Peggy Noonan Loses It

Poor Peggy Noonan. The Wall Street Journal's knee-jerk partisan columnist has completely surrendered to Obama Derangement Syndrome and turned her weekly Journal effort into plotting out ways to express her irrational contempt for the president.

This week she calls Obama a “loser.” Last week he was a “boring” “walking headache” and Noonan suggested he just “shut up.”

Oh my.

Remember, of course, that Noonan was part of the conservative media movement that for years played defense for George W. Bush and demanded (demanded!) the office of the presidency always be treated with the utmost respect. Anything less was patently un-American. (Noonan also disdains incivility, or so we're told.)

But now with a Democrat in the White House that respect has evaporated and has been replaced with a type of absurd personal disdain that seems to be driving Noonan to utter distraction as she searches for way to express her scorn for Barack Obama.

What's curious is that unlike some media ideologues who relentlessly ridicule Obama's policies, Noonan, a Beltway media favorite, seems to be fixated on the personal in a way that defies rational punditry.

What's also embarrassing is that her juvenile bout of name-calling comes during the debt debate in which she's been trying to depict Republicans as the grown-ups and the ones trying to solve the nation's problems. (If Obama would just get out of the way!) But as Thursday's late-night non-vote on Speaker of the House John Boehner's bill indicated, that doesn't seem to match reality.

And actually, if you go back to last week's condescending column, Noonan was sure the Senate's so-called Gang of Six had figured out the debt logjam, and if Obama would just stop his arrogant grandstanding the bipartisan Gang of Six could find a way out of this crisis.

Oops.

Turns out it was Republican Boehner, under pressure from far-right members of his caucus, who last week walked away from the Gang of Six deal. But Noonan's now silent on that point.

This week Noonan makes no mention that it was conservatives who torpedoed the Gang of Six plan she touted as the most promising compromise. (i.e. “It's good, it represents progress, build from it. ”) Instead, Noonan simply doubles down with the Obama name-calling.

Question: Who's the real loser here?