NOONAN!

If you only know one thing about the Flower of Christian Womanhood that is Peggy Noonan, it is that she thinks airport security embarrasses the angels. If you know two things, the other one is that she has a crush on Ronald Reagan's shoes. But if you know three things about her, like I do, you also know that she really, really, really hates Hillary Clinton.

Peggy hasn't blasted ichor at Hillary for a few weeks, so her latest column seeks to make up for lost time. It's a real doozy, too: she contrasts snooty, stuck-up rich-bitch Hillary with her opposite number, the unassuming, working-class man of the people Rudy Giuliani. (She starts out by referring to Rudy's campaign momentum as "Giuliani time", a phrase which his staff would do well not to adopt, conjuring as it does in the minds of many voters the image of a policeman sodomizing a black immigrant with a plumber's helper.) She compares the possibility of having New Yorkers as the two parties' leading candidates with the 1920 election, when both were from Ohio; the Democrat, she scolds, was James Cox, a "dreamy Wilsonian who thought America wished to hear more about the League of Nations" and received a sound drubbing at the hands of the "sprightly" Warren Harding, who correctly thought that America wished to have the White House turned into the personal piggy bank of the most corrupt administration in history.

Giuliani's people are "old-style New Yorkers", she says, "pugnacious" charmers who cajole and argue you around to their obviously correct viewpoint, while Hillary's campaigners are "like a captain from an army about to crush you". This sort of militarism looks good on a dreamboat like W., but coming from a woman? Peggy knows a woman's place, and it's not acting in a confident manner. She also notes that she once met a journalist who wrote to Hillary's campaign with a neat idea, and Hillary never wrote her back! Who does that high-toned bitch think she is? Happily, at a recent dinner Peggy attended, the crowd was subdued, showing Hill the high hat she deserves.

Not that Giuliani is perfect: his new wife is too much of a loudmouth, daring to say at a recent press engagement that the race for the presidency is one that she and her hub will make together. Goodness, says the very proper Peggy! She may be willing to forgive having three wives, but enough is enough: doesn't this brassy dame know that "the proper attitude of a third wife is modesty"?

Peggy then goes on to engage in a distinction between the working-class Giuliani and the cossetted, isolated Clinton (never mind that Giuliani is a multimillionaire whose wealth is well in excess of that of Bill Clinton's when he became President; Peggy doesn't cotton to that kind of class warfare); Hillary can never understand what it is like to be a real New Yorker, says Peggy, because her existence is filtered through a veil of "aides, drivers, cooks" who protected her from "crime, the cost of things, the culture". "Her life has been lived within a motorcade", Peggy sadly concludes, shaking her head in shame at this elitist millionare who cannot understand our struggles.

She says this, if I may be allowed to remind you, on the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal.