Peggy Noonan takes up Reagan’s last bottle of Just For Men, solemnly shakes the few remaining drops of “Chestnut Brown” over cracked ice, then downs it with an everclear chaser. She drags a forearm across her lips, leaving a Joker-like smear of lipstick that stretches from mouth to ear, then turns her gimlet eye upon Simi Valley and haughtily informs the various pretenders that not only are they no Ronald Reagan, they aren’t even JFK who was no FDR, and what are all these snakes doing in the punchbowl?
Meanwhile, Doghouse Riley, like Tina Turner, demonstrates that We Don’t Need Another Hero, and manages to do so without belting out the love theme from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.
Still, I don’t know anyone who became a “conservative” because of Reagan. No doubt some people did, just as there’s no doubt some admirers of Beethoven out there owe it all to A Clockwork Orange, but that doesn’t constitute proof of anything. I know there’s a demimonde of thirty- and forty-somethings out there who claim Road to Damascus-type revelation, but their precocious supposed liberalism is never credible nor believable. David Brooks? Glenn Harlan Reynolds? Neither evinces even a passing familiarity with the Civil Rights movement; both have a political cartoonist’s take on Feminism. What the hell were they so damned Liberal about in the 70s, anyway? The Reagan Era gave them the opportunity to keep dressing like their Inner Nixon Staffer but feel like they were finally trendy.
Read the whole thing. No, go on, treat yourself. You deserve it.