Grounded in Unreality
Sent July 15, 2004

 
Alan Keyes is living proof of the fact that a supposedly intelligent man with an advanced degree from an Ivy League school can still have a grating personality and be pretty stupid when it comes to dealing with people. There’s nothing politically smart, for example, about gratuitously insulting the daughter of your own party’s vice-presidential candidate. George W. Bush, on the other hand, is proof that someone who botched his education at an Ivy League school that he never could have enrolled in on his own merits can still be pretty clever about conning the public by being a seemingly nice, decisive guy about it.

That’s the big difference between Keyes and Bush the Lesser, and what makes the latter more politically effective than the former. What they have in common, though, is scarier: they’re bold, decisive, and speak from strong conviction — about all the wrong things, for all the wrong reasons, and they’re both devastatingly divorced from reality. These guys are so out of it, they wouldn’t recognize a reality check if it punched them in the nose — all the more reason they need one (the reality check, or the punch in the nose? Take your pick).

Here’s the question all voters should force themselves to answer before they enter a voting booth: what good is decisiveness and conviction if you’re decisive about (and convinced of) all the wrong things? What good is it if a man acts boldly but stupidly, because virtually everything he believes and acts upon has been repeatedly shown to be untrue? That’s exactly what Bush the Lesser has been doing for four years — while the polls continue to reward him for it.

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.