REPUBLICANS: WE ARE ALL ANN COULTER

Peggy Noonan today, writing about Hillary Clinton:

She does not seem like someone who would anguish and weep over sending men into harm's way.

... Maybe a lifetime in politics has bled some of the human element out of her. Maybe there wasn't that much to begin with. Maybe she thinks that if she wept, the wires that hold her together would short.

Peggy Noonan today, writing about The New York Times:

Frank Rich is running around with his antiwar screeds as if it's 1968 and he's an idealist with a beard, as opposed to what he is, a guy who if he pierced his ears gravy would come out.

What the hell is this? Noonan, the high and mighty defender of human modesty and dignity, the one who threatened that if another airport security person touched her she'd shriek, "You are embarrassing the angels" -- suddenly she's Don Rickles? Suddenly she's doing fat jokes?

Once only Ann Coulter, among mainstream pundits, declared that political opponents deserved death on charges of treason; now everyone's doing it. Coulter's use of the term "infallibility" as a weapon is now entrenched in our political language. And now this -- politics reduced to cheap riffs on appearance and personal affect -- from someone who used to pretend to be above such rhetoric. Coulterism is now utterly, irreversibly mainstream.

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On the other hand, Noonan is still Noonan. Here she is in her attack on Hillary today, citing presidents who, presumably unlike Hillary, have grieved at having to send soldiers into combat:

LBJ felt anguish; there are pictures of him, head in hands, suffering. Bush the Elder wept as he talked, with Paula Zahn, about what it was to send men to war. Bush the Younger would breastfeed the military if he could.

That last sentence? Eeeeuuuuw.