Peggy Noonan alerts us to breaking news:
William F. Buckley this week said words that, if you follow his columns, were not surprising. And yet coming from the man who co-fathered the modern conservative movement, carrying the intellectual heft as Reagan carried the political heft, the observation that President Bush is not, philosophically, a conservative, had the power to make one sit up and take notice.
I have had reservations in this area since Mr. Bush’s stunning inaugural speech last year, but Mr. Buckley’s comments, in a television interview last weekend, had the sting of the definitional.
What has Peggy been doing the last six years, coloring in her Ronald Reagan coloring books? Seriously, it’s only taken them about seven years to notice what was obvious from the start. The remarkable thing is that Noonan and Buckley are among the more intelligent members of the conservative commentariat.
It’s not that I am impressed with my own intelligence, there are an abundance of things I do not understand. But the deep and abiding moronism that abounds in the media, left and right, seldom fails to astound me.
Why do people pay attention to anything they say? They are dependably wrong, often reliably so! I’m thinking of starting a tracking service to note various pundits’ predictions. I’ll bet aside from a handful of commentators, most of them bat well below the Mendoza line.