As Victor Davis Hanson shows, she's dead wrong.
With all due respect, I don’t think we “all” know that this started with Trump, however crass he can be. Rather, we know all too well the political landscape a decade before Trump.
Do we recall the recent deranged talk of 2004-8 from the Democratic Party, the popular culture, and the media—or the relative passivity of the wounded Bush administration in response to such venom?
Why, after all, did Alfred A. Knopf publish the novel Checkpoint, a boring and tired rant about fantasizing the assassination of then-President Bush? Who created the particular landscape that encouraged filmmaker Gabriel Range to offer up “Death of a President”that trafficked in the same fantasies of a Bush assassination?
Why would the Guardian publish an op-ed by “satirist” Charles Brooker’s dreaming of the need for another John Wilkes Booth or Lee Harvey Oswald to repeat their needed work—a theme in part that actor Johnny Depp has recently channeled against Trump.
Were premonitions of Trump in 2004 befouling our political discourse?
What were the “origin and rationale” of the Jonathan Chait’s 2003 New Republic screed, “Why I Hate George W. Bush” in which he began: “I hate President George W. Bush There, I said it . . . I hate the way he walks—shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks—blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo populist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him.”
Had Chait become unhinged by reading The Art of the Deal?
Peggy has been coasting for most of her life on her role as a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan. In her old age, she has become a sad spectacle.
No comments:
Post a Comment