You forgot to mention a taxi driver.

Maureen Dowd:

John McCain recently scored points when he decried Hillary Clinton's appropriations attempt for Woodstock with the line "I couldn't go, I was tied up at the time." He could have gone, however, to the conservative Woodstock, the county fair of Philadelphia, MS, in 1980, and hobnobbed with the Bud-guzzling Bubbas, and heard the gilded tones of that paragon of the people, Ronald Reagan, discussing the finer points of states' rights to an army of dim-bulbed (yet oddly attractive in their cowboy boots and tight, NASCAR t-shirts) Mississippi crimson-necked fellers. Why doesn't McCain, the maverick, prove his maverickness by installing a new monument to Reagan in this very spot? This would stick it to Hillary, bring great joy to the conservative masses, and bring much publicity to the flagging maverick. He could take it on a tour on the Straight-Talk Express, starting out by revealing it during halftime of a Dallas Mavericks game, then take it to Oklahoma and show it during a screening of the movie Maverick (Mel Gibson, meeow), and then land it in Mississippi for its final placement in Philadelphia. This would square the circle, coupling McCain's and Reagan's libertarian conservatism of the west with the Bush conservatism of the South. It would be a red(necked) letter day for all, as the fiddles play and the chicken fries. I am sooooo there.

My David Brooks:

Just the other night I was having lunch with an unnamed leading neoconservative thinker. We had been discussing the current President’s outlook on the concepts of good and evil when I posed the question of how the thought of Christian philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr (a running theme in my work the past few years) might serve as a necessary check on the sometimes unbridled naďvete of the neoconservative worldview that human action can rid the world of evil. He responded in a slightly flippant tone that while he had heard of Niebuhr “a little bit while in college or something”, he didn’t “really need to know much about a guy who saw the problem of evil as ineradicable”. This type of statement, while at one level I find anathema, still exemplifies why I still maintain a general respect for policymakers who truly believe that they can roll up their sleeves and, by acting on the principles of a liberal democracy, can make the world a little less terrible.

Whoops, didn't read closely enought that the mimicing had to be on this subject.

Ronnie kicked of his 1980 campaign with a states' rights speech at the Nehoba county fair, a speech that was not racist but that of the star quarterback playing to the crowd in the cafeteria. He stood on the lunch tables posing and satisfying their demands. It's not that he actually believed in states' rights, but he was always a performer, so if it's a nod to nooses they needed, Teflon Ron became Donald Duke.

Friedman:

Recently there has been heated debate about whether Ronald Reagan speaking in Philadelphia MS was an act of racism. Let's give it another six months and revisit the question. Only then will African Americans be able to see without hatred and engage in power-sharing and give up their false claims of powerlessness; only then will the whites give up their claims that they are completely without fault. Time is on our side, my friends...