ALTERMAN: SLACKER FRIDAY

[dArKeR]

Name: Charles Pierce
Hometown: Newton, MA
Doc:
Let's play "Jeopardy."

I'll take "National Pageantry" For 400, Alex.

Frances FitzGerald, Theodore Draper, Mark Hertsgaard, and Eric Alterman.

(Bada-bing!)

Who are four people who might have provided a more interesting perspective on Ronald Reagan's presidency than did freaking Robert Evans, whom MSNBC had on to talk about it Wednesday night?

I'm still totaling up the moments. The first one was Fox having Ollie North on to explain Iran-Contra.  (Silver medal in that division goes to Larry King, who brought in for similar duty Ted Olson, who'd been RR's counsel at the time, which even I didn't remember.  Oh, for 10 minutes and a vial of sodium pentothal there, boy.)  Then there was the inevitable appearance of the politically unemployable Joe Lieberman, inevitably on Fox, talking about "evil."  Or maybe, given the source, it was my old friend Keith Olbermann, talking about Wednesday's procession as a "sight no man alive had seen," which certainly must have given pause to the folks both at Graceland, and at the Kennedy Compound.

Or maybe it was Tom Brokaw, The Haircut Who Invented History, talking about how all the people in Washington were a'hankerin' for the simpler, less-divided nation that Ronald Reagan had given us -- which led me to believe that Brokaw had spent most of the 1980's on mushrooms, which is the nicest thing I've thought about him in a while.  You want to talk about divisive politics, cowboy?  Drop down the hall to Lisa Myers's office and talk to her about being the mouthpiece for a 10-year dirty tricks operation.  After that, stop profaning the honored dead by dressing their sacrifice up in banality.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870/

[LittleApple81]

1. Tom Brokaw The Haircut Who Invented History BWAHAHAHAHA! nt

[papau]

2. Newton, MA - well at least one person (Charlie) in Newton can write well!

:-)