{"id":28150,"date":"2015-08-19T01:00:45","date_gmt":"2015-08-19T05:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=28150"},"modified":"2015-08-12T20:30:12","modified_gmt":"2015-08-13T00:30:12","slug":"qotd-political-autobiographies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/08\/19\/qotd-political-autobiographies\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Political autobiographies"},"content":{"rendered":"

… usually these books are simply campaign documents or, in the case of Wendy Davis\u2019s Forgetting to Be Afraid: A Memoir<\/em>, r\u00e9sum\u00e9s for candidates who have suffered a crushing defeat or expect to suffer a crushing defeat, offering a rationale for keeping themselves in the game.<\/p>\n

I have heard more than one thoughtful political observer lament the fact that Bill Clinton is constitutionally incapable of writing an honest book \u2014 given the man\u2019s intelligence, his charm, and his genuinely dramatic life\u2019s story, he might very well have written a real work of literature. But politics suffers from the same tendency toward dishonesty that U. S. Grant attributed to war: Political careers \u201cproduce many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true.\u201d How many Americans still to this day believe that John Ashcroft draped a statue of Justice because he was scandalized by her bare, aluminum breast, or that he fears that calico cats are emissaries of Satan?<\/p>\n

But, as Neil deGrasse Tyson demonstrates, in politics the truth rarely gets in the way of a good story. If ever I run for office \u2014 angels and ministers of grace defend us! \u2014 I will title my memoir Awesome American Courage: My Courageously Awesome American Story of Awesomely American Courage<\/em>. Never mind that I\u2019ve never done anything particularly awesome or courageous; Wendy Davis never really had much to forget to be afraid of, either, except, possibly, the voters.<\/p>\n

Kevin D. Williamson, “A Plague of Memoirs: A courageously awesome American story of awesomely American courage”, National Review<\/em><\/a>, 2014-10-06.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

… usually these books are simply campaign documents or, in the case of Wendy Davis\u2019s Forgetting to Be Afraid: A Memoir, r\u00e9sum\u00e9s for candidates who have suffered a crushing defeat or expect to suffer a crushing defeat, offering a rationale for keeping themselves in the game. I have heard more than one thoughtful political observer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,57,28,53,41],"tags":[669,463],"class_list":["post-28150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-humour","category-media","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-billclinton","tag-parody"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7k2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28150"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28151,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28150\/revisions\/28151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}