Monday
November 3, 2003Remembering Reagan
The Republican National Committee is trying to force CBS to let it censor its series on Reagan. CNN.
November 6, 2003
Reagan: Amiable Dunce or Vicious Hypocrite?
Let's talk about Reagan for a minute, since CBS has decided that a bunch of conservative hotheads who already tyranize nearly all broadcast media in the U.S. should be able to eliminate any point of view that differs from theirs. (See Salon) CBS is foolishly saying the brass at the network pulled it because they didn't like it themselves.Let's get away for a minute from whether he was senile when he was in office or only after he left it officially, or whether his wife was a control freak as nearly all of Reagan's own allies and associates indicated she was, or whether the actor in this controversial movie captures Reagan's undeniable charisma. When it came to what the man really did that affected a lot of people, he was a cold-hearted, lying creep. (See Mike Hersh's "The Real Reagan Legacy: Debunking Myths About Reagan".)
He lied nearly as much as Bush does. He just said whatever came off the top of his head. Some of the more ridiculous lies his press people would "correct" later. "What the president meant was..." It was ridiculous.
He may not have been as dumb as this controversial movie portrays him to be (I plead total ignorance about the movie), but with Reagan it's about what he really did, not about whether he appeared "presidential" or not. Yeah, he gets that, hands down. The guy wasn't much of an actor, but he did "The President" okay for a lot of people. Not for me. I prefer Martin Sheen. But in real life, the guy's policies were daggers in the heart of America. While he smiled and appeared jovial, he presided over the biggest heist of the American people yet seen. (Bush is outdoing him by a long shot, but Reagan laid the foundation and is the model for the Bush heist.)
For putting the country into deep deficits to hand money over to his buddies in the defense establishment and wrecking the economic infrastructure of the county, he is credited with "ending the Cold War." Right. Things sure got peaceful. That Reagan.
Remembering Reagan
Here are some Reagan Moments to Remember:
While the AIDS crisis was developing, when there was a chance of cutting it off before it grew into a world plague (the way SARS was handled, for example), Reagan refused to deal with the crisis in any way. For years he would not even utter the word "AIDS". Finally when pressure grew to a clamor, the old goat relented and addressed the issue. The "final judgment is up to God," he decreed. Thanks. Good job. Thanks for ending the Cold War, and allowing AIDS to become what it is today. See Glaad.org With a single-minded determination to go after "The Evil Empire", Reagan poured America's prosperity into attacking it any way he could. Not only did he funnel insane quantities of money into military spending, which his Soviet psychological twins tried to match, he also funded al Qaeda to go after the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Thanks for that, Ronnie. Thanks for al Queda. We really needed that. Of course there is always the question with Reagan, how much he was aware of, and how much was being run under the table by dear George Herbert Walker Bush. But now the conservafascists are crying because a movie portrayed him as a bit ... out of touch? But Reagan himself used that alibi to get out of responsiblity for the crimes of Iran Contra. So which is it? You can't have it both ways. Was he aware of what was going on during his term as president, or was he just an actor/frontman for a vicious cabal? Neither prospect is particularly heroic since a president is supposed to be in charge, the commander in chief, the buck stops here and all that. Apart from his ability as an actor to make people like him, the only redeeming aspect of his actual political history is that he may have had his presidency hijacked by the Bush clan.
On the possibility that Reagan was NOT aware of the crimes perpetrated by his administration, as he himself alleged, check out John Judge's theory of the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, in March 1981, about two months after taking office with an ambitious former opponent named George Bush as the first in succession.Go to ratical.org and do a search for the word "Reagan". Here's a piece to get you started:
John Judge: In the period when Reagan came in, I believe Bush took over. He was vice president and rose to power, I believe, on March 31, 1981, when Reagan was nearly assassinated. The person placed as the patsy, not the person that actually shot Reagan but the person placed as the patsy in the case, was John Hinkley. His family ties were to oil. Through that oil connection, Neil Bush -- George Herbert Walker Bush's son, who worked in oil -- knew Scott Hinkley who also worked in oil. Neil had been involved with Scott in many oil operations -- both working for oil speculation and oil companies.
