FUN WITH NUMBERS, STARRING PEGGY NOONAN

I haven't even gotten to the second paragraph of Peggy Noonan's new column ("America's Crisis of Character") and she's already wrong, twice:

People in politics talk about the right track/wrong track numbers as an indicator of public mood. This week Gallup had a poll showing only 24% of Americans feel we're on the right track as a nation. That's a historic low. Political professionals tend, understandably, to think it's all about the economy -- unemployment, foreclosures, we're going in the wrong direction. I've long thought that public dissatisfaction is about more than the economy, that it's also about our culture, or rather the flat, brute, highly sexualized thing we call our culture.

Gallup's version of "right track/wrong track" is to ask whether people are satisfied or dissatisfied with how things are going in the U.S. -- and, in fact, that current satisfaction level of 24% is a hell of a lot higher than what we had in late 2008, when the satisfaction level was 9%. Gee, who was president then?

Now, as for this having to do with "our culture, or rather the flat, brute, highly sexualized thing we call our culture"? Know what the satisfaction level was in 1998, most of which we spent talking about presidential blowjobs?

It was 60%.

Sorry, Peggy. I know you want to believe that everyone in America is as squicked out by sex as you are, but we just aren't.

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Ah, I see: what follows in the column is a dog's breakfast of moral horrors: whoring Secret Service agents, GSA partiers, troops posing with body parts, unfireable New York teachers, and violent "flash mobs." Flash mobs? Will someone please block the Drudge Report on the computer she writes on? You'll be doing the poor, fretful woman a favor. Oh, and tell her to read some Roy Edroso, not that she'll listen.

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And no, now that you mention it, Ted Nugent's fantasy of suicide by liberal-fascist cop, and all his other violent talk, somehow failed to make Peggy's list of horrors.