"Whoo Boy. We’re in for Quite a Ride on That Ego."

Elizabeth Scalia is reacting to the Peggy Noonan piece I reacted to this morning and has more cogent, relevant and important things to say:

This is the narrative for the next four years: the president as visionary and victim. Obama will attempt to utterly solidify that image on his inaugural day when he takes the oath of office, while using not one but two bibles — because if a little symbolism is good, a little more is better.

The point of the bibles is not their content but their character. One belonged to Abraham Lincoln, the great Emancipator. The other belonged to The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, the great Civil Rights leader. Both were visionaries and victims. The message of this startlingly illiberal president, whose second terms appears geared toward the narrowing of our rights, is: “I’m one of these guys; I am their standardbearer and their culmination, the third person of the trinity of American freedom.”

Whoo boy. We’re in for quite a ride on that ego. Obama may well be a visionary of sorts — he is certainly a cunning campaigner who effective lays waste to his opposition while he pursues his intent to “fundamentally changes” America — but a president operating with the full-on assistance of an unquestioning and complicit press, one that has become more of a Ministry of Information than anything else, is hardly a victim, except perhaps of his own personal demons.

Actually, I think we could make the case that the country is the victim of his personal demons but perhaps that's best left for another day.  It's what The Anchoress finishes with that gets my dander up a bit:

I fully anticipate the first comment in the combox to be something along the lines of “Oh, Noonan is finally figuring out this president, eh? Well too bad, too little, too late. She liked him once, and that’s enough to discredit her forever in my perfectly calibrated eyes.”

Why not give up the satisfaction of saying that, and take Noonan in good faith? If you give the back of your hand to someone who has altered their thinking, you do not strengthen the hand, you just further weaken the fibers that may need to be connected.

Given that my piece, again posted this morning, is titled Too little, too late Peggy Noonan, it's hard not think a bulls-eye has been painted on my forehead.

I want to take Peggy Noonan in good faith.  Just as I'd like to take Chris Christie in good faith or Colin Powell or name the next Republican who seems to have a penchant for throwing people who think like me under the bus or who time and again, bluntly and more particularly, cozy up to a President who's hell bent on fundamentally transforming the United States of America.

If Ms. Noonan gives me consistent evidence that she has truly changed her mind about who Obama is and how he threatens liberty, if she were to allay my concern that her latest comments are simply an attempt to shore up her journalistic ojectivity, then perhaps I can take her in good faith.

But at this point, I remain an unbeliever. a person unwilling to believe this is a bonafide change of heart.

And if that's heresy, color me, for now, an unrepentant sinner.