Posted on 09/30/2013 2:09:40 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Molly Ball of The Atlantic is a very good political reporter. (For example, she's exactly right about the pipe dream that wrecking the economy will wring the crazee out of the Republican House.) The only advantage I have is that I'm a lot older than she is, and I've seen enough to know that her piece over the weekend about the intellectual decline of the Heritage Foundation is a little thin on historical memory. To be sure, ever since Jim DeMint took over, Heritage has been less obviously about "ideas" -- and we'll get to those in a minute -- and more about raw, nihilistic wingnut politics. Ball is right about that. However, I also see in Ball's piece an example of what I believe to be an ahistorical effort at the moment to divorce the current conservative gotterdammerung from the historical continuum that made it inevitable. In short, there is absolutely nothing going on in conservative Washington right now that cannot be traced back to Reaganism, and to the forces behind its rise, of which Heritage was an important part.
For example, the idea of abandoning reason and empirical evidence in favor of apocryphal anecdotes was central to Ronald Reagan's entire public career. Welfare queens and their Cadillacs. Pollution-causing trees. Iranian moderates. It's not a long jump from those to Sarah Palin's death panels, and the complete failure of the press to challenge the triumph of that mythological universe that was crucial to Reagan's own triumph legitimized that kind of thing in our politics forever.
Moreover, a familiar pattern of Republican vandalism was set during the 1980 Reagan campaign. Aides talked openly of crippling government functions of which they disapproved. They would refuse to fund them. They would cut their staffing. They called this "defunding the Left."(continued)
(Excerpt) Read more at esquire.com ...
Why? It's just a rehash of 20 year old talking points that didn't have much truth in them to begin with.
If you are writing about politics for esquire.com, and turning out an average of one blog post an hour, how much thought are you really putting into your articles?
Why yes, thanks for not posting the entire article, the short portion was quite enough to make me feel stupid for having wasted my time.
Yes libs, we get it...you don't like Reagan or conservatism. You really can't explain why, so you resort to your usual methods of slander and stopping off at the pie store to stock up on more lib ammunition.
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