Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (25 page)

When they weren’t running articles by old people relating how they tend to misplace car keys around the house, the media raised the senility-issue by reporting on the emergence of an “issue.” Like other phony liberal concerns, “the age issue” only was an “issue” because the blabocracy kept harping on it.

Most peculiarly, a spate of general-interest articles on senility began to pop up in large-circulation magazines. In the ten months before the 1984 election,
Newsweek, Time, Ladies’ Home Journal,
and
U.S. News & World Report
all ran major pieces on senility.
⁴⁵
That’s too many to be a coincidence. The LexisNexis archives yield only one magazine article on senility
(U.S. News & World Report)
⁴⁶
in 1976; zero in 1980; zero in 1988;
⁴⁷
zero in 1992: one in 1996
(Time
magazine);
⁴⁸
and one in 2000
(Maclean’s).*
⁹
In other words, the same number of magazine articles on senility were published in 1984 alone as in all other presidential election years combined in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
⁵⁰

Fortunately, it turned out that forty-nine states preferred a senile old man to a Democrat. Amid unusually high voter turnout, Reagan was re-elected in the largest electoral college total ever. He went on to end the Soviet Union, preside over a booming economy, and translate his immense popularity with the public into another landslide election for his vice president (who then squandered it all by raising taxes). This is what liberals mean by “senile.”

Years later, the media was still muttering about what a dope Reagan was. On September 27, 1999, NBC’s host Katie Couric opened the
Today
show by chipperly announcing, “The Gipper was an airhead. That’s one of the conclusions of a new biography of Ronald Reagan that’s drawing a tremendous amount of interest and fire today.”
⁵¹
She was referring to the recently released Edmund Morris book,
Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan.
The next day, Matt Lauer opened the
Today
show saying, “Good morning. For the first time, President Bush is responding to the controversial new biography of Ronald Reagan and, in particular, the author’s assertion that Reagan “was a great president but an airhead.”
⁵²
After quoting President Bush attacking the “airhead” characterization as “grossly unfair and untrue,” Lauer observed that another thing the author seems to say “is that the Reagans were not all that crazy about the Bushes.”

When Morris finally came on the
Today
show to respond, he denounced the claim that his book called Reagan an airhead as “brutal and grossly unfair. I did not call him an airhead.”
⁵³
Explaining that he had simply written that on a first meeting, Reagan seemed “an apparent airhead,” Morris observed that the “whole course” of his book “makes quite obvious that that first impression was wrong.” To Couric’s follow-up question, “So you do not believe today that Ronald Reagan was an airhead?” Morris said, “Oh, good God, no. He was a very bright man.”
⁵⁴

Years after Reagan liquidated Lenin’s revolution, biographer Lou Cannon pontificated that Reagan “was wonderful about Jack Benny and worthless on the subject of Lenin.”
⁵⁵
Good thing he wasn’t “wonderful” on Lenin, or the Red Army might be goose-stepping through Toronto about now.

Summarizing the wildly successful Reagan years,
Washington Post
reporter Haynes Johnson wrote a book suggesting Reagan had sleepwalked through history—a thesis coyly alluded to in the title of his book,
Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years.
Ponderous windbags wrote earnest book reviews observing that Johnson did not “specifically” say that Reagan was the one doing the sleepwalking.
⁵⁶
(How about
Sleazeballing Through History: The Clinton Years?)
But as John Kenneth Galbraith admitted in his
New York Times
review of Johnson’s book, Johnson made the case that Reagan was the sleepwalker “over and over again.” Galbraith pompously added, “This is as it should be.”
⁵⁷

The irrevocable fact that the American people adored Reagan posed a problem for liberals. They had very clearly explained that Reagan was dumb, mean-spirited, frightening, and so on. But, still, Americans loved him. Even during the media’s nightly flogging of Iran-Contra, Reagan’s approval ratings fell only 5 percentage points, from 80 percent to 75 percent.
⁵⁸
This was “the biggest ever recorded” drop in Reagan’s public approval rating.
⁵⁹
A majority of Americans continued to approve of the job he was doing as president, and 79 percent of Americans said they “like him personally.”

