Former Obama booster Robert Reich, later yet another self-identified rube, has always had a way with words, as Jonathan Rauch spotted in a 1997 Slate article when he compared what Reich wrote in Locked In the Cabinet, Reich’s memoirs of his days as Bill Clinton’s labor secretary, with videotapes and transcripts of the actual events. Reich describes himself, as Jonah Goldberg wrote in Liberal Fascism (where I first discovered Rauch’s Slate article), as trapped in a Thomas Nast cartoon, “in constant battle with greedy fat cats, Social Darwinists, and Mr. Monopoly.” The actual transcripts and tapes describe a reality that’s far more pedestrian.
I wonder how Reich will morph this exchange:
George Will on Sunday marvelously told liberal economist Robert Reich something that many conservatives have been dying to say for years.
AdvertisementDuring a fascinating Right vs. Left debate on ABC’s This Week, after Reich predictably pined for higher income tax rates to solve all that ails us, Will struck back with the line of the weekend, “You are a pyromaniac in a field of strawmen” (video follows with transcript and commentary):
See, it’s all true! Robert Reich really did debate the man on the Monopoly box top — he just did so 15 years after writing his book. But what’s a decade and a half amongst postmodern fabulists?
To be fair to Reich, he did stick to the supposed topic at hand better that debate partner Barney Frank, who did everything short of a Nikita Khrushchev-like pounding his shoe on the table to avoid having to answer the questions.
– on your side: pound the law.
When the facts are on your side: pound the facts.
When neither the law or facts are on your side: pound the table.
Google fails me, but from memory, I bring you an exchange between Robert Reich and Bill Kristol that is all too appropriate here.
Pardon if the details are not exact, but Reich said in a book he wrote about some particular time he was being grilled before Congress over some matter or another. And what he wrote in the book was decidedly at odds with what happened in that committee room. Problem is, it was all saved by C-SPAN.
So someone brought this up to him at some point, and Reich said (the gist of it), “There is no greater reality than my own perception, as I was the one who was there” etc etc. To which Kristol commented, “In fact, there is one greater reality, and that is….. what actually happened!
Not only was that delicious, but what a pluperfect clash of the two outlooks on the world. Reich the liberal really believed that all that mattered was essentially “what ought to have been”, and what “felt right” to him. And Kristol the conservative smacks him with “it’s on tape, doofus, it doesn’t matter what you think or feel, what is what IS!”
Loved it.
A charter member of the Dan Ratbag postmodern “So what if it didn’t happen, it shoulda happened” school of “journolism.”