Topic: Newsmax
A Dec. 13 Newsmax article by Charlie McCarthy reported:
Conservative historian and political commentator Doug Wead died Friday after suffering a massive stroke a week earlier. He was 75.
Doug, a New York Times bestselling author, wrote the 2019 book "Inside Trump's White House: The Real Story of His Presidency."
The author of more than 30 books, Doug had been hospitalized in Fort Myers, Florida. He was removed from a ventilator and died of heart failure Friday.
"He will be remembered as a great American historian — and not a woke left winger," conservative author Craig Shirley told Newsmax Monday after learning of Doug’s death.
"Doug believed in just telling the facts of history as they were," he added.
Shirley said his passing will leave a great void because "the world is filled with left-wing historians but has very few conservative historians."
As Shirley all but admits, Wead was a biased "historian." And that book on what happened "Inside Trump's White House"? That was a ridiculous hagiography:
Doug Wead’s Inside Trump’s White House goes further, advancing to enraptured fantasy. Wead, a veteran Republican toady, acclaims Trump for “the magic of thinking big”; his own padded, puffy volume is an exercise in magical thinking.
Like a sun king freshly solarised on the tanning bed, Wead’s Trump radiates “beauty and intellect”. His sons are “well groomed”, his daughters “statuesque”, and his consort bends down from her spike-heeled altitude to “reach out to the suffering”. While Melania is cast as a stilettoed Madonna, Trump functions as a universal paterfamilias. “It’s a father thing,” smarms Jared Kushner to explain Kim Jong-un’s attachment to Trump: Kim’s actual begetter was a maniacal despot, so the chubby ogre has chosen a fitting surrogate.
Acclaimed by Wead as the creator of his own “immortal brand”, a lucrative logo that is “etched into the marble of history”, Trump the mass-market Midas dispenses product placements at every turn. Wead, briefly alarmed, sees him press “a big, fat red button” on a table; the command produces one of the dozen Diet Cokes he swills each day, not a missile strike.
Wead's fawning tone is apparently how conservatives should be written about, according to Shirley. Indeed, in a 2018 Newsmax column, Wead gushed all over Melania, proclaiming that she is "a dedicated mother who puts her child ahead of other justifiably demanding, distractions" and "whose life will one day cover entire bookshelves in libraries." We would ask if Wead actually died of embarassment for writing things like that, but it's clear he was not capable of shame.
Wead was a hater of Barack Obama and lover of both Ron and Rand Paul. He was also not afraid to do something competent, credible historians never do: peddle conspiracy theories. We've noted that a 2017 WorldNetDaily column by Wead pushed an unsupported claim about a "Bill and Hillary Clinton list of women" accompanied by a video that was more self-promotional than anything else.
In continuing to praise him, McCarthy inadvertently admitted Wead wasn't a real historian:
Credited with coining the phrase "compassionate conservative," Doug served in the White House as special assistant to then-President George H.W. Bush.
A devout Christian, he served the Bush White House and later the Republicans in helping to build their alliance with evangelicals, now a key constituency in GOP politics.
Newsmax was proud to have Doug as an Insider, and he weighed in on all matters Washington, D.C., since 2009.
Real historians would not be that partisan and that overly fawning. Let's not pretend that Wead was one.
