Obama: To The Right of Reagan

Barack Obama has not just dribbled away the progressive mandate of 2008, he has emerged over the past three years as a politician “to the right of President Ronald Reagan, the Tea Party hero” on at least some issues. The U.S. continues its steady decline in all the indices that count for the average person. “Only three developed countries – Albania, Russian and Moldova – had a worse maternal mortality rate.” African Americans are in free fall under the First Black President.
BAR editor and columnist Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, PhD
Wed, 01/04/2012
http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/obama-right-reagan

“Of 891 promises made, Obama has kept 233, broken 116 and failed to address 61 percent.”

Barack Obama recently told a radio interviewer of his response to criticisms of his administration, “I tell them what Joe Biden says, judge me not as the Almighty, consider the alternative.”

Obama’s comment was astonishing. The man who came in on a wave of public optimism and support, whose rallying cry was, “Yes, we can” was brushing off his four years of “no, we can’ts.” Here are some examples:

– Obama has increased drone strikes eight times over what the Bush administration did across two terms according to John Feffer, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies

– He prevailed upon the Environmental Protection Agency to pull back anti-smog legislation as part of the Clean Air Act. The U.S. with China and India is the worst carbon emitter in the world.

– He has failed to close Guatanamo Bay – an election promise.

– He promised immigration reform - a key promise given that 26 percent of the electorate is Latino. In 2010, his administration arrested more migrants – 393,000 - than any administration before (81,000 more than in President George W. Bush’s last year in office).

Obama’s failure to keep promises has been mapped by a user of Idea Palooza, a U.S. website, it is sobering reading. The creator, who appears to be conservative, compiled all 891 election promises Obama made (perhaps the first warning was a candidate who made so many promises, but Americans and the world, exhausted after eight war-mongering years of George W. Bush failed to pay attention). So far, according to this measure, which is used by major U.S. news media, Obama has kept 233 promises, broken 116 and failed to address 61 percent.

“In some states schools are on four-day weeks because there is no funding and thousands of teachers have been retrenched.”

He is to the right of President Ronald Reagan, the Tea Party hero, according to the Institute for Policy Studies on some financial issues. They point out that after more than 250 economists wrote to him earlier this year calling for more imagination in the handling of the $15-trillion debt, their call was spurned by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (Obama remained silent). The IPS said, “That rigid position places the Obama administration to the right not only of Reagan, but also both Bush presidencies and the International Monetary Fund.” Geithner served as head of New York’s Federal Reserve under Bush, and is one of a number of key Bush appointees Obama has kept close; they also include national Federal Reserve chief, Ben Bernanke and former Defense secretary, Robert Gates, among others.

When Obama was elected into office in November, 2008, he had the strongest majorities in both houses of Congress since 1993. Democrats held 258 of the 435 seats in the House and at least 54 of the 100 seats in the Senate. Two years later he lost the House to the Republicans.

And since then a bitterly divided Congress has slumped to a nine percent approval rating – its worst ever – for its failure to legislate and continual threats to shut down government. These threatened shutdowns have seen government departments freeze – they are too nervous to implement projects or to hire staff because there is no assuredness that they will receive an ongoing flow of funding.

“Nearly two-thirds of city employees across the country facing layoffs are African American.”

And so America’s infrastructure has begun crumbling: 12% or 69,000 bridges are “structurally deficient,” as just one example. In some states schools are on four-day weeks because there is no funding and thousands of teachers have been retrenched.

In August the White House reported that unemployment among young African Americans was 32%; by December it had leapt to 41.3%. The union group, AFL-CIO, reported last week that, “The loss of public-sector jobs has disproportionately impacted African Americans – nearly two-thirds of city employees across the country facing layoffs are African American.”

While Africa greeted his election with joy, Obama has shown little interest in the continent. In September, he signed into law a $23.2 million cut for Pepfar – the HIV and AIDS program introduced by President George W. Bush and an important funder of treatment and care programs in developing nations. But global family planning and reproductive health services took the biggest hit with a reduction of $85 million.

