Reagan’s gone, but the lies live on — if we let them
Sent June 11, 2004

It’s time to speak ill of the dead. Ronald Reagan is gone, but the Big Lies live on. The nation and the media may have a knee-jerk desire to say nice things about the recently departed, but preserving historical accuracy allows incivility. In this case, history begs for it, so I come not to praise Caesar but to bury him.

Whether it’s ingrained good manners, guilt at the prospect of upsetting the grieving widow, or just chickening out of speaking truth when the deceased’s supporters are plentiful and loud, there’s been a wave of willful self-delusion and myopia about Reagan that’s affected most of the news media and the political world since his death. There are times when frankness is necessary, however, and this is one.

That the New York Times, the Washington Post, and many other newspapers so softballed their obituaries and editorials raises eyebrows, but that's not as shocking as the fact that some of those obits, editorials, and columns repeat the Big Lies that this same press rightfully challenged when they were first spun. It’s as if the news media have developed collective amnesia about Reagan — at the exact moment that Republican spinmeisters are doing their damndest to make sure we swallow those Big Lies, so that history will be biased accordingly and so that we are more favorably disposed to the sad case in the White House who is currently up for reelection. We’ve even forgotten that political hacks and flak-catchers earned the sobriquet ‘spinmeisters’ during the Reagan Administration, because that’s when they perfected the practice of ‘spinning’ bad news into an art. It means they got good at lying, which seems to be a required trait in the Beltway.