Eventually liberals threw in the towel on persuading the public to hate Reagan and instead trained their hostility on the American people. From the beginning, this had been the logical consequence of the left’s attacks on Reagan. The self-appointed Party of the People hated the People because the People kept voting for Reagan.

A book reviewer for the
Washington Post
commented on the Reagan era by impotently demanding to know “just how dumb, how submissive Americans really are.” He speculated that the public was “hypnotized by the fluctuations of Reagan’s left eyebrow.”
⁶⁰
Citing “many observers,”
Newsday’s
Jonathan Schell said that during the Reagan era “we Americans” (a preposterous conceit) “began willfully to deceive ourselves about the world in which we live and about our place in it.”
⁶¹
Still in a huff about Reagan’s triumphant popularity, Schell fumed: “A nation that has enclosed itself in a bubble of illusion is at risk of sudden, startling inundations of facts from the real world.”

Reagan was elected by the American people in two presidential landslides—the second was the largest electoral college total in history. And then the ripe old fellow single-handedly won the Cold War, ending the forty-year threat of nuclear annihilation and finally freeing liberals of their grave responsibility to frighten small children with tales of a coming nuclear holocaust. He cut taxes, ended inflation, and presided over a booming economy. In a Gallup poll taken in February 2001, respondents ranked Ronald Reagan as America’s “greatest” president, beating out George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and the left’s beloved Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

If that isn’t enough for liberals to stop calling you stupid, it makes you wonder if maybe it isn’t something else about Republicans they don’t like.

Another Republican who failed to meet the exacting IQ standards of the media is President George W. Bush. The image of Bush as an “air-head”—as the
New York Times
nonjudgmentally put it
⁶²
—has been lovingly ft nurtured by the media. During the 2000 presidential campaign, the media was issuing daily updates on the Bush intelligence issue, which, as usual, had become an “issue” solely by virtue of the media’s perseverating that it was an “issue.”

In a seething rage that Bush does not defer to important Ivy League intellectuals so treasured at Establishment headquarters, the
New York Times
called Bush “determinedly nonintellectual”—an anti-intellectualism he “has resolutely cultivated.” The
Washington Post
framed the Bush IQ “issue” this way: “Call it a recurring plume of doubt that hangs in the air like cigar smoke. Sometimes framed as depth, sometimes intellect, sometimes gravitas. Does George W. Bush have the candlepower to be a great president? Is George W. Bush bright enough to steer the country in times of crisis? Is George W. Bush a lightweight?”
⁶³
Time
magazine elaborated: “The implicit charge is less that he’s stupid than that he’s incurious, proudly anti-intellectual.”
⁶⁴

This was in contrast to John McCain, who graduated fifth from the bottom of his class at the U.S. Naval Academy,
⁶⁵
but was beloved by liberals and, therefore, never had his intellectual curiosity questioned.
⁶⁶

Dozens of columnists—chosen not for their leadership qualities, but presumably for their facility with words—used the “sharpest knife” cliché to describe Bush, such as an article in
U.S. News & World Report
that asked: “Is George W. Bush not the sharpest knife in the drawer?”
⁶⁷
Demonstrating her own superior intellect,
Boston Globe
reporter Mary Leonard described Bush as not “the sharpest knife in the drawer” twice within the same month.
⁶⁸
(It is long past time that reporters attacking Republicans as “dumb” be required to run SAT scores with their bylines, starting with Pinch Sulzberger at the
New York Times.
) In the LexisNexis archives, there is not a single use of the wildly original “sharpest knife” expression to describe Al Gore.

