Peggy Noonan

I see you have a book out this week and intend to crassly devote your column to it. All too true. The book is called “John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father.” I had hoped to promote it by embroiling myself in controversy and wish therefore to note at the outset that Maureen Dowd […]

This column, and the world, have been very serious lately. Let’s take a not-too-solemn look at postelection players. Warren Beatty has been all over the news as the leader of the anti-Schwarzenegger forces in California. He has emerged, and good for him. He’s been making heavily covered speeches and shadowing GOP rallies along with his […]

“The conservative screamers who shot down [Harriet] Miers can argue that they were fighting only for a ‘qualified’ nominee. . . . But whatever the rationale, the fact is that they short-circuited the confirmation process by raising hell with Bush. . . . A cabal of outsiders—a lynching squad of right-wing journalists, self-sanctified religious and […]

It is not so hard and can be a pleasure to tell people what you see. It’s harder to speak of what you think you see, what you think is going on and can’t prove or defend with data or numbers. That can get tricky. It involves hunches. But here goes. I think there is […]

We make presidents crazy. They receive endless encomiums from friends and staff telling them of their brilliance, their courage, their foresight. “God sent you to lead us.” And the authors of such statements aren’t always or even usually sucking up. They mean it. They’re excited, fervent, full of belief. All a president has to do […]

I think I know what White House aides are thinking. They’re thinking: This is the part of my memoir where we faced the daily pounding of our allies. They’re thinking: This is the “Churchill Alone” chapter. They’re thinking: He was like a panther in the jungle night. For five years he sat, watchful, still as […]

It all depends on the hearings. Barring a withdrawal of her nomination, it’s going to come down to Harriet Miers’s ability to argue her own case before the Senate Judiciary Committee. If the American people decide she seems like a good person—sympathetic, wise, even-keeled, knowledgeable—she’ll be in; and if not, not. What everyone forgets about […]

With the DeLay indictment and another Supreme Court nominee soon to be announced, the subject has moved on from Hurricane Katrina. But I’m still thinking about it. News reports and common media wisdom this week suggested Katrina was actually a smaller story than we thought—fewer dead than had been feared, more hype than was helpful. […]

George W. Bush, after five years in the presidency, does not intend to get sucker-punched by the Democrats over race and poverty. That was the driving force behind his Katrina speech last week. He is not going to play the part of the cranky accountant—“But where’s the money going to come from?”—while the Democrats, in […]

If you lived through 9/11 in New York you have nothing worthy of the city, its people, and the event worth saying that has not already been said, or, if you do opinions for a living and are relatively sane, has not been said by you. I will tell you only this. For something like […]