The U.S. has the highest maternal death rate of any industrialized nation according to the CIA Factbook. The Save the Children Fund notes that “an American woman is more than seven times as likely as one in Ireland to die from pregnancy-related causes and her maternal death risk is 15 times that in Greece. Only three developed countries – Albania, Russian and Moldova – had a worse maternal mortality rate.”

The Census Bureau reports the number of Americans in poverty jumped to 15.1 percent in 2010, a 17-year high. About 46.2 million people, or nearly one in six, were in poverty. And 49.9 million were without health insurance.

“The U.S. has the highest maternal death rate of any industrialized nation.”

In October, the Congressional Budget Committee revealed that since 1979, the richest one percent had seen incomes rise 275%, while the middle class was 40% more comfortable and the lowest fifth of the nation had seen incomes rise only 18% – essentially, they got poorer. Yet in November, when the so-called super-committee nominated by Obama to find ways out of the debt crisis failed to reach accord, one of the biggest stumbling blocks was a refusal by Republicans to increase taxes on the rich, many of whom pay far lower taxes than the lowest earning members of society. Billionaire Warren Buffet famously pointed out recently that his personal assistant pays more tax than he does.

Many of these issues Obama inherited, but with the mandate the electorate gave him he had the greatest capacity of any president in decades to make a real difference.

When he was elected Obama said: “Americans have sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of red states and blue states, we have been and always will be the United States of America.”

Under Obama the United has fallen off the States of America. History still has to reveal whether Barack Obama is a victim of racists in the Republican Party who will do anything to stymie the first black president for the United States or whether he simply was not the right man for an important job.

Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo is the author of No FEAR: A Whistleblowers Triumph over Corruption and Retaliation at the EPA is available through amazon.com and the National Whistleblower Center. Dr. Coleman-Adebayo worked at the EPA for 18 years and blew the whistle on a US multinational corporation that endangered vanadium mine workers. Marsha's successful lawsuit lead to the introduction and passage of the first civil rights and whistleblower law of the 21st century: the Notification of Federal Employees Anti-discrimination and Retaliation Act of 2002 ( No FEAR.)

30 Years Ago Today: The Day the Middle Class Died...

A letter from Michael Moore Friday, August 5th, 2011

Friends,

From time to time, someone under 30 will ask me, "When did this all begin, America's downward slide?" They say they've heard of a time when working people could raise a family and send the kids to college on just one parent's income (and that college in states like California and New York was almost free). That anyone who wanted a decent paying job could get one. That people only worked five days a week, eight hours a day, got the whole weekend off and had a paid vacation every summer. That many jobs were union jobs, from baggers at the grocery store to the guy painting your house, and this meant that no matter how "lowly" your job was you had guarantees of a pension, occasional raises, health insurance and someone to stick up for you if you were unfairly treated.

Young people have heard of this mythical time -- but it was no myth, it was real. And when they ask, "When did this all end?", I say, "It ended on this day: August 5th, 1981."

Beginning on this date, 30 years ago, Big Business and the Right Wing decided to "go for it" -- to see if they could actually destroy the middle class so that they could become richer themselves.

And they've succeeded.

On August 5, 1981, President Ronald Reagan fired every member of the air traffic controllers union (PATCO) who'd defied his order to return to work and declared their union illegal. They had been on strike for just two days.

It was a bold and brash move. No one had ever tried it. What made it even bolder was that PATCO was one of only three unions that had endorsed Reagan for president! It sent a shock wave through workers across the country. If he would do this to the people who were with him, what would he do to us?

Reagan had been backed by Wall Street in his run for the White House and they, along with right-wing Christians, wanted to restructure America and turn back the tide that President Franklin D. Roosevelt started -- a tide that was intended to make life better for the average working person. The rich hated paying better wages and providing benefits. They hated paying taxes even more. And they despised unions. The right-wing Christians hated anything that sounded like socialism or holding out a helping hand to minorities or women.

