THE BEAM IN HER OWN EYE

Peggy Noonan, even though she's no fan of Donald Trump, rejects the call by some Never Trumpers to "burn down" the Republican Party.

Now various of [Trump's] foes, in or formerly of his party, want to burn the whole thing down—level the party, salt the earth where it stood, remove Republican senators, replace them with Democrats.

This strikes me as another form of nihilism. It’s bloody-minded and not fully responsible....

Many if not most of those calling for burning the whole thing down are labeled “Never Trump,” and a lot of them are characterologically quick to point the finger of blame. They’re aiming at Trump supporters in Congress....

But Never Trumpers never seem to judge themselves. Many of them, when they were profiting through past identities as Republicans or conservatives, supported or gave strategic cover to the wars that were such a calamity, and attacked those who dissented.... Never Trumpers eloquently decry the vulgarization of politics and say the presidency is lowered by a man like Mr. Trump, and it is. But they invented Sarah Palin and unrelentingly attacked her critics. They often did it in the name of party loyalty.

The wars she's referring to are the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan -- "two unwon wars, which constituted a historic foreign-policy catastrophe," as she puts it.

But she has some nerve chastising others for pounding the war drums. Here was Noonan in 2003:

Last Thursday night Tom Brokaw carried a war report that featured an American GI who’d been shot in the leg outside Baghdad. They showed him being treated in the field on a gurney. His pants had been cut away, and you could see his shorts. They were red, white and blue. They had stars and stripes like a flag. And one of the soldiers treating him looked up and smiled. “Nice shorts,” he said....

Our young troops love their country. That is why they are where they are. It has had me thinking a happy thought, about the success with which our country, for all its troubles the past few decades, has continued to communicate to new generations the simple idea of the goodness of loving America. They have picked up the sheer exuberant joy of understanding a thing and, because one understands it and because it is good, loving it, and then acting on that love to the extent that you would fight for it, you would even die for it. This is a beautiful thing, more precious than gold....

Is this corny? Too bad. It’s beautiful to see Americans stand up and embrace their patrimony and go forth into the world with faith. And none of this is unconnected to our president. George W. Bush has given our soldiers something to be proud of, something they can understand and respect. He is, now, after all he’s been through the past two years, Mr. Backbone. He has demonstrated to a seething and skeptical world that America can and will stand and fight for a cause, see it through, help the tormented and emerge victorious....

America appears to have a president worthy of its people.

The wars are good and our troops are good and George W. Bush, who sent them to fight in those wars, is very, very good. That was the message of Peggy Noonan when it counted.

Oh, and also this, written shortly after Bush was reelected in 2004 as a war president:

About a year ago I was visiting West Point, and I was talking to a big officer, a general or colonel. But he had the medals and ribbons and the stature, and he asked me what I thought of President Bush. I tried to explain what most impressed me about Mr. Bush, and I kept falling back on words like “courage” and “guts.” I wasn’t capturing the special quality Mr. Bush has of making a tough decision and then staying with it if he thinks it’s right and paying the price even when the price is high and—

I stopped speaking for a moment. There was silence. And then the general said, “You mean he’s got two of ’em.” And I laughed and said yes, that’s exactly what I mean.

And while Noonan soured on Sarah Palin fairly early, she was dazzled by Palin's 2008 Republican convention speech.

She has the power of the normal. Hillary Clinton is grim, stentorian, was born to politics and its connivances. Nancy Pelosi, another mother of five, often seems dazed and ad hoc. But this state governor and mother of a big family is a woman in a good mood. There is something so normal about her, so “You’ve met this person before and you like her,” that she broke through in a new way, as a character vividly herself, and vividly genuine....

What she did in terms of the campaign itself was important. No one has ever really laid a glove on Obama before, not in this campaign and maybe not in his life. But Palin really damaged him. She took him square on, fearlessly....

By the end, Democrats knew they had been dinged, and badly....

The speech was, in its way, a call so tender it made grown-ups weep on the floor. The things she spoke of were the beating heart of the old America. But as I watched I thought, I know where the people in that room are, I know their heart, for it is my heart.

And after Palin's debate with Joe Biden:

She killed. She had him at “Nice to meet you. Hey, can I call you Joe?” She was the star. He was the second male lead, the good-natured best friend of the leading man....

As far as Mrs. Palin was concerned, Gwen Ifill was not there, and Joe Biden was not there. Sarah and the camera were there. This was classic “talk over the heads of the media straight to the people,” and it is a long time since I’ve seen it done so well....

Sarah Palin saved John McCain again Thursday night. She is the political equivalent of cardiac paddles: Clear! Zap! We’ve got a beat! She will re-electrify the base. More than that, an hour and a half of talking to America will take her to a new level of stardom.

Noonan blames Trump on things others did: got us into wars we couldn't win, let too many immigrants into the country (Noonan is practically Ann Coulter on this issue), gave us Palin.

But somehow, none of the blame for Trump can be laid at Peggy Noonan's feet, even though Noonan helped invent Ronald Reagan, the original ignorant but telegenic dilettante who became president after turning right-wing politics into a late-life hobby.

Noonan says we got Trump because neither party seemed to care much about "on-the-ground Americans." But Noonan, in what's considered one of her finer moments, had George H.W. Bush tell those Americans that they didn't need government to help solve domestic problems, because prvate citizens -- "a thousand points of light" -- would make everything all better. Bush wasn't the first to sell that nonsense, but Noonan's prose poetry made the idea seem lofty. Thirty-two years later, Donald Trump abandoned responsibility to the American people in a once-in-a-century pandemic, and here we are, with 150,000 dead, no end in sight, and not nearly enough points of light visible.

Many people are responsible for the state of the Republican Party, the party that has dragged down America. Give the Never Trumpers credit for at least trying to undo some of the damage, even if they've never apologized for most of the harm they've done. I don't see any effort at undoing or apologizing on Peggy Noonan's part.