I happen to know Christopher Lehmann-Haupt personally, and the man is notably unpolitical. I challenge you to cite any published statement by anyone but yourself alleging that Lehmann-Haupt is an "extreme leftist ideologue." Leave out the word "extreme," even. You can't imagine how laughable this is as a proposition.
You have a choice. Is it your view that Reagan was
delusional, or that he was
a liar, or that
the many recorded instances of his fabulating, and confusing reality with movies, were all invented by his enemies?
I do hope you will answer this question. None of your confreres has done so.
I think he was delusional, myself. In the sense that he had the gift of being able to make himself believe whatever it was convenient to him to believe. A trait shared by many of his fans here, I observe.
I suspect that this truly unusual quality of being able to believe, sincerely, whatever he needed to believe, has something to do with much of his early success, as when he performed so well as a spokesmodel for the General Electric Corporation. Reagan was always surrounded and backed by tycoons of one sort or another, and they undoubtedly found this capacity of his an absolutely mindblowing resource as they maneuvered him in different directions.
[Edit: Reagan's adaptability is, truly, a marvel. He even went along with the notion that the pronounciation of his name, firmly anchored in the minds of millions of television and movie fans, as REE-gan, should be changed to RAY-gan, which his backers felt was "higher class." ]
[Edit again: And calling the son he didn't recognize when he was shaking his hand, so blind was he, "Schmuck," when the son was a child... that was just an affectionate appellation, I assume, and not preternaturally insensitive?] |