Reagan promised to end all that. So when the air traffic controllers went on strike, he seized the moment. In getting rid of every single last one of them and outlawing their union, he sent a clear and strong message: The days of everyone having a comfortable middle class life were over. America, from now on, would be run this way:

* The super-rich will make more, much much more, and the rest of you will scramble for the crumbs that are left.

* Everyone must work! Mom, Dad, the teenagers in the house! Dad, you work a second job! Kids, here's your latch-key! Your parents might be home in time to put you to bed.

* 50 million of you must go without health insurance! And health insurance companies: you go ahead and decide who you want to help -- or not.

* Unions are evil! You will not belong to a union! You do not need an advocate! Shut up and get back to work! No, you can't leave now, we're not done. Your kids can make their own dinner.

* You want to go to college? No problem -- just sign here and be in hock to a bank for the next 20 years!

* What's "a raise"? Get back to work and shut up!

And so it went. But Reagan could not have pulled this off by himself in 1981. He had some big help:

The AFL-CIO.

The biggest organization of unions in America told its members to cross the picket lines of the air traffic controllers and go to work. And that's just what these union members did. Union pilots, flight attendants, delivery truck drivers, baggage handlers -- they all crossed the line and helped to break the strike. And union members of all stripes crossed the picket lines and continued to fly.

Reagan and Wall Street could not believe their eyes! Hundreds of thousands of working people and union members endorsing the firing of fellow union members. It was Christmas in August for Corporate America.

And that was the beginning of the end. Reagan and the Republicans knew they could get away with anything -- and they did. They slashed taxes on the rich. They made it harder for you to start a union at your workplace. They eliminated safety regulations on the job. They ignored the monopoly laws and allowed thousands of companies to merge or be bought out and closed down. Corporations froze wages and threatened to move overseas if the workers didn't accept lower pay and less benefits. And when the workers agreed to work for less, they moved the jobs overseas anyway.

And at every step along the way, the majority of Americans went along with this. There was little opposition or fight-back. The "masses" did not rise up and protect their jobs, their homes, their schools (which used to be the best in the world). They just accepted their fate and took the beating.

I have often wondered what would have happened had we all just stopped flying, period, back in 1981. What if all the unions had said to Reagan, "Give those controllers their jobs back or we're shutting the country down!"? You know what would have happened. The corporate elite and their boy Reagan would have buckled.

But we didn't do it. And so, bit by bit, piece by piece, in the ensuing 30 years, those in power have destroyed the middle class of our country and, in turn, have wrecked the future for our young people. Wages have remained stagnant for 30 years. Take a look at the statistics and you can see that every decline we're now suffering with had its beginning in 1981 (here's a little scene to illustrate that from my last movie).

It all began on this day, 30 years ago. One of the darkest days in American history. And we let it happen to us. Yes, they had the money, and the media and the cops. But we had 200 million of us. Ever wonder what it would look like if 200 million got truly upset and wanted their country, their life, their job, their weekend, their time with their kids back?

Have we all just given up? What are we waiting for? Forget about the 20% who support the Tea Party -- we are the other 80%! This decline will only end when we demand it. And not through an online petition or a tweet. We are going to have to turn the TV and the computer and the video games off and get out in the streets (like they've done in Wisconsin). Some of you need to run for local office next year. We need to demand that the Democrats either get a spine and stop taking corporate money -- or step aside.

When is enough, enough? The middle class dream will not just magically reappear. Wall Street's plan is clear: America is to be a nation of Haves and Have Nothings. Is that OK for you?

Why not use today to pause and think about the little steps you can take to turn this around in your neighborhood, at your workplace, in your school? Is there any better day to start than today?

Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com

Awesome Quotes: Reagan on the Taliban

"These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America's Founding Fathers"
President Ronald Reagan, 1985

Five Myths About Ronald Reagan

From WashingtonPost.com:
1. He was a bad actor.

