“A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions tell me that’s true. But the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”
— President Reagan
Speech on Iran-Contra Cover-up
March 4, 1987
Read my lips: presidents lie. That’s no secret, and the latest issue of The Atlantic Monthly has a great article about what makes George W. Bush different—a different kind of liar. What makes Bush different can best be summed up by the last line of the article: “The most dangerous lies a president can tell, it would seem, are the lies he tells himself.”
On the Atlantic website, on the same page as the article, you can get streaming audio—a stream of lies, if you will—of other presidents’ prevarications: Truman calling Hiroshima a “military base” after the U.S. dropped the A-bomb, Nixon denying his involvement in Watergate, Reagan “apologizing” for the Iran-Contra affair, and the subsequent lies of Bush Sr., Clinton, and our current president and decider George W. Bush. Another thing available only on the online edition of the article is a link to a YouTube montage of Bush repeatedly using the phrase “stay the course.” The video was quickly posted after Bush, in an interview on ABC, denied ever having used the phrase. “The president of the United States is not a fact-checker,” White House communications director Dan Bartlet is quoted as saying in the artice. Touché.
Any person who follows the news and is familiar with American history has already seen or heard all these speeches and clips, but they are helpful in that they put the article in a greater context. I didn’t read the 15-page story online because I try to avoid staring at a computer screen whenever possible. While reading the printed version—from a printer, not from the magazine—I put the online version of the article up on my computer screen after I realized that it was going to be a three-way affair.
Therefore, I propose the ménage a trios method for reading long-form magazine articles typically found in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, etc. All you need is yourself, your literary magazine of choice and the online edition glowing on your computer screen (so you can sneak a peak at it whenever necessary). But there’s a problem: the print editions of these magazines often don’t indicate if a word is hyperlinked in the online edition or if there are any other features available online that could help put the article in a greater context or illuminate a certain point. The more these magazines do to fix that problem by encourage the ménage a trios reading method, the less they’ll have to worry about losing subscribers.
