Noonan: against non-profiling, but not for profiling

Peggy Noonan has been openly and increasingly hostile to President Bush ever since his 2005 inaugural address in which he used the word “freedom” about 600 times and argued that any dictatorship anywhere in the world is a threat to U.S. national security, so naturally Powerline, whose mission is the defense of Bush against all critics, is displeased with her. Indeed, Scott at Powerline expresses a personal hostility toward Noonan the like of which I have never seen expressed at that website toward any establishment conservative. He even entitles the entry “Season of the Witch,” plainly aiming the epithet at her. However, Scott also makes a good argument. Noonan in her Wall Street Journal column eloquently protests the airport security measures that in the name of fairness subject all Americans, including middle-aged women like herself, to humiliating and demoralizing treatment. But, Scott says, Noonan herself fails to indicate what she thinks ought to be done differently:

I suspect that the reason Noonan doesn’t draw out the implication of her observations is that doing so … would require an act of courage on Noonan’s part….

The underlying political realities that give us the airport security system described by Noonan are related to the boundaries of political correctness that Noonan herself carefully observes in this column.

It’s a fair point. Since Noonan thinks the equal screening of all people—Irish-American ladies along with Muslim-American young men—is wrong, she must logically support the idea that screening be focused on Muslims. But she doesn’t say that.

It is, in other words, the typical conservative syndrome I have discussed so often. Conservatives endlessly grumble about the inevitable consequences of the ruling liberal ideology of non-discrimination—in this instance, an airport security system that absurdly and equally targets all passengers. But they are unwilling to take a principled stand against that liberal ideology—by, in this instance, calling for discrimination against Muslims.

What is a conservative? A liberal who complains a lot.

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Noonan in her column also makes some interesting observations about Barack Obama and liberals generally: The only thing they like about America is liberal progress. America, its history, its achievements, leaves them cold.

Noonan is moving in a good direction, recognizing the difference between America the actual historical country and America the liberal project. However, she still needs to repudiate her 2002 column in which she contemptuously dismissed a concrete sense of nationhood as “mud.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 26, 2008 02:49 PM | Send