Peggy Noonan does Woodward

Peggy Noonan had a column in the WSJ on Friday, The Boring Fabulist, that didn't attract much attention in the blogosphere® probably because the left never reads her and because she said some things the right didn't want to hear. As usual it's difficult to figure out where she is going but one paragraph jumped out.

To the central thesis. Was the White House, from the beginning, in a state of denial? I doubt denial is the word. They were in a state of unknowingness. (I have come to give greater credence to the importance, in the age of terror, among our leaders, of having served in the military. For you need personal experience that you absorbed deep down in your bones, or a kind of imaginative wisdom that tells you even though you were never there what war is like, what invasion is, what building a foreign nation entails.)

For her starters I like her replacement of "state of denial" with "state of unknowingness". This leads to her referring to the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld cabal as, yes, chickenhawks. No that's not the word she uses but that's what she is saying.

For the most part she doesn't really challenge anything in Woodward's book. When you've lost a Republican political hack like Peggy Noonan............