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227 Comments
- kenvsryu, on 11/06/2007, -11/+212Reagan's corpse declared as an enemy combatant.
- crillbilly, on 11/06/2007, -13/+178He would have done less damage at a McDonald's.
- dynein, on 10/10/2007, -6/+137Fake. I've got the book in front of me. The pages in question are 411-412.
There is no such entry. - mediaspree, on 10/10/2007, -5/+134Reagan was the most Reganesque of our presidents.
- swrostmore, on 10/10/2007, -5/+102This so-called "Burger King" is a ruthless tyrant - we must overthrow his monarchy and bring Democracy to these helpless citizens!
- grendelboogie, on 10/10/2007, -13/+86It's probably fake, but I'm digging it anyway. Very funny.
- mbelleghem, on 10/10/2007, -3/+69Fake. The paragraph in the article in The New Republic that immediately precedes this quote goes something like this:
"But I was more interested in the me angle, frankly. And it was a puzzle. What on earth could Reagan have written? I indulged my imagination, and my ego:"
Ergo the quote was the indulgence of the author Michael Kinsley's ego. - mikalveli, on 10/10/2007, -5/+68"I don't recall" it mattering much to conservatives either.
- Akaji, on 10/10/2007, -6/+56Probably declare war on the customers, though...
- pintomp3, on 10/10/2007, -4/+51"libs", how clever. what would that make you, a con?
- granolajoe, on 10/10/2007, -9/+45Buried for spelling Reagan correctly and then misspelling it immediately afterward.
- inactive, on 10/10/2007, -8/+43I doubt the credibility of that entry. I'd like to see a worthy reference...
But I wouldn't put it past Reagan to write that. - litolist, on 10/10/2007, -2/+34*cries*
- jj9000, on 10/10/2007, -2/+33This is indeed fake. Read mbelleghem's comment below.
Buried as inaccurate. Almost as bad as that "80% of republicans would abort Down's syndrome baby" story. Jesus guys, we don't have to make up ***** to make GWB and republicans look bad. - Pilot85, on 10/10/2007, -7/+34For a while now, actually.
- JigoroKano, on 10/10/2007, -6/+31He would have declared war on hunger.
- dynein, on 10/10/2007, -1/+26you want a screenshot of my book? seriously?
- alexanEmpire, on 10/10/2007, -3/+27Bill Clinton....when he was in the oval office with Monica.
- Lyanto, on 10/10/2007, -2/+26Nah... He would have invaded hunger under false pretences without declaring anything.
- palustris, on 10/10/2007, -6/+26It's a fake.. see here http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20070702&s=kinsley070207
- CraigJ, on 10/10/2007, -3/+23"know how to confirm if this is real or not?" uh, read the book?
- hipnerd, on 10/10/2007, -2/+21Yes, Padilla went to jail after a trial by his peers. It almost seemed like it wasn't necessary to suspend the Constitution and destroy civil liberties in order to protect the country from terrorists.
- wendelgee2, on 10/10/2007, -0/+18to quote from below:
Fake. The paragraph in the article in The New Republic that immediately precedes this quote goes something like this:
"But I was more interested in the me angle, frankly. And it was a puzzle. What on earth could Reagan have written? I indulged my imagination, and my ego:"
Ergo the quote was the indulgence of the author Michael Kinsley's ego. - enforcerpsu, on 10/10/2007, -1/+18That bad part is all the nut job conspirators and tin foil hat people will pass this on as truth. I don't like Bush at all but I hate it when the "horde" pushes crap like this to front.
- MarkOfTheDead, on 10/10/2007, -3/+20REAGAN SMASH
reagan sleepy..... - tkstock, on 10/10/2007, -0/+14It's probably because the article you link to requires a membership, and the brief excerpt at the beginning doesn't mention anything about this at all. How about posting the article here?
- treecha02, on 10/10/2007, -5/+19Can anyone confirm or does anyone know how to confirm if this is real or not?
- 2keysmatt, on 10/10/2007, -2/+16I'm pretty sure the Hamburglar would be in gitmo.
- revjustin2, on 10/10/2007, -2/+15You aren't even trying to be subtle are you?
- yenshee, on 10/10/2007, -0/+13I'm no fan of Bush, or Reagan either for that matter, but false stories deserve to be buried as inaccurate, no exceptions. This kind of lameness only hurts Digg's credibility, and undermines the whole Digg concept.
- gropo, on 10/10/2007, -8/+20Since the truth has a widely acknowledged liberal bias?
