. She went on the trail a sensation but demonstrated in the ensuing months that she was not ready to go national and in fact never would be. She was hungry, loved politics, had charm and energy, loved walking onto the stage, waving and doing the stump speech. All good. But she was not thoughtful. She was a gifted retail politician who displayed the disadvantages of being born into a point of view (in her case a form of conservatism; elsewhere and in other circumstances, it could have been a form of liberalism) and swallowing it whole: She never learned how the other sides think, or why.

In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. "I'm not wired that way," "I'm not a quitter," "I'm standing up for our values." I'm, I'm, I'm.

In another age it might not have been terrible, but here and now it was actually rather horrifying.

Noonan is properly horrified at the prospect of a Palin candidacy; I imagine that Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee are also recoiling at how Palin's poll numbers have increased since her addled resignation speech last Friday. Palin's children, I should also add, would never have been a target if she hadn't paraded them before the media at every opportunity. The Obama children were never a topic in the media for the simple reason that the Obamas, unlike Sarah Palin, never used them as political props.

That said, I must congratulate Peggy Noonan for finally recognizing and speaking the truth. Palin isn't just a joke, she's a bad one.