Subject: some thoughts on Reagan's passing
Ever since the announcement that Reagan had passed, all I hear in my head is this line from a Neil Young song about addiction:
"Oh, oh, the damage done."
You see, America in my mind gets addicted
to someone like Reagan, who comes off so affable, humorously self-deprecating
--a man of the people. However, Reagan
was an actor, where people like Lincoln, Kennedy, the Roosevelts, etc.
were truly
smart men with the gift of gab. Like bad
drugs, Reagan made the unthinking among us high, while at the same time
his henchmen
did things to our country that will take
decades to repair.
I would often find myself listening to the
man give a speech, but at the end of the day, would always come back to
reality.
I knew so many "Reagan Democrats" and moderate
Republicans who kissed the ground Ronnie walked on. I often wondered
if these people realized what he was doing
to the Republican Party: turning the once "party of Lincoln" in a raging,
ultra right-wing
band of thugs, thieves, and religious fanatics
bent on the destruction anyone who opposed them.
Look at the modern mainstream media and think of this line from a Don Henley tune:
"I could’ve been an actor, but I wound up here."
Here again, we see Americans buying into
something that’s not really there. Like bad drugs, the reality hits years
down the road.
That reality is now, in the form of the
BFEE, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, etc. Like heroin addiction, the damage will
take years
to repair; that is, if it can be repair
at all.
"Oh, oh, the damage done."
mwbdrum
They keep repeating saying how faithfully in love the Reagan's were.
I'll bet if some mad dog, out-of-control special prosecutor with
$80 million to waste
and unlimited time and scope and subpoena powers and the moral
bankruptcy to
threaten every witness with death in prison unless they gave
him some dirt
looked into Saint Reagan, they might find out about Selene Walters'
"Battle of the Couch,"
Jacqueline Park's pregnancy, the Doris Lilly situation and Nancy's
affairs
with Jack Warner and Frank Sinatra.
...but the myth says they were "truly in love," so believe what you want.
Killer,
Coward, Con man - Good riddance, Ronnie
More proof only the good die young - by Greg Palast
Excerpt:
You shouldn't speak ill of the dead. But in this
case, someone's got to.
Ronald Reagan was a conman. Reagan was a coward.
Reagan was a killer.
In 1987, I found myself stuck in a crappy little
town in Nicaragua named Chaguitillo.
The people were kind enough, though hungry, except
for one surly young man.
His wife had just died of tuberculosis.
People don't die of TB if they get some antibiotics.
But Ronald Reagan, big hearted guy
that he was, had put a lock-down embargo on medicine
to Nicaragua because he didn't
like the government that the people there had
elected.
Ronnie grinned and cracked jokes while the young
woman's lungs filled up and she
stopped breathing. Reagan flashed that B-movie
grin while they buried the mother of three.
And when Hezbollah terrorists struck and murdered
hundreds of American marines in
their sleep in Lebanon, the TV warrior ran away
like a whipped dog … then turned around
and invaded Grenada. That little Club Med war
was a murderous PR stunt so Ronnie could
hold parades for gunning down Cubans building
an airport.
Dubya better than Reagan?
For the last 4-5 years, the flying monkey wing of the GOP has
been claiming that the Chimp is
every bit as good, or maybe even a better president than Reagan
ever was, so I wonder how
the real Reagan Republicans like seeing the never-elected moron
compared favorably to old "Dutch."
...and, I gotta say, as bad a president as Reagan was, as cold-hearted
and stubborn and convinced
he was always right as he was, and as uninterested in minorities
and the poor and the HIV infected
as Reagan was, looking back, compared to the blood-thirsty murderer,
Reagan wasn't all that bad.
The biggest war Reagan ever lied us into was Grenada, and he did that to get his massive Bungle in Beruit
..
off the front pages, which makes me think they had a list of nations
that "needed to be invaded,"
the next time another Reagan disaster hit the headlines.
.
When Reagan was boasting about the Russian "evil
empire," and
"We begin bombing in 5 minutes,"
even with all that - at least America wasn't hated around the
globe like we are today.
Ronald Reagan 1911-2004
Excerpt:
Iran-Contra was the defining moment. Despite
a congressional prohibition on aid to the Contras,
a group inside the White House decided to circumvent
the law, so ineptly, and so completely,
we wound up arming Iran and getting few hostages
held in Lebanon released. We also sold
chemical and biological weapons to Iraq. While
Saddam murdered thousands, the US government
was his ally. Even after 34 sailors were murdered
by an Iraqi exocet missle, we still backed Saddam.
No governmental outrage, no demands on Saddam.
Like the Liberty incident, we turned our backs
and hoped for the best.
Ronald Reagan’s passing, a mixed blessing
for his family and closest friends, will no doubt be played for all it
is worth.
His suffering is over.
Alzheimer’s is a horrible illness in the
final stages. I watched it eat my own father and came to see his death
as liberation.
All that was left at the end was an empty
shell of a man without a trace of the drive that allowed him to provide
a decent life
for his family despite spending 18 months
having to learn to walk again from injuries sustained as a captain with
the 82nd in
France from German artillery during the
advance drop 60 years ago today. Say what you will about Ronald Reagan,
but don’t
forget that he was part of that generation.
Most of them made sacrifices and very few of them bitched about it.
Those folks spent their entire lives, for
the most part, trying to do right, by finding common ground with others
that were not in
complete agreement. Reagan was the face
of that enthusiasm and if nothing more, he helped this country regain her
confidence
and reminded us all of the value of hope.
I know that my friends on the left will accuse my friends on the right
of using his passing
and the deluge of media coverage to come
this week as a deliberate distraction from the pressing reality of an uncertain
war in Iraq.
I am certain that there is a grain of truth
there. I am also certain that my friends on the right will try and link
as much of their current
ideology to Ronald Reagan for additional
tactical advantage in the upcoming election. Ronald Reagan, with all of
his conservative strings
attached, managed to work quite successfully
with Tip O’Neil, a classic textbook liberal, and put this country back
on track. It wasn’t
perfect and it wasn’t without scandal,
but it demonstrated the power of this country when people are willing to
compromise.
Scholars will argue about it for decades
to come, but Reagan defeated the Soviet Union without firing shot and made
the world a much
safer place. Perhaps a bit of wistful thinking,
of a time when serious problems could be solved and were never hopeless,
is just what this
country needs most at this time. Ronald
Reagan is at last free from his suffering, but we owe him and the generation
that he came from
a debt of gratitude and the responsibility
of becoming the hopeful nation that he envisioned.
Sincerely
Stephen Browne