- palustris, on 10/10/2007, -0/+12My apologies.. I didn't get a registration/subscription warning when I first visited the article.
Article Quoted Below
From tnr.com by Michael Kinsley
**************************
The literary editor of The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier, brought the joyous news. "Guess what, Mike. You're mentioned in Reagan's diaries." The diaries were published recently by HarperCollins and were generally well-received. Edited by America's historian-on-steroids, Douglas Brinkley, The Reagan Diaries apparently reveal Reagan to be more thoughtful than he is normally given credit for. Of course, our standards in the area of presidential thoughtfulness have plummeted in recent years. Still, the fact that Reagan was writing it all down was news, and an interesting departure from presidential tradition. Traditionally, presidents use a hidden tape recorder.
Illustration by Gary HovlandBut I was more interested in the me angle, frankly. And it was a puzzle. What on earth could Reagan have written? I indulged my imagination, and my ego: "January 22, 1983. Mommie [Nancy] says that Kinsley's column this week in The New Republic undermines the entire philosophical basis of my administration. O dear O dear, I had better not read it."
Or: "October 6, 1987. Why does Kinsley keep picking on me? He is the only thing standing between me and the total destruction of the welfare state. But, ha: I will destroy him--destroy him utterly--or my name's not ... not ... not ... . Say, they had 'State Fair' on TV last night. What a wholesome, clean-cut young man that Pat Boone is."
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Or: "May 17, 1986. A moment I've been dreading. George brought his ne'er-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who lives in Florida. The one who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I'll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they'll hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work."
Excited, I borrowed a copy of the book and gave it a "Washington read." That means looking yourself up in the index. It's best to find a copy you can peruse in private. You can do your Washington read in a bookstore, but it's tricky. People can see you pathetically scanning for your name and, even more pathetically, not finding it. And OK, fair enough, why on earth would you be in the index of a history of medieval France? Answer: for the same reason you might be in any book--i.e., no reason at all. Unless, of course, you are Henry Kissinger, in which case virtually every book published in the past few decades, if it contains an index at all, devotes several lines of it to references to you. The contrast between Kissinger and everyone else in this regard is a special burden on those of us who share Kissinger's neighborhood in alphabetical order. At least Zbigniew Brzezinski is spared this. But remind me to bomb Hanoi in my next life.
In the case of The Reagan Diaries, however, I'd been tipped off. And, sure enough, there I was in the index and on page 400, which describes the events of Friday, March 21, 1986, a busy day for Reagan. He learns that Panama will not take in the unwanted dictator of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos. He meets with our ambassador to Russia to talk about Gorbachev. Javier Perez de Cuellar, secretary-general of the United Nations, drops by in the afternoon, and Billy Graham comes over for dinner. Reagan finishes writing his speech for the annual Gridiron dinner. He has an interview with New York Times reporters. And at midday: "had off-the-record lunch with Meg Greenfield, David Brinkley, and editor of New Republic (Michael Kinsley)."
Picture the scene. David Brinkley, the famously sardonic NBC, then ABC, news anchor--no relation to Doug the Historian--says something sardonic. Meg Greenfield, the editor of The Washington Post's editorial page, laughs her throaty cigarette laugh in appreciation. The president, uncomprehending but amiably eager to share in the fun, offers a hearty ho-ho. And me? And me? Well, here is the problem: This whole thing never happened. Or, if it did happen, I was not there. Or, if I was there, it had slipped my mind. I had no memory of having lunch with President Reagan in the White House or anywhere else. And it's not the kind of thing you forget, is it? Or maybe it is. Is Alzheimer's contagious?
Was it possible that Reagan remembered having lunch with me, but I didn't remember having lunch with him? A friend of mine has a story about how Bill Clinton, shortly after being elected president of the United States, came up to him at a large social gathering and said, "You don't remember me, but--" they had met once, two decades earlier. And my friend realized that it was true: They had met, and he hadn't remembered. But Clinton is famous for this sort of thing, and he wasn't president when my friend met him the first time. By contrast, phenomenal feats of memory were never Reagan's forte.
Phenomenal feats of making stuff up and convincing himself that they were true, on the other hand, were a bit of a Reagan specialty. He liberated the death camps, to name but one example. But surely President Reagan had better things to make up than having lunch with me. And, anyway, who am I to question the president of the United States? Even one who is deceased. In fact,everyone at this alleged lunch is now deceased, except me. So I can basically make up any story I wish. And my story is that, on March 21, 1986, I had lunch with the president and two far more distinguished journalists than myself. With Reagan to back me up, who is going to challenge me? (And, for that matter, who is going to question him?)
