The Clothes Have No Emperor: A Chronicle of the American '80s

We do not throw around a lot of praise for “political books” here at Wonkette, because almost all political books are awful. The Clothes Have No Emperor is an exception. This droll accounting of the Reagan presidency was published in 1989, and your editor still has the dog-eared, scribble-annotated trade paperback on his bookshelf. It’s the only honest history of the Ronald Reagan 1980s. If there’s any possible antidote to the hundred-foot-long shit sandwich of Reagan Worship pummeling America this weekend, you’ll find it within the pages of this book by Paul Slansky.Thrill to Nancy telling Ronnie what to say for eight wacky years, etc.! As a reader of blogs, you will be delighted by the blog-like chronological items that make up this complete assessment of the Reagan production. As a hater of Washington media, you will recoil with recognition at this damning pile of evidence proving that today’s idiot-beltway hero-worship dingbat crap factory truly began in 1980, when the Washington press corps was presented with a narrative by Reagan’s handlers: America wanted to “feel good again,” and the empty-eyed smiling face of Ronald Reagan was exactly the way to “bring fun back” to a nation crippled by recession, unemployment, lost wars and humiliation in the Middle East. (Hah, sound familiar?) Like SPY Magazine and The Bonfire of the Vanities, this is one of those essential documents of the 1980s — a time of idiocy and fraud, and a time we can now see as the Birth of a Nation’s Stupidity.

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