Well, yes and no. Most of the movies he made as a Warner Bros. contract player are unwatchable by persons of sound mind. When he was president, it was easy to laugh at them. The spectacle of the leader of the free world, a.k.a. Secret Service agent Brass Bancroft, deploying an enormous ray gun against an airborne armada was especially hilarious in 1983, the year he announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, that vaporizer of foreign nuclear missiles. "All right, Hayden - focus that inertia projector on 'em and let 'em have it!"

Even when Reagan believed he was acting well, as in "Kings Row," he betrayed infallible signs of thespian mediocrity: an unwillingness to listen to other performers and an inability to communicate thoughts. Now that he is dead, however, one feels an odd tenderness for the effort he put into every role - particularly in early movies, when he struggled to control a tendency of his lips to writhe around his too-rapid speech.

Ironically, he was transformed into a superb actor when he took on the roles of governor of California, presidential candidate and president of the United States. Then, as never in his movies, he became authoritative, authentic, irresistible to eye and ear. His two greatest performances, in my opinion, were at the Republican National Convention in 1976, when he effortlessly stole Gerald Ford's thunder as nominee and made the delegates regret their choice, and at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1985, when he delivered the supreme speech of his presidency.

I asked him once if he had any nostalgia for the years he was nuzzling up to Ann Sheridan and Doris Day on camera. He gestured around the Oval Office. "Why should I? I have the biggest stage in the world, right here!"

2. He was but a movie-set soldier in World War II.

It's true that Reagan spent virtually all the war years flying a desk at the First Motion Picture Unit, USAAF, in Culver City. But that hardly means he did not passionately want to fight for his country overseas. Army doctors found his vision to be so defective, at "7/200 bilateral," that a tank could advance within seven feet of him before he could identify it as Japanese. His Warner Bros. colleague Eddie Albert, a veteran of the Pacific War, later told me about presenting Reagan with a souvenir from the bloodbath of Tarawa. "I've never forgotten the way he looked. Like I'd humiliated him."

In the spring of 1945, Capt. Reagan, as the FMPU's intelligence officer, spent weeks processing raw color footage from the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. The images so burned into his brain that later in life - quite understandably - he imagined he had been there at Ohrdruf and Buchenwald. He kept one of those Army reels to show to each of his children in early adolescence, so that they could learn about man's inhumanity to man. Ask Patti. Ask Ron.

3. He was warm-hearted.

No. But Reagan wasn't cold - except in his detestation of totalitarianism - so much as cool, in the way a large, calm lake is cool. Like many another natural leader (George Marshall and Charles de Gaulle come to mind), he viewed those who clustered around him abstractedly. He registered audiences rather than individuals. Reagan intimates have confessed to me that they were never sure he knew who the hell they were.

His three younger children have publicly stated that there were times (decades before any rumors of dementia) when he treated them as complete strangers. As for his marriage to Nancy, I'll note only that she was the fourth short, tough, street-smart woman he dreamily depended on to organize his everyday life, the others being his mother, Nelle Reagan; his first fiancee, Margaret Cleaver; and his first wife, Jane Wyman. He had no close friends. And until young Ron reminded him, it didn't occur to him to put a headstone on either of his parents' graves.

4. He was only a campaign Christian.

On the contrary, Reagan was a "practical Christian," that being the name of a mainly Midwestern, social-work-oriented movement when he was growing up. At 11, young Dutch had an epiphany, prompted by the sight of his alcoholic father lying dead drunk on the front porch of the family house in Dixon, Ill. In a moving passage of autobiography, Reagan wrote: "Seeing his arms spread out as if he were crucified - as indeed he was - his hair soaked with melting snow, snoring as he breathed, I could feel no resentment against him." It was the season of Lent, and his mother, a devotee of the Disciples of Christ, put a comforting novel in his hand: "That Printer of Udell's" by Harold Bell Wright. Dutch read it and told her, "I want to declare my faith and be baptized." He was, by total immersion, on June 21, 1922.

