Sometimes, for medical reasons, I need to make my brain bleed, so I read something Peggy Noonan has written. Her blend of insipidness and dishonesty always does the trick. Nonnan is one of those Republicans who clings to false narratives, of an America that never quite existed. She does so in the face of overwhelming facts, despite her party losing almost every battleground state in the last Presidential election. 

Noonan contnues to traffic in the usual bullshit ofnot accepting that her extremist, racist party wants nothing to do with the leadership of an African-American Democratic President, that the modern GOP is about disqualifying anyone who isn’t one of them. 

She writes in her most recent grab bag of bullshit:

“We are living in the age of emergency—the economy, the Mideast, North Korea, Iran. The president has an utter and historic inability to forge a relationship with Congress.”

Why have you repeatedly turned down the friendly overtures of Mitch McConell, Mr. President? He wants to be close. And when they scream at you during the State of the Union Address, it’s dinner invitations they’re offering. The problem is the Republican-controlled Congress is the result of extreme gerrymandering. They’re not just out of step with the President, they’re out of step with the country. Hence, they’re incredibly low approval ratings. Those numbers are truly historic.

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But far more troubling in the same column is Noonan’s embrace of Dodge’s “So God Made a Farmer” ad which ran during the Super Bowl. It’s an impressive spot, until you stop to think about it–if you stop to think about it. It’s largely a paean to the work ethic of white people that conveniently forgets that farms and plantations in this country had much of their toil done by non-white slaves and non-white migrant workers. (Was there a Mexican face in that commercial?) What’s even more appalling is that Noonan wrote speeches for Ronald Reagan, whose policies were devastating to small farmers. Wreck them and then use them as a metaphor. That’s been the GOP playbook for more than three decades and cling they still do even though the decentralization of communications and shifting demographics have put their ridiculous narratives to bed.

Peggy explains why she loves the ad so much:

“• Because it spoke un-self-consciously in praise of certain virtues—commitment, compassion, hard work, a sense of local responsibility. The most moving reference, to me, was when Harvey has the farmer get up before dawn, work all day, and ‘then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board.’ Notice the old word ‘town,’ not ‘community’—that blight of a word that is used more and more as it means less and less.

• Because it explicitly put God as maker of life and governor of reality, again un-self-consciously, and with a tone that anticipated no pushback. God, you could say anything in Paul Harvey’s day.

• Because it was Paul Harvey, a great broadcaster and a clear, clean writer for the ear, who knew exactly what he was saying and why, and who was confident of the values he asserted. He wasn’t a hidden person, he wasn’t smuggling an agenda, he was conservative and Christian and made these things clear through the virtues and values he praised and the things he criticized.

•You could like him or not, but you understood that by his lights he was giving it to you straight as he could.”

As straight as he could wasn’t very straight at all. It was a false myth, one that was exclusionary and meant to flatter a certain segment of the population that wanted to cling to power. Peggy Noonan is one of those people.•