Who says women aren’t funny?

Peggy Noonan is hilarious. First of all, she manages to tie together Bush’s immigration speech and The Da Vinci Code’s critical failure into one column by noting that they share in common being “out of touch.” Reversing the order of her column, we’ll look at her take on the film first, which—I kid you not—starts out, “Speaking of the detachment of the elites…” Ho ho ho. I told you she's a side-splitter.

There is a God. Or, as a sophisticated Christian pointed out yesterday, there is an Evil One, and this may be proof he was an uncredited co-producer. The devil loves the common, the stale. He can't use beauty; it undermines him. "Banality is his calling card."

Yeah, yeah—we know. And he wears a green parka to Auschwitz.

I do not understand the thinking of a studio that would make, for the amusement of a nation 85% to 90% of whose people identify themselves as Christian, a major movie aimed at attacking the central tenets of that faith, and insulting as poor fools its gulled adherents. Why would Tom Hanks lend his prestige to such a film? Why would Ron Howard? They're both already rich and relevant. A desire to seem fresh and in the middle of a big national conversation? But they don't seem young, they seem immature and destructive. And ungracious. They've been given so much by their country and era, such rich rewards and adulation throughout their long careers. This was no way to say thanks.

Yeah, Tom Hanks! Yeah, Opie! What’s wrong with you? Everyone knows it’s a total insult to make a fictional film which could be read to suggest that some of Christianity’s gulled adherents are poor fools, because then when they overreact and accuse you attacking the central tenets of their faith as if you were making a documentary, they’re proven to be poor fools—and compelling them to reveal themselves thusly is just rude rude rude! Although, if you ask me, Noonan is two decades too late. I wrote off Tom Hanks after Bosom Buddies got cancelled and I found out he wasn’t really a woman. Dirty trickster!

I’m too flustered to think about the travesty of this film any longer. Moving on (or back) to Noonan’s discussion of Bush’s out-of-touchness:

The disinterest in the White House and among congressional Republicans in establishing authority on America's borders is so amazing--the people want it, the age of terror demands it--that great histories will be written about it. Thinking about this has left me contemplating a question that admittedly seems farfetched: Is it possible our flinty president is so committed to protecting the Republican Party from losing, forever, the Hispanic vote, that he's decided to take a blurred and unsatisfying stand on immigration, and sacrifice all personal popularity, in order to keep the party of the future electorally competitive with a growing ethnic group?

This would, I admit, be rather unlike an American political professional. And it speaks of a long-term thinking that has not been the hallmark of this administration. But at least it would render explicable the president's moves.

You know, if Bush has suddenly developed a keen interest in sacrificing himself for the good of the GOP, he should really go whole-hog with the falling on his sword shtick and just resign.

The other possibility is that the administration's slow and ambivalent action is the result of being lost in some geopolitical-globalist abstract-athon that has left them puffed with the rightness of their superior knowledge, sure in their membership in a higher brotherhood, and looking down on the low concerns of normal Americans living in America.

Mmm, maybe that’s it. I might posit that it has something to do with the fact that Bush is paralyzed by the blood-thirsty caterwauling of his racist base on one side and the hushed whispers to leave immigration bloody well alone if his party wants to keep favor with the corporatists on the other. But in true Wall Street Journal columnist form, Noonan likes to pretend that the only Bush base has is the rubes in the red states. Err, normal Americans living in America.

I continue to believe the administration's problem is not that the base lately doesn't like it, but that the White House has decided it actually doesn't like the base. That's a worse problem. It's hard to fire a base. Hard to get a new one.

See, here’s why I flip-flopped (how liberal of me) Noonan’s column. She is delightfully funny, but she still doesn’t realize you save your best joke for last. (Apparently this is what Peggy Noonan and Bush have in common—an inability to go out on a high note.) Is there anything more amusing than a professional political writer pretending to not know that the Bush administration has never “liked” its average-Joe base? That’s a splendid riff, Pegster—almost post-modern in its appearance as a critique of the Bush administration while simultaneously employing the same premise that they have always used…the presumption that the average-Joe base means something (or did, at one time) to the administration, other than a useful swath of diligent and easily-manipulated voters who helped usher BushCo into power so they could cater to corporatists and Neocon warmongers. Superbly ironic, Peggy. Brava.