Lying down, she has it
Nov. 18th, 2009 12:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
matthewdaly“The term I used to describe the panel making these decisions should not be taken literally. It's a lot like when President Reagan used to refer to the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire.’ He got his point across. He got people thinking and researching what he was talking about. It was quite effective. Same thing with the ‘death panels.’ I would characterize them like that again, in a heartbeat.” - Sarah Palin
As I said before, while cleaning out my house a month ago I came across my collection of silly books from my childhood. The one book that I was particularly sorry to not see in that list was Paul Slansky's The Clothes Have No Emperor, which was a chronicle mostly of the lies and gaffes perpetrated by Ronald Reagan and the rest of his administration. The entries are very brief with almost no commentary, so it's sort of like what Al Gore's Twitter feed would have looked like in the 1980's. It's a fun little book that walks the line between humor and rant very effectively and from the looks of things you can pick up a used copy for the cost of shipping, so you might want to give it a read and pass it along to a loved one for Holiday.
The one comment that does stick with me was Slansky's prediction that the Republican party would go back to this well and provide us with more telegenic personalities who were unconcerned about the substance of their comments provided it allowed them to pursue their agenda. The word "truthiness" didn't exist at the time, but I think Slansky would have found a use for it. He has turned out to be even more accurate than he could have predicted, as since 1992 the Republicans have either nominated slick-talking idiots or principled people who then were forced to pretend to be slick-talking idiots. I suppose that the one point in Sarah Palin's advantage regarding her political future is that being proud of being inaccurate seems to come naturally to her.
As I said before, while cleaning out my house a month ago I came across my collection of silly books from my childhood. The one book that I was particularly sorry to not see in that list was Paul Slansky's The Clothes Have No Emperor, which was a chronicle mostly of the lies and gaffes perpetrated by Ronald Reagan and the rest of his administration. The entries are very brief with almost no commentary, so it's sort of like what Al Gore's Twitter feed would have looked like in the 1980's. It's a fun little book that walks the line between humor and rant very effectively and from the looks of things you can pick up a used copy for the cost of shipping, so you might want to give it a read and pass it along to a loved one for Holiday.
The one comment that does stick with me was Slansky's prediction that the Republican party would go back to this well and provide us with more telegenic personalities who were unconcerned about the substance of their comments provided it allowed them to pursue their agenda. The word "truthiness" didn't exist at the time, but I think Slansky would have found a use for it. He has turned out to be even more accurate than he could have predicted, as since 1992 the Republicans have either nominated slick-talking idiots or principled people who then were forced to pretend to be slick-talking idiots. I suppose that the one point in Sarah Palin's advantage regarding her political future is that being proud of being inaccurate seems to come naturally to her.
