A pretty strange stray sentence within Peggy Noonan’s editorial, attempting to get her fellow Republicans to ever-so-gingerly move past Sarah Palin:

Here are a few examples of what we may face in the next 10 years: a profound and prolonged American crash, with the admission of bankruptcy and the spread of deep social unrest; one or more American cities getting hit with weapons of mass destruction from an unknown source; faint glimmers of actual secessionist movements as Americans for various reasons and in various areas decide the burdens and assumptions of the federal government are no longer attractive or legitimate.

All due respect to the Governor of Texas, the Texas “secessionist” sentiment is long-held and largely joking — it is a sort of nationalist pride that it’s in the constitution that “Texas can leave any time it wants”.  That was the most visible “faint glimmer” of “actual secession”ism to pop up in the mainstream press.  At least, since the New York Times Magazine covered Second Republic of Vermont’s spear-heading of a union of Secessionist movements as one of several “Ideas”.  (That was during the Bush Administration.  Secessionist sentiment has necessarily moved across the political spectrum, I guess.)

Well, Kennedy’s bringing the US into Vietnam brought on the borderline Insurrectionist sentiment in the Johnson and Nixon administrations (Seymour Hersh’s sentiments in “Dark Side of Camelot”).  , or to  Moynihan’s defense of Nixon that he averted our second civil war.

I guess Noonan is saying Noonan would be our second President Buchanan?

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