Peggy Noonan Gratuitously Blesses The Tea Party!

Apparently indicating that Tea Party activists aren't legitimate until she says so, Peggy Noonan titled her most recent weekend Wall Street Journal editorial Why It's Time for the Tea Party.

As a conservative independent who attended last year's 9-12 rally at the Capitol, and another against the passage of ObamaCare at the same location, I find Noonan's attitude to be arrogant and repugnant.

As a card-carrying member of the nation's established political class and parties, Noonan and her ilk are the ones who put us where we now are. Sure, sure, every one of us voted, or didn't, for candidates who put us deeply into debt, gave us an entitlement society, and have poured sand into the gears of our economy.

But you know what I mean. They- meaning both parties' careerists, including Noonan- made it nearly impossible for an average person of modest means to run and win a Congressional election. Our choices have become basically liberal Democrats or their opponents, liberal Democrats-Lite, a/k/a Republicans.

This weekend's Journal editorial cataloging the disappearance of New York's Republican party into a sort of weird, grafting onto the Democrats, creating a single, self-perpetuating group of politicos, is not far from describing the national scene, as well.

Does any truly independent voter want John Boehner as the next Speaker, or Mitch McConnell as the Senate Leader? Doubtful.

Noonan, now trying to pretend she's been objective and non-aligned all this time, gives us her own little analogy of why Tea Partiers are up in arms. Are, to quote the Peter Finch's character from Network,

"Mad as hell and (I'm) not going to take it anymore."

Yes, we are- finally- ready to "do something about it."

Even to the point of nominating otherwise unaccomplished people like Christine O'Donnell in Delaware to run as the Republican candidate for the Senate. It's become so alarming how badly our professional political class has run America to the brink of financial disaster, economic lethargy and defense lapses that we'll vote for someone who simply promises to vote to limit government and shrink spending. Nothing else really matters at this point.

That's certainly how I feel. It's why I'd vote for anyone to the right of my idiotic Representative, Lance Leonard. Or maybe It's Leonard Lance. Does it really matter? He's a buffoon, whichever his name is.

Noonan thinks it's news to write,

"The populist movement is more a critique of the GOP than a wing of it."

Really, Peggy. Gee, Glenn Beck has been saying that for, what, since CNBC's Rick Santelli called for the first Tea Party in Chicago on July 4th of last year?

Then Noonan solemnly invents two devices, "the yardstick" and "the clock" to explain the Tea Party. You can't make this stuff up. The issues are already painfully simple, but, apparently, not simple enough for Noonan.

Here's the shorter version: independent voters are tired of career pols of both parties taking too much power at the federal level, as well as spending and taxing too much. It's reached a tipping point in the view of many voters. There, I did it in two sentences.

Of course, I have an advantage, Peggy. I've actually been to Tea Party functions, met real members/participants and talked with them.

Have you?

That said, Noonan, after carefully disguising her tracks for 90% of her column, finally shows her true colors in the final two paragraphs of her editorial,

"A movement like this can help a nation by acting as a corrective, or it can descend into a corrosive populism that celebrates unknowingness as authenticity, that confuses showiness with seriousness and vulgarity with true conviction. Parts could become swept by a desire just to tear down, to destroy.

But establishments exist for a reason. It is true that the party establishment is compromised, and by many things, but one of them is experience. They've lived through a lot, seen a lot, know the national terrain. They know how things work. They know the history. I wonder if tea party members know how fragile are the institutions that help keep the country together.

One difference so far between the tea party and the great wave of conservatives that elected Ronald Reagan in 1980 is the latter was a true coalition—not only North and South, East and West but right-wingers, intellectuals who were former leftists, and former Democrats. When they won presidential landslides in 1980, '84 and '88, they brought the center with them. That in the end is how you win. Will the center join arms and work with the tea party? That's a great question of 2012."

Nice try, Peggy, but this isn't Revolutionary France, and there is no Robespierre. And, by the way, Peggy, nearly nothing that the Gipper accomplished lasted. His major failing, in what I call Conservatism 1.0, was to not cement via Constitutional Amendments some of the limited, temporary headway he made against the Welfare State. This time, under Conservativism 2.0, we might get there.

God, let's hope the Tea Party Senators and Representatives don't work with the center, but clean them the hell out of power and do the unthinkables. Like enforce absolute budget cuts, real balanced budgets, and shrink federal regulatory reach and power back to levels with which the country can actually prosper and enjoy personal liberty and freedom once more.