The truly vile attack on Rick Perlstein’s new book has been revealing in a number of ways. It’s not just the instinctive effort to suppress and punish anyone who raises questions; it’s also the way supposedly reasonable, civilized conservatives have contorted themselves to support the party line (which they always do when it matters, no matter how much open-mindedness they seem to display when it doesn’t).

And why this determination to quash Perlstein? It’s all about Reaganolatry, the right’s need to see the man as perfect. John Quiggin has some thoughts about the phenomenon; I’d just add that the economic myth of Reagan is truly remarkable. Everyone on the right knows that Reagan presided over job creation on a scale never seen before or since; but it just isn’t so. In fact, if you look at monthly rates of job creation for the past six administrations, it’s actually startling:

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You may have known that Clinton was a better “job creator” than Reagan, but did you know that over the course of the Carter administration — January 1977 to January 1981 — the economy actually added jobs faster than it did under Reagan? Maybe you want to claim that the 1981-82 recession was Carter’s fault (although actually it was the Fed’s doing), so that you start counting from almost two years into Reagan’s term; but in that case why not give Obama the same courtesy? The general point is that the supposed awesomeness of Reagan’s economic record just doesn’t pop out of the data.

But don’t expect the Reaganlators to acknowledge that. Their whole sense of identity is bound up with their faith.