{"id":10163,"date":"2007-03-09T16:31:19","date_gmt":"2007-03-09T21:31:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/10163.html"},"modified":"2007-03-09T16:31:19","modified_gmt":"2007-03-09T21:31:19","slug":"noonan-worried-about-wincing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/noonan-worried-about-wincing\/","title":{"rendered":"Noonan worried about ‘wincing’"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan devoted her column<\/a> today to what she sees as a harshness in our public discourse. She begins by equating Ann Coulter’s “faggot” comment with Bill Maher’s suggestion that Dick Cheney’s death could save lives in Iraq.<\/p>\n

The truth is many liberals were dismayed by Mr. Maher because he made them look bad, and many conservatives were mad at Ms. Coulter for the same reason.<\/p>\n

I realized as I watched it all play out that there’s a kind of simple way to know whether something you just heard is something that should not have been said. It is: Did it make you wince? When the Winceometer is triggered, it’s an excellent indication that what you just heard is unfortunate and ought not to be repeated. <\/p>\n

In both cases, Mr. Maher and Ms. Coulter, when I heard them, I winced. Did you? I thought so. In modern life we wince a lot.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Noonan’s broader point was that we should reject political correctness and efforts to curb offensive speech, and instead embrace some ambiguous “wince” standard — if the average American “winces” at a controversial statement, the speaker should show greater restraint.<\/p>\n

As Steve M. noted<\/a>, that’s an “interesting standard” for Noonan to take, in light of her own wince-worthy comments.
\n
\nFor example, Noonan wrote<\/a> last summer: “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.”<\/p>\n

On Hillary Clinton, Noonan added<\/a>, “No one in America thinks she’s a woman. They think she’s a tough little termagant in a pantsuit. They think she’s something between an android and a female impersonator. She is not perceived as a big warm mommy trying to resist her constant impulse to sneak you candy. They think she has to resist her constant impulse to hit you with a bat…. She does not seem like someone who would anguish and weep over sending men into harm’s way…. Maybe she thinks that if she wept, the wires that hold her together would short.”<\/p>\n

Like Steve M., I found both of these more than enough to “wince,” and I thought I’d add a couple more that come to mind.<\/p>\n

Two years ago, it was Noonan who said Mark Felt, Watergate’s Deep Throat, was indirectly responsible for genocide<\/a> in Cambodia.<\/p>\n

Around the same time, it was also Noonan who argued during the Schiavo controversy that liberals “seem to have fallen half in love with death<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

And a few years before that Noonan argued<\/a> that Bill Clinton wasn’t “a man” because he wasn’t willing to separate Elian Gonzales from his father in Cuba.<\/p>\n

If “wincing” was the standard for which political figures are judged, Noonan should have given up her column years ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan devoted her column today to what she sees as a harshness in our public discourse. She begins by equating Ann Coulter’s “faggot” comment with Bill Maher’s suggestion that Dick Cheney’s death could save lives in Iraq. The truth is many liberals were dismayed by Mr. Maher because he made […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10163\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}