The two families lived close to each other. They knew each other socially and financially. When the Hinkley oil company started to fail in the sixties, Bush's Zapata Oil financially bailed out Hinkley's company. It went from being Vanderbilt Oil to Vanderbilt Energy or Vanderbilt Resources in the '60s after Bush intervened. The Hinkleys had been running an operation with six dead wells but then they were making several million dollars a year after the Bush bailout. I always thought this was some sort of a money-pass front where they were laundering money through on this phony oil operation but actually operating some type of an intelligence pay-off.
The father in that family, John W. Hinkley Sr., was also the president of the board for World Vision. World Vision is a far-right evangelical missionary operation that does missionary and "good work" operations in countries where there is a political purpose for it to be there. From its inception, it was rabidly anti-Communist and it focused on refugee populations of people running from countries that had been taken over by Communism. This was from the fifties on.
For some references on the Bush connection with the Hinckley family, see See Free Republic: "Bush Son Had Dinner Plans With Hinckley Brother Before Shooting"
Take this for what you will. While it's primitive and cannot be verified, it's a fascinating story with some veracity: "Attempted Assasination of Ronald Reagan by Bryan D. Watson"
But if you want to hold Reagan responsible for the actions of his administration, then let's take a look at them, and for a moment forget what a pleasant old fart he was:
On the subject of Reagan's capacity to tell the most outrageous lies and unfounded statements, check out the book Reagan's Reign of Error. See David Corn's discussion of the ridiculous authorized biography of Reagan by previously apparently sane Edmund Morris Ronald Reagan's Reign of Error: What the Book Could Have Told Us but Didn't. The book was a fantasy in which the author placed himself in the story as a fictitious narrator. As Gore Vidal concluded, it was a fairly logical result of the fact that investigating Reagan in depth would prove extremely challenging because there is nothing there. Ronnie and Nancy were pure fantasy.
November 7, 2003
More Reagan Memories
If you go to Geobop.com and search for "reagan", you will find this: "March 24, 1980 Archbishop Oscar A. Romero is assassinated by a right-wing death squad in El Salvador. According to Bush Body Count, 'Archbishop Romero was a true hero, speaking out against atrocities by a Bush/Reagan-backed fascist government. He refused to appear in public with any army or government personnel, and was a voice for the thousands of tortured, slaughtered and oppressed in El Salvador. He was shot in the back while preparing Mass. The death of Archbishop Romero is one among many. There is not enough space to list the hundreds of thousands who died under Reagan/Bush-backed, right-wing governments.' See The UN Truth Commission on Romero’s Murder."
The Contras, the terrorist group Reagan called "Freedom Fighters", were funded by secret arms sales to Iran, which was declared by Reagan to be an enemy of the United States. Reagan, who publicly said he would never even negotiate with terrorists for the return of hostages, was actually selling them weapons, in order to fund his Contras after the U.S. Congress passed legislation explicitly forbidding it. Iran was the country that took the U.S. hostages, creating the crisis that destroyed Jimmy Carter's presidency. Iran held onto the hostages throughout Carter's presidency and released them simultaneous to Reagan's inauguration. The Contras were an army trained by the CIA and funded by the U.S. to overthrow the government of Nicaragua by terrorizing the population. They were well known for their brutal, terrorizing murders of innocent civilians, women and children as well as men. The network of crime that funded the Contras included not only illegal weapons trafficking, but cocaine running, an old favorite business of the CIA. Thanks to Reagan for this. See National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 2: The Contras, Cocaine, and Covert Operations, Webcom.com, and Guide to Contra Drug Documents Online. How Reagan and Bush gave us Osama bin Laden. Public I
And Elsewise
Exposing the Bushes: see geobop.com, which says, "This site chronicles the exploits of President George W. Bush (a corporate fascist masquerading as a presidential clown) and Osama bin Laden (an Arab multi-millionaire masquerading as an Afghan freedom fighter), their dual attack on America, and the United States’ war against whoever it is we’re at war with..."