I read a speckled copy of that book in the Library of Congress. Almost creepily, it tells the story of a handsome Midwestern boy who makes good for the sins of his father by becoming a practical Christian and a spellbinding orator. He develops a penchant for brown suits and welfare reform, marries a wide-eyed girl (who listens adoringly to his speeches) and wins election to public office in Washington.

Shy about his faith as an adult, Reagan was capable of conventional pieties like all American politicians. He attended few church services as president. But on occasion, before critical meetings, you would see him draw aside and mumble prayers.

5. He was an "amiable dunce."

Yeah, right, Clark Clifford. Ronald Reagan only performed successfully in six different careers: radio sportscaster, movie actor, trade union president, corporate spokesman, two-term governor and two-term president of the United States. Lucky for him he wasn't hampered by Jimmy Carter's intelligence!

Five myths about Ronald Reagan
Edmund Morris
Friday, February 4, 2011
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/04/AR2011020403106.html

Reagan: Killer, Coward, Con-man

The Observer London
Greg Palast
Monday, February 7, 2011

You're not going to like this. You shouldn't speak ill of the dead. But in this case, someone's got to.

On the 100th Anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth, as we suffer a week of Reagan-kitcheria and pukey peons, let us remember:

Reagan was a con-man. 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.

I remember Nancy, a skull and crossbones prancing around in designer dresses, some of the "gifts" that flowed to the Reagans - from hats to million-dollar homes - from cronies well compensated with government loot. It used to be called bribery.

And all the while, Grandpa grinned, the grandfather who bleated on about "family values" but didn't bother to see his own grandchildren.

The New York Times, in its canned obit, wrote that Reagan projected, "faith in small town America" and "old-time values."

"Values" my ass. It was union-busting and a declaration of war on the poor and anyone who couldn't buy designer dresses. It was the New Meanness, bringing starvation back to America so that every millionaire could get another million.

"Small town" values? From the movie star of the Pacific Palisades, the Malibu mogul? I want to throw up.

And all the while, in the White House basement, as his brain boiled away, Reagan's last conscious act was to condone a coup d'état against our elected Congress. Reagan's Defense Secretary Casper the Ghost Weinberger with the crazed Colonel, Ollie North, plotted to give guns to the Monster of the Mideast, Ayatolla Khomeini.

Reagan's boys called Jimmy Carter a weanie and a wuss although Carter wouldn't give an inch to the Ayatollah. Reagan, with that film-fantasy tough-guy con in front of cameras, went begging like a coward cockroach to Khomeini, pleading on bended knee for the release of our hostages.

Ollie North flew into Iran with a birthday cake for the maniac mullah - no kidding - in the shape of a key. The key to Ronnie's heart.

Then the Reagan roaches mixed their cowardice with crime: taking cash from the hostage-takers to buy guns for the "contras" - the drug-runners of Nicaragua posing as freedom fighters.

I remember as a student in Berkeley the words screeching out of the bullhorn, "The Governor of the State of California, Ronald Reagan, hereby orders this demonstration to disperse" - and then came the teargas and the truncheons. And all the while, that fang-hiding grin from the Gipper.

In Chaguitillo, all night long, the farmers stayed awake to guard their kids from attack from Reagan's Contra terrorists. The farmers weren't even Sandinistas, those 'Commies' that our cracked-brained President told us were 'only a 48-hour drive from Texas.' What the hell would they want with Texas, anyway?

Nevertheless, the farmers, and their families, were Ronnie's targets.

In the deserted darkness of Chaguitillo, a TV blared. Weirdly, it was that third-rate gangster movie, "Brother Rat." Starring Ronald Reagan.

Well, mis amigos, your kids can sleep easy tonight. The Rat is dead.

All week you're going to hear about how Reagan restored America's sense of patriotism - as if heartless slaughter, Club Med wars and making racism respectable are patriotic . (When they said "small town values" you know the color of the town, don't you?).

I wonder if the Reaganauts can recognize any of the weapons they sold the mullahs when they see students gunned down in Teheran.

I do plan a memorial, for the victims, not the victimizer.

