Between Tom Friedman’s mustache, which looks like Harry Reems’s mustache, and Jon Meacham’s nose, which looks as big as Reems’s “mustache,” Friedman and Meacham look like a perverse version of Wooly Willy—without the magnetic personality. The two may not look the same, but they sound the same. There they stand: Friedman in his half-zippered fleece, issuing parables about Japanese fishermen and Micronesian lenders, while Meacham, in a stained nightshirt made of green velvet and white fur, rhapsodizes about dead Republican presidents.
Meacham’s latest homily in the New York Times, which follows his eulogy for George H. W. Bush at the National Cathedral, the one in which he dressed like George W. Bush and sounded like Mister Rogers, if our friendly neighbor had taken a large dose of estrogen to ease his “transition” from man of the house to the madam of public television; his newest column about Ronald Reagan reads like a love letter from one of our more hypocritical historians.
By replacing Reagan’s burial cloth with one of Meacham’s (cleaner) shrouds, and in an act of rhetorical grave robbing akin to our eulogist-in-chief holding the Gipper’s skull instead of Yorick’s, Meacham reveals how little he knows about Reagan and how much he hates Donald Trump.
He seems to think Reagan was engaged to Lady Liberty, despite his marriage to the First Lady. Maybe Reagan, like Meacham, had a thing for robes and torches, when he was not watching men wear and brandish them at the Creation of Care ceremony at a summer festival of the Bohemian Grove. Or maybe Reagan thought illegal immigration was wrong.
Alas, poor Reagan! Meacham did not know him.
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