The problem with the "Chattering Classes"
To our betters in the elite media it is all theoretical and far removed from their own existence.
From Ace of Spades HQ (regarding, in this case, David Brooks...but it applies just as well to the Noonans, Dionnes, etc. of the world):
While you may have opinions about economics, you can afford to prioritize such matters below worries about "tone," because you are altogether immune from economic misery.Your job is set, guaranteed for life (virtually), with few competitors for it. You're a one-man operation, an employee; your only interaction with the realities of business life is cashing a check, meeting with investment advisers, and occasionally pitching a book to a publisher.
You do not particularly fear a reduction of wages or an increase in taxes, because you're already making as much money as a writer could reasonably expect to make. Plus, there is not (yet) any way to tax the non-pecuniary benefits of your job -- influence, fame, respect, easiness of it all -- which far outstrip the pecuniary ones you have to give the government a piece of.
In short, you are someone whose interest in politics is chiefly a theoretical matter. You have no skin in the game. You can afford to be dispassionate about Obama's $500 billion cut to Medicaid, because in all likelihood you'll be an employed writer into your seventies and will have private insurance and even when retired will have enough money to opt out of the system. You can afford to have an intellectual's distance from Obama's choking regulatory overreach, because your only "business" is writing seven hundred words twice a week; you have no employees, no mandates, no regulations to comply with. You can gamely defend your cultural brother-from-another-mother Obama even as his policies do nothing to decrease (and probably in fact increase) grinding unemployment of levels of misery not seen since the Great Depression, since your job is effectively pink-slip-proof and even the friends you know who've lost their jobs are largely rich and therefore have plenty of cushion for three or four lean years.
In short, you can afford to give Obama a pass on all of his destructive policies, the policies which really hurt regular people who are not so fortunate as to have comfortable, bulletproof berths at the New York Times, and focus laser-like on childish frettings about "tone" and its alleged "elevation" because you're as removed from the vigor and scuffle of the scrum that is the working world as the palest, dottiest tenured professor.
Bingo. We may as well be lab rats to these cocooned chin-pullers.
Brooks literally admits to being an "Obama Sap". Which is the truth. He most certainly is an Obama Sap.
And since that is the case, then of what use is he to consumers of news and opinion?
I don't agree with Jake Tapper all that much, but one Jake Tapper is worth five hundred maleable twits like David Brooks or Peggy Noonan, however eloquent they are.
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Noonan's oh-so-carefully-modulated voice irritates the piss out of me. Her delivery too. When I've seen her interviewed, and was strangled by her preciousness.
And her insularity.