Miss Peggy

My friend Mark Evanier wrote a piece on his wonderful blog yesterday about Andrew Sullivan's scathing takedown here on The Dish of Peggy Noonan for her snide suggestion that President Obama may well have been behind the supposed IRS attempt to destroy the Tea Party corporations, making his election all the more suspect.  With the new revelations arising about how the IRS also went after progressive groups, Sullivan writes, "So time’s up, Peggy. Put up or shut up – especially with the outrageous smear that the president was behind this. The IRS was trying to flush out bogus non-political groups on both sides. That’s what we pay them to do."  And then he adds --

"I think this scandal just evaporated into thin air."

Please let me know if you find any right-wing outlets that have pushed this untrue story that are actually reporting on this new IRS data (this attempt by NRO is lame or needs further clarification); and whether – God help us – they are apologizing and correcting. Over to you, Mr O’Reilly. And Ms Noonan."

In his own piece, Mark notes:  "And you know, I used to like Peggy Noonan. I think I linked to a lot of her pieces here a while back. But she, like a lot of people who are desperate for an Obama impeachment, have resorted to just plain lying."

Me, I didn’t like her.  Peggy Noonan is very smart and a good writer, and she had the patina of being fair-minded, but it was always after-the-fact, when it was safe.

BobProof:  two Hufferies I wrote.

Here's one -- "Peggy Noonan Feels Bad About George Bush:  A Nation Mourns"

And this is the other -- "Peggy Noonan Regrets Sarah Palin:  A Nation Weeps"

Both are pure Peggy Noonan at her best.  Critical shreddings of two Republican pariahs that make her look decent and fair-minded.  Yet both shreddings were written long after she'd used her smarmy typing fingers to praise the two subjects extensively and build them up while slamming the dastardly Democrats and liberals for daring oppose them.  And both were written long after the two subjects had long-since been discredited by most everyone who actually was decent and fair-minded.

So, too, was her smearing President Obama pure Peggy Noonan.

"One of the great questions about the 2012 campaign has been 'Where was the tea party?'" she wrote. "They were not the fierce force they’d been in the 2010 cycle, when Republicans took back the House. Some of us think the answer to the question is: 'Targeted by the IRS, buried under paperwork and unable to raise money.'"  And from all this, she concluded, "Technological savvy plus IRS corruption. The president’s victory now looks colder, more sordid, than it did."

That's Peggy Noonan.  And as Andrew Sullivan so aptly put it:  ""So time’s up, Peggy. Put up or shut up."