[img]1|left|||no_popup[/img]Left-wing Washington journalists such as Jimmy Mann, formerly of the Los Angeles Times, are permanently galled that the dreaded President Reagan pulled the trigger that collapsed the Berlin Wall 20 years ago this month.
Typical of liberal thinkers and left-wing journalists when the bullseye they are aiming for is a dreaded Republican, he wrote a muddled centerpiece in the Times’ op-ed section this morning, “Against the wall.” The essay was so meanderingly unclear that Sherlock Holmes may have to be exhumed to give an expert interpretation.
He cooked up a rhetorical stew that would choke a rhino.
Mr. Mann’s writings specialize in pedantic sarcasm. It flows like a humming spring brook through this latest attempt to demean President Reagan.
With condescending impatience, anther of his specialties, he strikes a sardonic pose, suggesting that you, the simpleton reader, are a witless dumbbell for needing to be lectured on modern history that is so clear to gifted liberals.
When he was at the Times, and in his writings since, Mr. Mann has constantly used Republicans as red herrings to promote the leftist ideology that drives his career.
I read his essay three times, and I still do not know its purpose.
Steering a Baffling Course
What passed for dizzying reasoning by Mr. Mann more accurately resembled a slalom course as the reader, like a rag doll, was whipped to one side and then to the other. The author feigns to the right, then to the left, and who knows where he will stop.
Swish Obama’s incessant — and untrue — claim about the hundreds of thousands of jobs “I am saving and creating” is in the left-wing tradition of baffling the massses with a blend of zig-zagging data and conflicting concepts.
Mr. Mann hews to this line.
He opens by contending that the brilliant line for which President Reagan is most remembered, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall,” is misleading and overrated — not by the noble scholars on the Left, of course, but by those gullible, undereducated conservatives who will swallow everything they are served.
Right-wingers may think Mr. Reagan outsmarted the Communists and Mr. Gorbachev by staring down the Soviet leader.
But, nah, that is not the way it happened at all, he insists. He knows better.
Mr. Mann writes:
“It was Reagan’s diplomacy with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, bitterly opposed at the time by his conservative former supporters, that did the most to create the climate in which the Cold War could end.”
With more grudge in his jaw than Scrooge ever could summon, the envious Mr. Mann consumes 20 lengthy paragraphs to say, cloudily, well, yes, maybe, okay, President Reagan gets the credit, maybe, I am not saying yes for sure, for getting the Communists to tear down the Berlin Wall.
I Promise to Find a Villain
And then with an affected stutter that is so popular on the Left, Mr. Mann, once again grudgingly, says if the President gets the credit for bringing down the wall, at least history should be certain to condemn conservative supporters who criticized various of Mr. Reagan’s policies in convincing Mr. Gorbachev to heel. They should be blistered for their ignorance more than Mr. Reagan should be praised, he argues.
Like an exhausted parent telling a slow-minded child for the 10th time in an evening to clean up the mess in his room, Mr. Mann finally seems to make it slightly clear — who knows? — that conservatives and their simple-mindedness are his true target.
As Mr. Mann stumbles, agonizingly, toward a bumbled conclusion, he inserts several juicy digs at a favorite liberal whipping boy, the defense of America. He says Mr. Reagan’s diplomatic suasion with Mr. Gorbachev was crucial to the Cold War victory for the West.
But dumb conservatives, in their blind loyalty to America, credit the President’s “much-more hardline defense buildup.”
“Hardline” means Mr. Mann heavily disapproves. It always is journalistic code for “I disagree.”
Once again, he repeats, as he states at several junctures, how vexed he is by the wasting of precious taxpayer dollars on defense of America when it better could be spent on redistributing the wealth.
If you have not read it, don’t bother.
