Ronald Reagan on George W. Bush

[snopes]

Comment: A friend forwarded the following quote to me. I am skeptical that Ronald Reagan actually wrote it.

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"A moment I've been dreading. George brought his ne're-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who lives in Florida. The one who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I'll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they'll hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work."

-- Ronald Reagan in his recently published diaries, May 17, 1986.

[snopes]

http://www.snopes.com/politics/satire/kinsley.asp

[E. Q. Taft]

I heard this one last week from Bill Press, when he was guest-hosting the Ed Schultz radio show. I hadn't known if it was accurate or not, but as soon as I Googled, up it came.

I sent an email to Press, linking the snopes page and urging him to retract the story on the next day's show, as I think there are more than enough indisputably true items out there for anyone who wants to say bad things about George W. Bush. I don't know if he did so -- I only heard a few minutes of the following show. If anyone hears him repeating the story again, however, my respect for him will vastly diminish. (Bad enough that he read it without having checked it out -- he said he hadn't heard anywhere that it wasn't a genuine quote, but considering it took me all of ten seconds to invalidate it, that's sloppy broadcasting to say the least.)

[Ramblin' Dave]

Originally Posted by E. Q. Taft

If anyone hears him repeating the story again, however, my respect for him will vastly diminish.

Same here. The Bush apologists thrive on this sort of thing, saying it proves what a liberal media it is and how lots of other examples of Bush's stupidity are probably false. I remember, after Garry Trudeau apologized for referring in a Doonesbury strip to the false story about Bush having the lowest IQ of any president as if it were true, a lot of right wingers whined about how far more people saw the strip than the retraction. And these were the very same people who still were (and quite possibly still are) telling anyone who would listen that Hillary Clinton shot Vince Foster and Al Gore said he invented the Internet.