What happened, Peggy?

Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks Peggy Noonan has lost her appeal as a thoughtful political commentator: Professor Francis Beckwith expresses my thoughts exactly in a comment over at What's Wrong With the World.

Peggy "A thousand points of light" Noonan often confuses a turn of a phrase with an insight in thought. The lady who is "all words and no action" wrote the speeches for the first President Bush who was "all action and no words."

I used to like Noonan, but now I find her to be pretentious and annoying. Ever since she went after Sarah Palin, I began to see Peggy as a smoldering cauldron of rage carefully hidden under an overly polite literary smugness.

Case in point: a recent op-ed of hers was titled "How to Save the Catholic Church". One would think a Catholic would acknowledge that only God was capable of that prodigious task. But Ms. Noonan would now lead us to believe that all one needs to do is look to a human idea scrawled in an op-ed. It's just silly to me.

But please do not get me wrong, I do not revel in saying this. Ms. Noonan was friends with one of my heroes, the Late Father Richard John Neuhaus, and I know he had great respect for her. I wonder if Father Neuhaus would have respect for her columns as of late?