Our Lady Of The Magic Dolphins (h/t Charlie Pierce) took her turn piling onto President Obama and using the terrorist attack in France as an excuse to call him feckless and weak. Anyone remember the days when talking like this about a sitting president would have the right wing screaming treason, and calling the person who said it un-American?
My how things have changed. Here's how Peggy Noonan started out her interview on this Saturday's Fox & Friends:
CARLSON: So what are the lessons of this for us?
NOONAN: Oh, it is an epic moment. I think this is a very big thing that has happened. It's different from previous terror events. It's different from Charlie Hebdo. Charlie Hebdo was sort of about radical Islam's feeling about our press freedoms. This is about “I'm coming to get you.”
This is about the future has been declared and I think it will have a very big impact on men and women on the street in Europe and harden feelings, and also give some sturdiness to a desire to figure out what to do now. This isn't going away.
How does it affect us here. It will come here also.
SCOTT: You wrote some of the most consequential words for presidents Reagan and Bush 41. Presidential words matter. Yesterday our president said ISIS is shrinking. What's the effect?
NOONAN: You know, I think we've turned a sort of point with this story. I think the president actually is irrelevant in it. A new era has begun. Nobody looks to Mr. Obama for wisdom and will in this area of life. He will say things. Something may change a little bit here or there, but I don't Europe will be looking to him for leadership and I think they will be figuring this out, the European governments, on their own for a while.
Nooners is also very sure this is going to help her buddies in the Republican presidential primary, because terrorism supposedly just got very real for Americans -- which is doublespeak for admitting they're going to politicize this for every drop of feigned outrage they can squeeze out of it on the right.
NOONAN: And you see in terms of political leadership, you've seen Mr. Hollande and you've seen the Prime Minister from Britain come forward. I think what happened yesterday in Paris is also going to animate in a new way the 2016 presidential race. It's... terrorism in some new way became real yesterday. Realer than it been in a while. It's going to shape the Republican debate. It's going to shape the Democratic debate.
