My favorite bit in the exceptionally disingenuous Peggy Noonan column Ed Kilgore cited earlier is this:
Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the United States House of Representatives, accused the people at the meetings of “carrying swastikas and symbols like that.” (Apparently one protester held a hand-lettered sign with a “no” slash over a swastika.) But they are not Nazis, they’re Americans. Some of them looked like they’d actually spent some time fighting Nazis.
They still are, Peggy! Didn't you get the memo?
As anyone who's read a newspaper in the last two months--and I'm charitable enough to believe Noonan falls into this category--is well aware, the Democratic complaint about some of the more vociferous opponents of health-care reform is not that they are behaving like Nazis, but that they insist on portraying the Obama administration as Nazi-like. With her artfully crooked flourish, Noonan both a) defends reform opponents against a charge no one has leveled, and b) suggests it's the Democratic Party, not the GOP, that is so politically bereft that it seeks solace in the reductio ad Hitlerum. Though I suppose that's about what you'd expect from a column that bemoans the "ugly" new tone in the health care debate and claims it is all emanating from the left.
Saddest of all, though, is the fact that, wildly partisan and dishonest as she is, Noonan represents the moderate, let's-not-hitch-our-wagon-to-Sarah-Palin's-star wing of the GOP.
--Christopher Orr