August 24, 2004

Harper’s Pretends to Report on Republican Convention Speeches—Before they Have Been Given

Conservatives often wonder why Liberals seem to ignore the facts. There is a great example in a Lewis Lapham article in the latest Harper’s. Lapham has written, and Harper’s has published, an article that slams the speeches made at the Republican convention—which has not yet taken place.

From Hit and Run at Reason Online:

Perhaps the most revealing part of the article is the paragraph where Lapham pretends to have heard the speeches at the Republican National Convention that does not open until a week from today. Referring to “the platform on which [George W. Bush] was trundled into New York City this August with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the heavy law enforcement, and the paper elephants,” Lapham writes:

The speeches in Madison Square Garden affirmed the great truths now routinely preached from the pulpits of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal—government the problem, not the solution; the social contract a dead letter; the free market the answer to every maiden’s prayer—and while listening to the hollow rattle of the rhetorical brass and tin, I remembered the question that [Richard] Hofstadter didn’t stay to answer. How did a set of ideas both archaic and bizarre make its way into the center ring of the American political circus?

Most of us like our reporting to be done about things that have actually taken place.

The facts appear to be entirely irrelevant to Lapham; the anomaly is that here he reveals this so unequivocally.

(Hat tip: Andrew Breitbart )