There's an interesting blog post over at Classical Values about George Harleigh, a retired political scientist from Southern Illinois University who is also described as a veteran of the Nixon and Reagan administrations but an outspoken opponent of President Bush. He's been quoted in literally hundreds of websites and newspaper articles- but, does he really exist?
Calls by the blogger to SIU, and searches of Lexus-Nexis for published material by him, find no mention of Harleigh, and he's not mentioned on Google anywhere other than in providing quotes to blogs. Anyone ever heard of this guy, and have any evidence that exists or did exist? I'm figuring either he's real and everyone's wrong, or someone just made him up and his same few quotes have been recycled again and again for years, or there's some guy out there claiming to be a disgruntled former Nixon/Reagan aide.
Posted by Stephen Silver at July 20, 2006 01:33 AMThanks for the link! I hope someone gets to the bottom of this, as it's becoming more and more apparent that this "George Harleigh" does not exist. (Or if he does, he is not who he says he is.)
The problem is, it's always tough to prove a negative. The burden should be on Doug Thompson, as all links originate from him.
Posted by: Eric Scheie at July 20, 2006 09:55 AM