Mark Davis, Ronald Reagan, and trick questions
Having come back to Dallas after a couple of years in New York, I met with the editor of D Magazine to talk shop a few months back and asked him to name the city’s most prominent political commentator. This turned out to be Mark Davis, a popular radio host who also subs for Rush Limbaugh and writes a mediocre column for the Dallas Morning News.
I have a little test I use to gauge the competence of a pundit, which is to ask him a couple of questions designed to get him to accidentally denounce one of his political heroes; this helps to reveal the extent to which the pundit in question really does have some definitive set of values whereby he evaluates the world around him, rather than a penchant for making them up on the spot as convenient. A worldview should be a compilation of facts, rather than a filter to keep out those that one might find challenging. Moreover, someone such as myself who was not yet born when Reagan took office and who doesn’t have strong feelings about the fellow either way shouldn’t know more about Reagan than someone who experienced the whole of his presidency in adulthood and believes him to be some sort of extraordinary statesman worthy of emulation. Things just tend to work out that way.
Today, Mark Davis will discover what he would think of Reagan had Reagan been an enemy rather than an ally. If it’s any consolation, he will not lose a single listener over this or anything else, and will in fact probably gain a slightly wider audience, as there is absolutely no correlation between competence and success in the field of political commentary, which is why William Kristol still has his own magazine.
You have to wonder what the tea-party fantasists would make of Richard Nixon; other than his ethics and persecution mania, I suspect that they would find him a thoroughly reprehensible RINO. It’s extraordinary how the GOP has changed in only a couple of generations, and with no outside threat to blame, other than the threat of irrelevance.Report
C’mon Barrett, you can do better?
Nixon was a RINO. The effect of the TPers, as a movement, will be determined in a couple of weeks. My own opinion, after looking at the polls, is that this is the most politically significant movement I’ve ever experienced.
Ronaldo Magnus did a lot I liked and some I didn’t. I think he occasionally allowed the wrong people to advise him. However, there is obviously no comparison between Reagan and our current Kenyan-commie president. What Reagan did that the Left will never be able to forgive was to establish a ground that all of us Americans stand on that simply says American principles and ideals are intrinsically superior to any ideology originating in Europe, Asia, or Africa. And, I think its that reality that a whole lot of Americans will be taking to the polls on Nov. 2, and the truth is, we owe Barrack Hussein Obama and his radical regime a debt of gratitude for the ‘awakening’ and political rising.Report
@Robert Cheeks, I’m going to have to disagree with you on your notion that the left as a whole couldn’t forgive Reagan for iterating the supremacy of American ideals. Certainly there is a contingent of the left that not only ascribes to cultural relativism not just in the reasonable materialist sense of identifying attributes of culture’s but not believing in some set-in-the-stars or God-given pecking order, but which also goes so far as to save their praise for pre-industrial tribal societies and communist tyrannies while bashing America on every count. But this is a pretty small contingent of the left. Anyone who claims that a majority of the 100 million or so American liberals actually despise American ideals and hate Reagan for paying tribute to them is either ignorant of the subject or has some emotional need to write off all objections to his own worldview as intrinsically invalid lest he go so far as to have to face them.Report
@Barrett Brown, Thanks Barrett, I actually agree with your premise so I’m neither ‘ignorant’ nor do I have ’emotional needs’ along that direction…however, I may be stupid about other stuff and my ’emotional needs’ may drift along other directions.
My hyperbolic ‘criticisms’ are always directed at those ‘libruls’ who, presumably, have the intelligence to know better and the where-with-all to resist the so-called ‘immanent salvation of man and society.’ Those intellectual (academic?) leaders who may have some idea that there’s a gnostic component in their statist faith that is grounded on the ‘rise and fall of Soviet Communism’ and potentially understood by them as a ‘common failure of modernity’, a failure that is shared by the West.
Consequently, we can not bring the ‘intellectual librul’ to Jesus until we make him see that his philosophy is merely a ‘crisis of meaning,’ grounded on the corruption of the spirit. Like Dylan said, “It’s an empty, hungry feelin’ that don’t mean no one no good.”
I’m not really interested in the unwashed, mass of ‘libruls.’Report
@Robert Cheeks, Sorry, some of my previous comment got screwed up somehow; the sentence that begins “certainly there” seems to have been fractured somehow, but it looks like you got the gist of what was intended anyway.Report
@Robert Cheeks,
“My own opinion, after looking at the polls, is that this is the most politically significant movement I’ve ever experienced.”
Really? This is just the Republican base screaming louder. What do they stand for? The same things they’ve always stood for–lower taxes for them and more spending on things they like. Nothing has changed.Report
@Steven Donegal, Steve..I know, I know, it’s tough. Relax, take some asprin, this will all be over soon enough. Like I said, I’m here to hep yous guys understand that America is appalled by His Magnificence!Report
And thank you, Robert Cheeks!
For some odd reason, every time I am reminded of the fabulous Tea Party, I immediately remember a great Bill Mauldin cartoon – a new lieutenant is being escorted up to the front somewhere around the middle of the Italian campaign, and while passing through a bombed-out Italian village, he sees a couple of rough-looking GIs at a street cafe table, obviously spoiling for a fight. Willie (or Joe) answers the young officer’s obvious question by explaining “We call them ‘garritroopers’ – they’re too far forward to wear ties and too far back to get shot.” What Bill would think of the modern GOP, I’m not sure, but I bet he’d recognize the type.Report
Thanks John, you’ve made my day!
If you need someone to talk with following the upcoming election, just drop a comment. I’m here to hep!Report
Thanks to this mid-term election and the rise of the Tea Party, I have lost any and all ability to tell the difference between parody/satire and sincerity. c.f. post #2.Report