Occasionally I foray over into the VRWC side of things to see what they are saying about "our" side of things. An article by Peggy Noonan was linked from the Drudge Report website (which makes this all the more surprising), with a byline about difficult times needing less-contentious politics. I was expecting to hear a tirade about how difficult/whiney/pushy/irresponsible/etc Democrats are, and how THEY need to be nicer/kinder/gentler/etc to the poor new Republican minority in Congress. What I saw was actually rather different.
The beginning of the article actually found her decrying the debacle in Iraq, and wrapping up with statements such as this:
And the two truest statements on Iraq are, still, Colin Powell's "You break it, you own it" and Pat Buchanan's "A constitution doesn't make a country, a country makes a constitution." Iraq has a constitution but not a country.
These first 2 quotes piqued my interest, because they seem to be things that liberals have been saying all along! So I had to keep reading.
As I got to the section about needing to regain "civility", and then seeing her mention the "Webb incident" (of which I think we are all well aware), my first reaction was "here we go, another right-wing nutter takes a crack at Webb, as if we haven't already heard THAT before." However, what I saw was completely different.
For this Mr. Webb has been roundly criticized. And on reading the exchange I thought it had the sound of the rattling little aggressions of our day, but not on Mr. Webb's side. Imagine Lincoln saying, in such circumstances, "That's not what I asked you." Or JFK. Or Gerald Ford!
Wow, there it was. I had to blink a few times to believe what I was seeing. A right-winger actually saw through her shrub-colored glasses and criticized BUSH on the Webb incident? Maybe there is some hope left in the world!
She went on to decry the attitude of dominence in media and interviews (a la Bill O'Liely) and show how it influences the behaviors of politicians and pundits (perfectly exemplified by Bush's retort to Webb). She spoke more truth in this one article than I have seen her do in her whole life!
You can read the whole article here:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/...