Got Milk?

At this point, it must simply be assumed that instead of an actual paycheck, Peggy Noonan is paid with vouchers for Black Velvet and Paxil.

Bush the Younger would breastfeed the military if he could.

Um, yeahhhh. Holy fucking shit, do WSJ columnists not have editors or anything? Regardless, this one's worth its weight in gold, and it's going up on the header of this blog for a while. Mencken's taking a few months off; I want people chewing on Nooners' slab of insanity into election season. The Democrats oughta make that their fucking campaign slogan, just to gross people out.

But let's backtrack a tad and look at the context in which this grotesque image resides. Nooners is trying -- way, way too hard -- to ventriloquize Hillary Clinton's supposed complete and utter lack of basic human empathy. Apparently Nooners' chemical diet has given her, as with her superhero lactating preznit, special powers to see into the souls of others.

She doesn't have to prove she's a man, she has to prove she's a woman. No one in America thinks she's a woman. They think she's a tough little termagant in a pantsuit. They think she's something between an android and a female impersonator.

No one in America thinks Karen Hughes is a woman either, dearie, but that hasn't stopped her from gumming up the gears of mediocre governance.

[Hillary] is not perceived as a big warm mommy trying to resist her constant impulse to sneak you candy. They think she has to resist her constant impulse to hit you with a bat. She lacks a deep (as opposed to quick) warmth, a genuine and almost phenomenological sense of rightness in her own skin. She seems like someone who might calculatedly go to war, or not, based on how she wanted to be perceived and look and do.

Now, I am definitely no fan of Hillary, but Nooners is making some bizarre leaps of assertion here. She's overstating Clinton's calculated demeanor, and conflating it with Noonan's own peculiar assumptions of what a woman is or is not. No one sees Condi Rice as a "big warm mommy" either. That is orthogonal to whether she is skilled at what she does or not (mostly not).

Clinton's endless triangulations and petty machinations, to be sure, are tiresome, as those traits were in her husband. Neither of them ever met an issue they couldn't massage and finesse into something politically useful, as with Hillary's recent abject utilization of flag desecration. Instead of defining her philosophy to the Democratic base (in the broader sense) by espousing more libertarian principles, she cynically pimps symbolic issues to people who loathe her and will never vote for her.

This is all in the service of being seen as a "serious" candidate by "serious" media, and "serious" commentators who work within those media, such as Father Tim and Tweety and Wolf Blitzer.

And Peggy Noonan, house loon for the financial industry's house organ. And they say the blogs are unhinged.