Scrapbook
Scrapbook Is Pat the Bunny Hopping Back to His Hutch? After flirting with Ross Perot for his blessing and the Reform party nomination, will Pat Buchanan actually turn tail and run away from the...
...Plus The Scrapbook has a certain fondness for others who refer to themselves in the third person...
...Unsurprisingly, the one thing the New York Times found to like was that the show "tackles the religious right with a vehemence rare in politics or entertainment...
...The ultimate test of any piece of nonfiction writing must be its success in saying something—or quoting something—that a majority of readers 'can't help but believe.'" The moral of this story, The Scrap-book can't help but believe, is that when popular historians start asking in newspaper columns, What is Truth...
...On the other hand, it's a good bet that Morris will find defenders in the trendier university departments (not least for his symbolic desecration of Reagan...
...On the one hand, there must be an unimaginable reservoir of pent-up professional envy that a talented non-academic like Morris got this plum assignment in the first place...
...Bush's folks—have been in touch with Governor Ventura in the Reform party, and [Ventura's] in touch with Donald Trump, who has more money than Mr...
...The reason they're outraged, I'll tell you, is because they fear that Pat Buchanan may move to the Reform party and take the conservative movement with him...
...Bureaucrat September 21, 1999, "GENEVA (Reuters)—U.S...
...Bush...
...The Scrapbook, for its part, isn't out-raged—particularly since this magazine urged Buchanan to move to the Reform party, confident he would be unable to take the conservative movement with him...
...Buchanan had just complained about George W. Bush's fund-raising prowess, and Rehm asked him why he was thinking of leaving the GOP: "I believe the Republican nomination is virtually rigged now...
...In the interests of full disclosure, The Scrapbook should note that Buchanan complimented this magazine to the Today show's Katie Couric last week, calling us "that little dinky magazine that pretends to be conservative...
...What Buchanan seems not to have anticipated is that the defense of his book might endanger his chances of getting the Reform party nomination, both because Ventura may decide he has to block Buchanan to save his party, and because Perot, eccentric though he may be, is not on record as being a World War II revisionist...
...Yeah, it's a rare thing when Hollywood takes on the Christian right...
...Cue the inspirational music...
...Pat-the-politician started to flirt with the Reform party—not necessarily a foolish idea for a presidential campaign that was going nowhere in the GOP But at the same time, Pat-the-author was hitting the road to promote his much-labored-over revisionist history of World War II...
...Biographers and historians are generally more conscientious about accurate quotation than journalists are...
...Listen to what he told Diane Rehm on her radio show Sept...
...So a group of religious leaders is invited to the White House for a conversation about family values...
...Needless to say, this was all throat clearing, deeply ironic in retrospect, as Morris worked himself up for one hell of a "however" clause: "What, ultimately, is Truth...
...With gumption spilling out of his ears, the POTUS tells off the bigots: His adolescent daughter just received a death threat in the mail from a Christian group, and if these people will be so kind as to get the hell out of his White House he'd be much obliged because he isn't about to talk with them about anything...
...Not that Morris was entirely comfortable with the practice...
...And these little boys have been on Pat Buchanan's case for a long time...
...The central conflict of the first episode revolved around the Harold Ickes character (played by Brad Whitford), who belittles the faith of a religious pundit on a Capital Gang-like show...
...Morris, in fact, telegraphed his technique in a striking 1991 op-ed for the Washington Post, "Truth in Substance," in which he explained why he and the historian David McCullough had filed a brief with the Supreme Court defending the journalist Janet Malcolm, who stood accused of concocting quotes...
...God knows, I lock my study door and drop all the blinds before deleting so much as a dot from a four-dot ellipsis in somebody's quoted remarks...
...Not only that, we have to document our sources, whereas reporters will go to jail rather than reveal theirs...
...What courage...
...But then you hear that the Republican hierarchy down there in Austin—Mr...
...vicious, manipulative anti-Semites...
...After flirting with Ross Perot for his blessing and the Reform party nomination, will Pat Buchanan actually turn tail and run away from the race for the Reform party nomination before it even starts...
...This novelistic device has justifiably provoked an initial storm of outrage, though it will be interesting to track the reactions of academics...
...The United Nations was held back by the fact it does not recognize Taiwan and needed China's approval...
...And that's not all: Morris has invented a doppelganger to help him tell the story, a fictitious "Edmund Morris" who is Reagan's contemporary (the real Morris was born in 1940) and reports as an eyewitness on the doings of the young future president...
...What artistic novelty...
...The author—Pulitzer Prize winner Edmund Morris—was granted unprecedented access to a sitting president and seems to have been so deeply burdened by this good fortune that he needed an extra decade to finish the book...
...Barely 30 seconds into the meeting it turns out that the Christians are—surprise...
...Scholarly biographers are not ordinarily supposed to be parties to such tinkering with the truth," he archly noted...
...perhaps Edmund Morris should have stayed locked in his study, pondering the ellipsis in his career...
...Various senior staff come to him concerned that the president will have him fired to placate religious conservatives...
...Of course, they all agree that he was right in principle, but as a political matter the religious nuts are useful to the president...
...The dialogue begins to break down when suddenly the president (Martin Sheen) strides into the room and takes control...
...Edmund Morris, Amiable Dunce_ Scandal stalks the new authorized biography of Ronald Reagan...
...So if I'm running into another stacked deck, if our democracy has become a plutocracy, I can't play...
...Conservative Christians, often mocked as paranoid, may soon make that old counterculture bumper sticker their own: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you...
...with a capital T) and find themselves unable to give a persuasive answer, the game is up...
...it's what you might call a stacked deck," Pat complained...
...and Asian experts flew to Taiwan Tuesday to help rescue operations after a massive earthquake, while the United Nations awaited a go-ahead from China before launching its own coordinating mission...
...So I've gotta look and see if I can win this...
...That investment has manifested itself in the ever deeper hole he has been digging by resolutely defending his labor of love...
...The chief of staff explains, "We need these people...
...Fearing failure in the Reform party, Buchanan seems to be thinking of reasons not to go through with his presidential run...
...Wing Nuts NBC's White House drama The West Wing, created by self-proclaimed liberal Democrat and enfant terrible Aaron Sorkin, debuted last week...
...Buchanan may now be realizing that he has driven himself into a cul-de-sac...
...His psychic investment in the latter enterprise seems to have taken precedence...
...Doesn't this sound as if Buchanan has already crafted his talking points for not going ahead and competing for the Reform party nomination...
...There's No Bureaucrat Like a U.N...
Vol. 5 • October 1999 • No. 3
