Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber

by Andy Borowitz

In his 1990 autobiography, An American Life, Reagan wrote, “Whatever the reasons for the myth that I’m a racist, I blow my top every time I hear it.” Let us count the reasons. His “monkeys” remark is of a piece with his disparagement of allegedly polygamous Kenyans, his full-throated praise of South Africa’s apartheid regime, and his 1965 comment about recently independent African nations: “When they have a man for lunch, they really have him for lunch.” Reagan also had a knack for surrounding himself with bigots. There was his secretary of the interior, James Watt, of “a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple” fame. And there was Marianne Mele Hall, whom Reagan appointed in 1985 as the chair of the Copyright Royalty Tribunal. It emerged that she had