Crackpotty

That is about the crack[-]pottiest scheme of all.

You said just what I was meaning to write to you and say, except that you say “understatement is the only emphasis,” while I was going to seek emphasis by saying that of all the crackpot notions afloat the crack[-]pottiest is the combination of the three sillinesses of imagining that we can keep the secret of the atomic bomb if we just don’t tell it, of proposing to put future scientific research under government control (which we had always despised as one of the most glaring stupidities of Nazi and Soviet methods), and of putting the whole thing under the Army, the most unprogressive branch of our government.

That silly little clown, LaGuardia, repudiated by all but the crackpottiest of the crackpots, told a Senate group the other day that unless the White House changes around to his way of thinking “some of us won’t be available to stump for Harry Truman next year.”

The precedent-shattering significance of this is not so much that Ronald Reagan is a political figure—though this in itself is an important point—as that he is the sponsor of some of the crackpottiest ideas now floating around in the political soup.

They’re convinced the only way to stay in office is invite mail, and still more mail—then answer every letter, down to the most scurrilous and crackpottiest, with pretended gratitude, even if the voter prefaced his letter, “Dear Slob.”

Unfortunately for her knowledge of the Atlantis problem -- but perhaps fortunately for THE SERPENT -- she seems to have stumbled first upon all the crackpottiest writers in the field, such as Bellamy, Churchward, and Wilkins.

He exposes the television networks’ handling of the tragedy, from their relentless repetition and insincere solemnity to the anchormen Rather, Jennings and Brockaw fingering their “space phalluses” [models of the shuttle] and to finding “the crackpottiest shrink-ologists to give on-air instructions for saving the nation’s [traumatized] schoolchildren.”

Mind you, Gore’s crackpottiest moments it seems, as with Christopher’s, were motivated by the desire to shock.