A courtesy so deep it amounts to beauty: Peggy Noonan

WHEN A NAME WRITER publishes something heartily, wholeheartedly ridiculous, it's tempting to presume their editorial overseers have cut them loose for one reason or another, permitting them to soil themselves publicly. In Saturday's Wall Street Journal, career GOP speechwriter and neoconservative credulist Peggy Noonan speculates on the aftermath of November's election and the civil war in Iraq: "We're going to need grace. We are going to need a great outbreak of grace to navigate the next difficult months." Noonan writes of the "genius cluster that invented the republic" but worries of Democrats and their "energetic smugness" after the electoral defeat of her chosen. She wonders why Democrats have not "broken out in war... like Iraq, like a dropped pane of glass that is jagged, shattered, dangerous." What does she invoke to keep her Republican cohorts safe from the elected Visigoths who "lack a certain public grace"? "What is needed is grace—sensitivity, mercy, generosity of spirit, a courtesy so deep it amounts to beauty. We will have to summon it. And the dreadful thing is you can't really fake it." No, you can only type for it, and hope for it, and ignore the sniggers and grins of one DowJones editor who surely sleeps well at night. [Also posted at SharkForum.]