Looks like someone ruffled Nooners' feathers going after the Jeb! on Iraq during the CBS debate this Saturday night. Here's how she responded when Face the Nation host John Dickerson asked her to recap the food fight he moderated the night before.
DICKERSON: All right, to all four of you, here we are on the stage where there was so much excitement last night. I don't want anyone calling anyone else a liar.
Peggy, give us your reaction, what happened last night?
PEGGY NOONAN, "THE WALL STREET JOURNAL": It was lions and tigers and bears, oh, my. It's what happens when a field -- an uncoordinated field of 17 suddenly becomes six men who are really fighting and really want it. There were lots of sparks.
To me there were two headlines. One is, Donald Trump didn't just have controversial or interesting remarks to say on -- on the invasion of Iraq. By going into, by looking at Jeb Bush and saying essentially, your brother lied to get us in there and also he was president during 9/11 and he should have made us safer, to me he was getting into or he was into code pink territory. Not Democratic Party territory, not moderate Republican, but kind of code pink territory. I'm not sure how that's going to play. I think we may be hearing a bit about it the next few days.
Second thing was, I know many people think that Jeb Bush seemed strong in his sparks moments with Donald Trump, but I think too much Jeb Bush falls back on saying he's a 63-year-old man who's constantly saying, don't pick on my mom, don't pick on my pop, my father's the best father in the world. There's something odd and unbecoming about it. We know his parents. We know he loves them and why that's wonderful. But, in fact, Trump was talking about serious issues. I think he should have engaged on that.
Republicans and their allies in the media have been trying to attack Trump as a liberal for some time now, but the attacks have fallen flat with his supporters. I expect this latest attempt by Noonan to fall flat as well.
UPDATE: After watching GOP flack, a.k.a. "Republican strategist" Brian Morgenstern repeat the same line about Code Pink as Noonan on CNN this afternoon, I'm wondering if this was some new talking point sent down to all of them by the likes of Frank Luntz.