Liberals’ idea of intellectual engagement is Bill Clinton’s adolescent cramming in all-night slumber parties, leaving the place littered with pizza rinds and women’s panties. Describing Gore’s love of complex ideas,
Newsweek
admiringly observed that his office “is strewn with pizza cartons and Diet Coke cans.”
⁶⁹

!In a campaign profile of George Bush’s college years, the
Times
quoted numerous real people—including famed Clinton flack Lanny Davis— testifying to Bush’s superior intellect. Still, the article repeatedly insinuated

that Bush was an idiot by use of the
Times’s
signature unsubstantiated asides. Thus the
Times
vaguely referred to conceptual Yale classmates “who frowned on Mr. Bush, seeing him as an airhead party boy.” Also, the
Times
reported on impressions that seemed to exist: “Few, if any, professors seem to have left a mark on him, or he on them.”
⁷⁰

Other evidence that Bush was dumb consisted of his failure to argue with the press about their querulous descriptions of him as dumb. After relentlessly calling Bush stupid, the media began psychoanalyzing his reaction to being called dumb.
Time
magazine reported: “[His] body tenses. He turns his face forward, his eyes narrow and he gazes out the windshield at the long road ahead.”
⁷¹
Could it be ... he was weary of being asked the same moronic questions about his intelligence?

Further probing Bush on the issue of just how dumb he was, the
Washington Post
reported: “It becomes apparent rather quickly that this is not a comfortable interview, and not a comfortable subject, for George W. Bush.”
⁷²
What precisely is the proper reaction to having one’s intelligence questioned a billion times daily?

Gore was never asked if he was “too dumb.” He was, however, asked whether Bush was too dumb. As reported by the AP, Gore “convulsed in laughter while taking a drink of Diet Coke... grabbed a towel to hold against his mouth then, finally swallowing, insisted the tape recorder be stopped for an off-the-record observation.” And then Gore lost to the dumb guy—becoming the first incumbent president or vice president ever to lose a presidential election during peacetime and a good economy.

Most preposterously, the
New York Times
reported—as if it were news—”With his grades and college boards, Mr. Bush might not have been admitted [to Yale] if he had applied just a few years later.”
⁷³
“Might not have been admitted”?
What on earth does that mean? Bush also “might not have been admitted” if he had dropped out of high school and become a Gangsta Rapper. It so galls Northeastern liberals that Republican George Bush went to an Ivy League school, they can’t resist publicly fantasizing about an alternative universe in which Yale rejects him.

When not daydreaming about Republicans being rejected from Yale, the media spends its time enforcing the party line on dumb Republicans with Stalinist zeal. The tiniest deviation from liberal Scripture will be ferreted out and the apostate will be held up to ridicule by the liberal clergy.
New York Times
reporter Frank Bruni came in for public rebuke for an article in which he noted that Bush was “plenty bright.” The whole point of the article was to suggest that Bush’s allies were overplaying the intellectual disdain card and that Bush seemed to want “to have it all ways.”
⁷⁴

Newsweek
seized on the “plenty bright” locution to accuse Bruni of having fallen under Bush’s spell. Bush was “manipulating reporters,”
Newsweek
declared, “charming them.”
⁷⁵
And none were more susceptible than Frank Bruni—”probably the most influential beat reporter on the plane.” The Bush magnetism, it was darkly suggested, had worked its magic. “Importantly for Bush,”
Newsweek
said, Bruni had called Bush “plenty bright.”

It probably wasn’t really all that “important for Bush,” actually. If the electoral viability of any Republican candidate turned on what
Times
reporters said about them, there would never be any Republican presidents.

Still, insinuating that Bush was “plenty bright” was bald-faced heresy. Consider that the “plenty bright” phrase had appeared in an article that I accused Bush of coming across as a “self-satisfied boob.” It recited a string of insults to Bush’s intelligence from a (truly stupid) Republican, Governor Gary Johnson of New Mexico.
⁷⁶
The subtitle of the article was “Ignorance Is Bliss.” But Bruni’s minuscule deviation from the party line required a public shaming ritual.