The single most idiotic line ever to appear on the Op-Ed pages of the L.A. Times:

My beat is human psychology and the nature of reality and fiction. It's in those realms that at least one key difference between Reagan and Clinton can be found — a difference that sits at the heart of our current divisions.

Reagan was a man who believed in truth. Not your truth or my truth but "the truth," the one that is out there whether you happen to believe in it or not.

"I never thought of myself as a great man," he said, "just a man committed to great ideas." Those ideas — our founders' ideas — were great because they recognized a central truth: the good of individual liberty. And they guaranteed human beings those rights endowed in them by the "big truth" — their creator.

Clinton, on the other hand, is a narcissist who finds it difficult to grasp in any real sense that there is a place where his "inner man" ends and the rest of the world begins. Clinton's stock phrase, "I feel your pain," is really the insistence of a man who does not truly feel anyone else's pain, does not truly understand that there are other inner realities as urgent as his own.

This, from a column this morning by a novelist named Andrew Klavan, who seems to have the same high regard for the Big Dog that Hugh Chavez has for the current incumbent. That Ronald Reagan was a "great" President, or even the "greatest President of the last half of the 20th Century," is an argument for historians. He certainly wasn't the "greatest" President if you were an African-American, or if you lived below the poverty line, but I will admit he accomplished many things that, in retrospect, benefited the country, including his sharp repudiation of neoconservatism at the end of his second term, which in turn led to accomodation with Gorbachev and a relatively bloodless victory in the Cold War.

But to claim that ol' Dutch had some special loyalty to "the truth" is almost psychotic. There has probably never been a President, present company included, who had less interest in what the facts were in any given situation than Ronald Wilson Reagan. Whether it was fictitious "welfare queens" (a racist lie that helped discredit conservative efforts at welfare reform for a generation), or denials that his administration was selling arms to the mullahs in Iran as his principal hostage negotiation strategy, to his frequent juxtoposition of movie plots with reality, Reagan was a man who debased the truth at will.

I would even go so far as to argue that the reason President Clinton was able to ride out the Lewinsky scandal was that the bar for honesty had been set so low by his predecessor. What Clinton's adversaries forgot, but his supporters vividly remembered, was that the public eventually made their peace with Reagan's frequent lies, seeing that trait as an eccentricity gifted upon successful politicians rather than a character flaw. If you could forgive a President for not being honest about sending graft and kickbacks from Iran to the Contras, then what's the big deal about lying about a consensual affair? Reagan's most important legacy may well be the moral relativism that he legitimized in our political system, an attitude towards "the truth" to which both parties have made their accomodation.