THE ENDLESS VENAL LUNACY OF THE GOP can overwhelm, and it's easy to lose track of where a large part of this originated. SLATE has a reprise of a delightful article by the late Christopher Hitchens, "Not Even a Hedgehog / The stupidity of Ronald Reagan".
Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars. Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the "End Times" foreshadowed in the Bible. In the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan told Yitzhak Shamir and Simon Wiesenthal, on two separate occasions, that he himself had assisted personally at the liberation of the Nazi death camps.
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I only saw him once up close, which happened to be when he got a question he didn't like. Was it true that his staff in the 1980 debates had stolen President Carter's briefing book? (They had.) The famously genial grin turned into a rictus of senile fury: I was looking at a cruel and stupid lizard. His reply was that maybe his staff had, and maybe they hadn't, but what about the leak of the Pentagon Papers? Thus, a secret theft of presidential documents was equated with the public disclosure of needful information. This was a man never short of a cheap jibe or the sort of falsehood that would, however laughable, buy him some time.
Like Gil Scott-Heron said, the man is cheap-steak tough.
1 comment:
This was a man never short of a cheap jibe or the sort of falsehood that would, however laughable, buy him some time.
...but enough about Stephen Harper...
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