The Political Interest: Newt's Believe It or Not

We've been here before, remember? It wasn't so long ago that Ronald Reagan won the White House with a simple message: Americans were overtaxed and overregulated and reeling under the weight of Big Government. To illustrate those themes, the Master invoked stories of welfare queens driving Cadillacs and buildings full of bureaucrats, each taking care of a single Indian. Reagan's facts were so routinely off-base that his staff quit trying to explain them. In 1982 the President spoke glowingly about British legal traditions. In England, he said, it used to be that "if a criminal carried a gun, even if he...