Not that one.
This one:
My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true. But the facts and evidence tell me it is not.
The context of this, as most of us know, was the Iran-Contra scandal. “A few months ago,” said the 40th President on March 4, 1987, “I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages.” What came next, quoted above, was perhaps the best rhetorical evasion of “I lied” that has ever been uttered in public by any American politician, let alone President. And not only did the public let him get away with it, but it came to define an entire presidency, an entire political party, an entire political ideology, and an entire political movement, to this day nearly 30 years later — even though no one knew it at the time.
I’ve written extensively before about modern American conservative doublethink, viz., that the facts don’t matter as long as the “idea” is basically correct, and since all conservative “ideas” are basically correct, whatever conservative politicians, pundits and other enablers say is necessarily true even if they get the facts wrong, indeed even if they deliberately get the facts wrong and are just plain making stuff up. Even if there really are no real people out there (let alone elected Democrats) who actually want to take every last gun away from every last law-abiding American, it feels like there are, because that’s what all liberals and Democrats want, right? So it’s true, even though it isn’t.
I could go on and on.
In the prior diary linked above I traced this phenomenon back to John Kyl’s infamous not-intended-to-be-factual statement about Planned Parenthood on the Senate floor in 2011. At least, that was when it started to become more open and obvious; I never suggested that it started there. But I was reminded recently of this equally-infamous quote from Reagan about Iran-Contra, which I deployed in response to something like the above meme image being posted on Facebook, and thought perhaps that this might have been the flash point of modern conservative doublethink. The conservative Big Bang, if you will.
It has often been said, in politics and in life, that we judge ourselves by our best intentions while we judge others by the single worst thing they’ve ever done. (Political partisans sometimes take this up a notch, judging others by the single worst thing we can imagine them doing, even if they’ve never actually done it.) What Reagan says here about the lie he told “a few months ago” is, in hindsight, truly astonishing: “My heart, and my best intentions still tell me that’s true.” Long before Stephen Colbert defined “truthiness”, the Great Communicator enunciated to a credulous public: What is true, and whether something is true, can be gleaned and determined from one’s “heart” and one’s “best intentions”. And that’s the criteria for how one should be judged, regardless of what “the facts and evidence” actually show.
I was in high school at the time, there was no Internet, no cable news and no national political talk radio (the Fairness Doctrine wasn’t abolished by the FCC until five months later), so I don’t remember whether or not anyone asked the question, rhetorically or otherwise, “How can one’s ‘heart’ and ‘best intentions’ ‘still tell’ someone that something is true after ‘the facts and evidence’ prove otherwise?” The answer, obviously, is that it can’t, so just as obviously, that wasn’t the point of saying it. It was a novel and clever way of letting oneself off the hook for lying (or, if we’re a bit more generous, for being wrong or for being oblivious) that enough people would accept so as not to harm the President (or his party) politically.
Whoever wrote that line, whether it was Lee Atwater, Frank Luntz or someone else, was a political genius. Whether that person knew that it would come to define an entire generation of conservative/Republican politics, we’ll probably never know. Political lying is as old as politics itself, and doublethink — believing that something is true and knowing it’s false at the same time — was spelled out by George Orwell when Reagan was still acting in “B” pictures for Warner Brothers. But for perhaps the first time in American history, in 1987 an American president gave himself, his party and an entire generation of politicians a new, appealing, seemingly-credible and unassailable excuse for lying, for being wrong, for not knowing the truth and for not caring about the truth, that has become even more open and obvious over the past decade.
For all the liberal icons of the last 50 years — JFK, RFK, MLK, LBJ, WJC, BHO — conservatives seem to have only one. They don’t celebrate the Bushes, Nixon, Ford, Dole, Gingrich, or even Eisenhower, and it remains to be seen whether or how they’ll celebrate the Drumpfenführer once they’re done getting their terrible policies out of him. Reagan is their icon, their only idol, the sun around which all of their planets revolve. They remember “Tear down this wall” and “Government is the problem” and “We begin bombing in five minutes” and “I forgot to duck” and “There you go again” and “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” and all the other great Reagan quotes. But the one that has guided them more than any other, whether they realize it or not, is this:
My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true. But the facts and evidence tell me it is not.
It doesn’t matter what “that” is. If your “heart” and your “best intentions” tell you that something is true, then it’s true, no matter what “the facts and evidence” say. If your “heart” and “best intentions” don’t match “the facts and evidence,” then the latter, not the former, must be wrong; the former, not the latter, should be trusted, and the latter, not the former, should be questioned, doubted, suspected of bias, and dismissed.
The great Ronald Reagan said so, so it must be right.