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Noonan's TDS - bullet - 11-04-2025 01:35 PM
https://spectator.org/peggy-noonan-and-the-dangers-of-uncritical-thinking/
A good counter for all the holier than thou TDSers like Peggy Noonan. The author critiques Noonan's article.
"...This article purports to tell us all the ways that President Trump has violated our republic’s sacred norms and thus endangers the republic. There is no doubt but that the president is often vulgar, profane, and insulting, offending those who value dignity in our country’s officials. These are fair criticisms. But there is arguably a kernel of common sense in many, perhaps most, of his substantive projects that is lost on citizens who judge primarily on appearance.
What our republic urgently needs today are thinkers who can separate wheat from chaff and argue about this frantic presidency on substance, not style.
As John Stuart Mill so eloquently wrote in 1835, our republic was founded on liberty, which in turn is achieved by principled argument and discussion. Thus, what our republic urgently needs today are thinkers who can separate wheat from chaff and argue about this frantic presidency on substance, not style. We have plenty of TDS victims and Rachel Maddow commentators in the vast legacy media, and do not need any more reflexive bombast. The problem with Ms. Noonan joining this vapid, uncritical crowd is that she claims the conservative mantle of Reagan and Bush Sr. Peggy Noonan is a conservative and a Republican, so her criticisms of Trump must be valid...."
Also has some good comments about the 2020 "securest election ever."
"...So, while Noonan advises us to “trust the numbers,” Jimmy Carter and James Baker advise otherwise, even in a normal election, if absentee ballots are used. In 2020, abnormally, millions of unsolicited ballots were sent to the dead, relocated, and uninterested; the resultant 155.5 million votes were nigh on impossible, after 136.7 million in 2016. Nursing homes? In Wisconsin, a state with a 20,000-vote margin, normal government election monitors were not as per usual sent to nursing homes, leaving Democrat workers to preside. Turnout in Milwaukee homes was close to 100 percent, with 95 percent voting for Biden. In Arizona, residents without proof of citizenship were allowed to vote. Foreign mail-in ballots were, oddly, heavily for Biden. None of this required a reversal of the results, but it suggests the need, per Carter-Baker, for reform of mail-in voting, not the reckless expansion that occurred.
To make it appear that Trump, not suspicious Georgia voting, was fraudulent, she quotes him saying, famously, “I just want to find 11,780 votes.” As she knows well, he was not suborning the manufacturing of votes, but instead the finding of the likely illegal ones. This is a cheap shot from an opinion leader that harms our country. It perhaps escaped her memory that Al Gore tried similarly to find wrongly tallied ballots, which she then said was the essence of the democratic process. So what is sauce for the goose is apparently not sauce for the gander.
By writing, “your governor won, your congressman won,” she implies that Trump’s true 2020 fate can be discerned from congruence with his down-ballot ticket. In Pima County, Arizona, a whistleblower reliably relayed a scheme to insert 35,000 phony ballots. Consistent with that allegation, Trump led his Republican ticket in precincts with normal turnout, while, in a “fishtail” graph, consistently trailing it in unprecedentedly high-turnout precincts, where votes appear to have been injected in a 10,000 margin state...."
"...It takes courage and intelligence to give voice to critical conservative thought. So the question is, does Peggy Noonan lack critical thinking skills, or does she lack the intellectual courage to live in snooty New York and openly entertain the possibility that Trump may be, in some ways, yes, making our republic great again?"