Tom Smith nicely captures my gut reaction to Peggy Noonan’s essays in the Wall Street Journal and rekindles painful memories of NPR’s Roger Rosenblatt.
I finally realized who it is that Peggy Noonan reminds me of and why I wish she would just stop. It’s Roger Rosenblatt. You don’t see him around much these days (is he still alive?). But in the ’80’s he was much in evidence, blathering in his deeply pretentious yet relentlessly middle-brow way about the most topical of the topical. God he was painful to listen to. Nobody achieved a higher ratio of sheer opininated gas to actual content, the actual content being some thoroughly distilled bromide of public television contributor class. You’d need an astrophysicist to explain the profound vacuities he was able to achieve. Anyway, Peggy Noonan has something of the unmourned Rosenblatt in her, only instead of pieties of the leftish New England middle-brow liberal arts major class of ’65, we get the pieties of the (very) soft traditionalist Right.
The rest of his evidence of “The Roger Rosenblatt of the Right” is here.
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