Sailing Over a Low Bar

This commentator correctly notes that Noonan and Brooks were either watching a different debate or were smoking some powerful stuff:

So if the MSM’s conservative heavy hitters are sold, who isn’t? Try some who operated more at the media margins, and closer to the old G.O.P. base, like Daniel Larison of The American Conservative:

Noonan and Brooks actually fall over themselves trying to compliment Palin on the modest success of being coherent, but these excerpts are striking in that someone might have written them as withering, sarcastic criticism and instead they are supposed to be a celebration of her virtues. Noonan complains that Biden showed too much forbearance, but this is exactly what Noonan and Brooks show in their efforts to tip-toe around the obvious that for all her mastery of the non-answer and glittering generalities, to borrow Halcro’s language, she did not do very well. Incredibly, her fans don’t seem to mind debasing the meaning of excellence if it allows them to call what we saw last night excellent. There ought to have been some acknowledgement that it didn’t matter, that McCain was already fumbling and crumbling under the weight of his own mistakes, but instead we are treated to newfound, baseless enthusiasm …

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Sailing Over a Low Bar

By Tobin Harshaw

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/03/sailing-over-a-low-bar/?ref=opinion

“She killed,” writes Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal, and there’s no need to ask who “she” is.