Noonan’s realism

In the midst of the joy she says that she and the whole world feel over the “Arab spring” (a phrase that has pretty much the same connotation for me as “Springtime for Hitler”), Peggy Noonan has not backed away from her severe (and welcome in these parts, though greeted with disdain by her former fans at Lucianne.com) criticism of Bush’s inaugural:

I continue to think the president’s inaugural address, suggesting as it did that he was on a mission to expunge all political tyranny from the globe, and asserting that our nation’s survival depended on this utopian project, was a rather crazy speech, weirdly Wilsonian and at odds with conservatism’s ancestral knowledge of the imperfectability of this world and the inability of politics to heal all that wounds us.

More importantly, she says, while the current apparent success of Bush’s policy is grounds for hope and joy (though not, in her view, for messianic confidence), it is time for us to stop looking obsessively outward, toward other peoples and our attempted transformation of them, and instead think on ourselves and our own safety. Civil defense is the priority, she insists, yet we don’t think about it because it would remind us that we are in danger of weapons-of-mass-destruction attacks by domestic terrorists, and raising that prospect would ruin our high.

So, Noonan comes across as the realist, urging a return to basics while everyone else is dancing in the streets. But is she really being realistic? Notwithstanding her grim reminders of the inevitability of future Moslem terrorist attacks in America and her calls for greater civil defense measures to deal with same, she does not have a word to say about the sine qua non of such terrorist attacks: the presence in America of two or three million Mideastern Moslems, and their steady increase through immigration. No, that is taken for granted. That cannot be questioned. That is the sacred reality around which we must tiptoe, and to which we must adjust.

So much for Noonan’s realism.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 10, 2005 11:20 AM | Send