Posted 8:54 AM by Gene

Today (the WaPost reminds us) is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attempt on President Reagan. The first thing we must ask is, what did the luxury news suites think? Sadly, 9/11 puts such questions in bounds. We know some Texans were overjoyed when JFK was shot, presumably because a Texan assumed power (although that the Texan was LBJ should have stopped their cheering). Oh to be a fly and buzz though the news hacks' empty skulls, and probe their withered souls. We suspect it wouldn't be a pretty sight. We recall how some publicity seeking student at a college here ran some screed in the school paper saying how Reagan deserved it, and everybody rushed to him and said no no, you mustn't do that, all the while muttering "First Amendment" with a slight smirk. We recall too how THE GREATEST FILM DIRECTOR OF ALL TIME, MR. SCORSESE, fluttered like a chicken with its head shot -- CUT off to get mention of HIS IMMORTAL MASTERPIECE excised from his endorsements for Mitsubishi TVs. So we must wonder. Perhaps they were too busy with the pretentious phone-calling paper-shuffling rewrite-screaming seven-bell-ringing bustle that is the hacks' staff of life, but we imagine some of them were hoping. That PAPA would have taken over never entered their thick skulls; but who knows? After one flailing term it could have been DEMOCRATS FOREVER!!!!! Not that the Eastern Europeans would have been too pleased. Nor Jim Brady.

Whether or not the hacks were hoping, we know this: the attempt came about six months after JIMMY'S WORLD, and a scarce nine months after the RIGHTEOUS PERSECUTION of BILLY CARTER for being a fool. It was after an eternity when the hacks screamed to know WHO SHOT J. R.????? (the agony prolonged by an otherwise welcome actors' strike), and about eight months before they threw tons of rice over THE WEDDING OF LUKE AND LAURA. With that cavalcade of total JERNALISTIC miscreancy we never trusted news hacks again.

And that's why we ask what they were thinking.