I have made, if not a career, at least a habit, of subjecting
Peggy Noonan to (hopefully) withering ridicule and scorn. Well, hold back the ridicule and send back the scorn, because Peggy has penned a stunner of a column belting
Chris “I love widows and orphans and Rand Paul doesn’t” Christie all over creation. Chris, as you’ll remember, claimed to be in the same time zone as the Twin Towers when they fell, thus making him an, if not the, unimpeachable expert on how much the federal government should spy on us common folks, which, in Chris’s estimation, should be a lot.
In her reply to His Rotundity, Peggy puts it this way:
Christie is wrong that concerns and reservations about surveillance are the province of intellectuals and theorists—they’re not. He’s wrong that their concerns are merely abstract—they’re concrete. Americans don’t want to be listened in to, and they don’t want their emails read by strangers, especially the government. His stand isn’t even politically shrewd—it needlessly offends sincere skeptics and isn’t the position of the majority of his party, I suppose with the exception of big ticket donors in Aspen.
And Christie’s argument wasn’t even…an argument. It was a manipulation. If you don’t see it his way you don’t know what 9/11 was—you weren’t there, you don’t know how people suffered. If you don’t see it his way you don’t care about the feelings of the widows and orphans.
Peggy’s dig at “big ticket donors in Aspen” seems depressingly on point. Michael “I am the law” Bloomberg all but brags about running a police state on his side of the Hudson, declaring the New York Police Department to be “his army.” Big shots seem to like big government, because they figure they own it. I will be very pleasantly surprised if the Jeff Bezos-owned WP suddenly blossoms into anything resembling an advocate for civil liberties of people not named “Scooter” Libby.