Of course, those parentheses are troublesome. I don't mind immortality in parentheses, if that's the only model on offer, but "(Michael Kinsley)" does look like something the editor dropped in. Furthermore, the reference to this lunch was not in the main text of the diaries, as edited, but in a sort of junior varsity section Brinkley included at the end of each day, summarizing material he apparently found too boring to reproduce in full. But surely what matters is that Reagan himself recorded this lunch, not that Douglas Brinkley failed to be fascinated. And Brinkley confirmed that the actual diaries actually did contain my name and do state that I was at this lunch.
And, once I had decided I was there, the memories started flooding back. March 21, 1986: What a day! Retrieving my best suit from the freezer (what I couldn't remember was how it had gotten there); making sure that I had the exact bus fare; thinking up a tough question to prove that I couldn't be bought for a lunch at the White House ("How are you today, Mr. President?").
So it was irritating in the extreme when Douglas Brinkley e-mailed again a couple of days later to report his own bit of recovered memory. He said that, upon further investigation, an editor at HarperCollins (a company owned by Rupert Murdoch, I'd like to point out, for no particular reason) had slipped in my name. He or she--and Reagan, too--apparently were unaware of tnr's all-chiefs-and-no-Indians tradition of ladling out titles instead of money. Almost everyone at tnr is an "editor" of some kind. Reagan, it seems, actually had lunch with Charles Krauthammer.
Brinkley was terribly apologetic and said he would correct the error in the next edition. I said that wouldn't be necessary as far as I was concerned. Please don't bother. - johnny23, on 10/10/2007, -2/+14Actually, without daddy's help I think he would starve.
- kenvsryu, on 10/10/2007, -1/+12"I heard you the first time."
- wifirewire2, on 10/10/2007, -8/+18ne'er do well...looking shiftless...not much has changed.
- Charlotte_Web, on 10/10/2007, -1/+11It's a fake, here's the proof:
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/comments/4718/
Wow, and there was an article just last night about How Propaganda Works, but Diggers seem to think that the propaganda trap applies to everyone else BUT them. - crichton101, on 10/10/2007, -3/+12Who says he ever did? I've seen a photo of him posing in a flight suit, but any chimp with a flight suit and a camera can do that. And I think they had more planes with co-pilots back then. Maybe he was Goose and not Maverick. Damn, that's an insult to Goose, I apologize.
- gropo, on 10/10/2007, -2/+11Seriously therightside, you just condoned the actions of a terrorist. To fulfill your own ideological will. And you're different from Padilla how exactly?
- Plinkotic, on 10/10/2007, -0/+8"Yes, Padilla went to jail after a trial by his peers. It almost seemed like it wasn't necessary to suspend the Constitution and destroy civil liberties in order to protect the country from terrorists."
FOR THE WIN. Thank you good sir/madame. Truth, Common Sense, and a concise answer. - JigoroKano, on 10/10/2007, -0/+8Hunger would be the false pretense for him invading Taco Bell.
- CraigJ, on 10/10/2007, -0/+8Well, I only clicked once. I HATE this abomination of an AJAX Comment system...
- frsrblch, on 10/10/2007, -12/+19This really shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody...
- Pilot85, on 10/10/2007, -2/+9yes.
- SaranWrap, on 10/10/2007, -5/+12When has any politician had a REAL job?
- tzon, on 10/10/2007, -1/+7Total Complete *****. I have the book. I read the book and don't remember reading it. Just now checked the index---'W' not even there. Nowhere in the book is this mentioned. I went to the day in question in the book---not there.
INACCURATE. - ShrimpCrackers, on 10/10/2007, -0/+6RTFA! That goes for the submitter too! Right below that quote it says in big bold letters:
"This statement does not appear in the Reagan Diaries. See Below. "
"Did Reagan call G.W. Bush a ne’er-do-well?
Status: False"'
The article itself says its a hoax!
Apparently 90% of the digg users below did not read the article itself in its entirety. - greendalek, on 10/10/2007, -1/+7Substantiate please. Otherwise 'twill be buried.
- Quick2822, on 10/10/2007, -0/+6I just printed this off, and taped it into the copy of the book. So, now it isn't fake. I can't believe me said this!
- xxpor, on 10/10/2007, -3/+8C-C-C-C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER!!!!!
- banteron, on 10/10/2007, -1/+6Screenshot and no Photoshopping !
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