Remembering history the way they wished it had been
The Voice From Beyond 
America’s most prolific dead presidential offspring/author has struck again. Margaret Truman, Harry’s daughter, has checked in again with yet another Washington “mystery.” Murder Inside The Beltway is perhaps the most insipidly titled of her, shall we say uninspired crap novels.
Miss Truman “authored” a string of ’em before her January death. She’s entombed with her parents and husband at the Truman Library.
It Girl 
The McCain campaign practice of repeating lies even in the face of their refutation has spread to their apologists.
Even after National Treasure Thomas Frank blew up Sarah Palin’s Truman-homage-via-quoting-a-nut-who-wanted-FDR-dead, The Weekly Standard claims that “”So far no one has picked up on the significance of Palin’s invocation of Harry Truman in her convention speech.”
It’s all about the rise of natural aristocrats. Steven F. Hayward deploys a little Founder-Rama genuflection to Adams and Jefferson, then honers Truman [and Palin, in this alternative universe] by wheeling out one of the mustiest of nineties cliches:
Gettin’ It.
“Her reference was more than just a bridge to a heartland-versus-Beltway theme. Truman, recall, was the only president of the 20th century who was not a college graduate…In retrospect it is clear that Truman “got it.” He didn’t need any more “experience” to master the job. “
Pass the corn.
Bringing Sexy Back  
A discredited president had sapped the Nation’s spirits, as a seemingly endless war ground on with no resolution in site.
A hero arose to lift the people’s spirits. Never-mind that he was dead, and that the stories which inspired us were a tissue of lies – America loves a happy ending.
Can Ronald Reagan do for the Oughts what Harry Truman did for the Seventies? One Hollywood dream-weaver is determined to find out.
Republican hack of legend Lionel Chetwynd is launching a one man Ronald Reagan play, touring the provinces before filming the stage show for wide screen fun.
Dodgy, Yet Beloved 
The Truman industry launched in the wake Richard Nixon’s demise on the strength of Merle Miller’s Plain Speaking, the source of a thousand Harry Tales that can’t quite be verified.
Feist never fails. New Truman material is constantly arising to meet the Nation’s insatiable demand, and such is the legend’s strength that even discoveries of his mutterings about the Jews can’t tarnish the legend.
Education Abroad  
Richard Nixon son-in-law and New York McCain campaign chair Ed Cox sees haunting parallels between Veep-To-Be Sarah Palin and Tricky Dick*. 
The secret of Nixon’s success? Near death experiences at the hands of foreign mobs!
“Eisenhower in 1952 was also old for a person to be elected president …He had this young senator from California named Richard Nixon. He sent him on an around-the-world trip. Because of his intellectual interest in it, and because of what he was, he was able to learn the way of the world very quickly.”
And it weren’t no book learnin.
*Somehow she’s also Fighting Harry.
Telling Tales 
Having done his part to continue the Clinton era celebration of Harry Truman’s muscular liberalism, Peter Beinart is casting his eyes back further, to the glories of Wilsonian foreign policy.
It’s somehow to be different from George W. Bush Wilsonism. 
Beinart presents a highly selective version of Wilson, what he might call “coherent.” It’s heavy on Wilson’s doomed world vision for after that messy war he joined. Wilson without tears – no unhappy interventions in Russia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nicaragua [inherited], no teaching the Mexicans to elect good men.
It’s gonna be great.
“McCain’s singular focus may be more easily grasped; Obama’s broader catalogue could end up sounding less like a vision than a list. Collective security offers a way of linking these disparate concerns and telling a coherent story about today’s problems and how to solve them…In 1916, Woodrow Wilson talked of “a common order, a common justice and a common peace.†In the 2007 Foreign Affairs article in which he set out his foreign policy views, Barack Obama wrote about “common threats,†“common security,†and a “common humanity.†America’s fate and the world’s fate, both men were trying to say, are ultimately indivisible. We rise together or fall together. Never has the world so badly needed to hear these words from an American president, and never have the American people been so prepared to embrace them. Wilson’s dream has been too long deferred. The time to revive it is now.”
