Normally, I revere Peggy Noonan, as much for her liquid style as for her take on most issues.  She evinces a moral clarity, both in ink and often when on air during her Sunday morning appearances on talking-head pooh-bah sagacity venues.

This piece, however.  It is small, vitriol-sauced, and cut with the cheap powder of antagonism she uses too liberally for the heroin of her powerful Wall Street Journal longtime pulpit.

Trump is better than she indicates, and her slashing on Ted Cruz is to me unbecoming and short-sighted.

Judging from the hullabaloo this week, it's safe to hazard that 95% of the Fourth Estate and Cleveland listeners to Cruz got him and what he did wrong.  Some of us, albeit a small tranche of listeners, think he demonstrated integrity, since he told Trump up front he would gladly speak, but there was no pledge of support or endorsement.  And to be sure, whoever his boosters are, Mr. Cruz has been duly put down in a herculean smack-plonk that might-could linger for years.  The stand Cruz took not to support Mr. Trump will likely sideline any chance for a Supreme Court appointment in a Trump administration.  Or another cabinet post, to be sure.

Were I Cruz, I too could not stomach supporting a man who belittled and mocked my wife – though Friday on air, as he thanked his crew for his victory, he lauded both her intellectual heft and her beauty – besmirched and tarred my father, and daily called me a name I had not – in nonstop commitment to integrity and honesty in government during 20-plus years – merited.

Ruefully, and against one's better instincts, one could not help laughing at the hilarious Charles Krauthammer mots that that worthy sage used to take Cruz from the world of the vif to the next plane of existence: "[Cruz's non-endorsement speech] was the longest suicide note I ever read."

Trump could not leave well enough alone, basking in the 5,000-watt illumination of his victory in Cleveland as nominee 2016.  He called Cruz "an intellect" who "can't use his own intellect."  What rot.  Ted Cruz is five times smarter than most, and he certainly can win an argument, though not fighting in the squalid mud of epithets from a bygone zygotic stage that makes close company with Mr. Trump in campaign mode.  High school was the place for puerile name-calling, if there.

I will, of course, vote Trump, but his character, if not his heart, permits him to soil too many, too verbosely, too often.  Still, he is leagues above and better than the alarming and demonic alternative.

That propensity to name-call bespeaks a self-esteem problem, even if Rubio was smacked for daring to point it out.  Marco learned swiftly: That way there be dragons.

Translation into today?  Don't go there.

Trump has many virtues, which his superior offspring pointed out at length over the span of the RNC convention.

But Noonan here...ensmalled the topic and the subjects.  (Neologism that does not flow off the tongue or the page.  Easier to use "enlarged," of course.  But nothing in her piece was enlarged.)

As Groucho said: "Those are my opinions. If you don't like 'em, I have others."

PS: Did anyone notice that after the Trump's 75-minute acceptance talk wound to a vast crescendo of applause, the music piped in was the Rolling Stones' classic "You Can't Always Get What You Want"?  Couldn't they have selected anything a touch more optimistic?