Please join me in commemorating the ill star that brought us a celluloid cowboy on his movie-set horsey by lighting a candle for a mom from Chaguitillo.
*
This obituary was originally published in The London Observer on Reagan's death in 2004.

The author received close to 150 death threats and suggestions for acrobatic acts of intercourse with beasts and relatives.

Therefore, we have reserved a special email, deaththreat@gregpalast.com just for your next threats.

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Greg Palast is an investigative journalist and the author of the New York Times bestsellers Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. His reports can be seen on BBC Newsnight.

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Everybody Loves Reagan

If Ronald Reagan was still alive, he would've turned 100 on Super Bowl Sunday. Actually, as far as the GOP is concerned, he IS still alive. And while their obsession with deifying Ronbo may continue, the hatred he inspires among liberal types has waned. This may be due to the last two guys who occupied the White House. George W. Bush, with his epic failures, has replaced Reagan as the ultimate right wing bogeyman of US politics. Barack Obama, meanwhile, has adopted positions so far to the right, he is easily more reactionary than Reagan ever was. The continued Bonzo-worship of him by the right and the collapse of criticism of him by the left is a case study of the Overton window framing him as more popular now than any time during his presidency.

The reframing of Reagan ignores history. Reagan was a divisive figure, with almost no support in the African-American community. Meanwhile, historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited The Reagan Diaries, told CNN The Gipper wanted to roll back the "excesses of the 'Great Society' domestically, not abolish them. He was never talking about doing away with Medicaid, Medicare, or abolishing HUD. It had more to do with trimming the federal budget." That actually sounds pretty reasonable and mainstream in 2011. Lou Cannon also explained that when it came to the Soviets, "he really wanted to negotiate and thought he had learned the art of doing so by bargaining with movie producers when he was president of the Screen Actors Guild." Hard to argue with that: after dealing with Hollywood producers, communist dictators would be a piece of cake. So maybe he deserves much of the credit given to him over the fall of communism.

Maybe you would expect more contempt and outrage over St. Ronald from The Konformist, but at this point, it seems any continued fixation on Ronald Reagan as the Anti-Christ would be an obtuse and unproductive obsession. There's bigger fish to fry out there.

In any case, one guy who has had a lot to do with enhancing the image of Ronald Reagan is Ron Reagan, his son. While Ron is an unabashed liberal, the genuine warmth apparent when he describes his father has helped humanize the once controversial figure. So for what it's worth, Ron Jr. pretty much dismisses Sarah Palin, who is trying to exploit the Reagan mantle for her own purposes: "Sarah Palin is a soap opera, basically. She's doing mostly what she does to make money and keep her name in the news. She is not a serious candidate for president and never has been,"

Reagan's myth has grown over time
Ed Hornick
February 5, 2011
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/02/04/reagan.legacy

Reagan's 100th birthday: 10 defining moments
Aaron Couch
2-5-11
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/0205/Reagan-s-100th-birthday-10-defining-moments/President-of-the-Screen-Actors-Guild-1954-1962

Palin: America Out Of Step With Reagan's Values
February 5, 2011
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=133494625

The Ghost of Ronald Reagan

Haunted Rancho de Cielo
Since the death of Ronald Reagan, it is rumored that many spooky occurrences are taking place up at the Reagan Ranch. Reagan's Rancho de Cielo (the Spanish word ‘cielo’ means heaven), nestled in the hills above Santa Barbara, was Reagan's ‘favorite place on Earth.’ The hacienda-style ranch (neighbor to Michael Jackson's blighted Neverland) is preserved in the exact condition as when the Reagans lived there, as if they just stepped out and will return at any moment. Even Ronald Reagan's favorite jelly bean jar is still there complete with a few uneaten beans.

During his lifetime, Reagan kept several horses in the stable. He made sure that the Secret Service horses ate from separate hay troughs, as he did want American taxpayers paying to feed his own horses. On the riding trails at the ranch, Reagan rode a white Arabian stallion named El Alamein (meaning ‘two flags’) given to him by Jose' Lopez Portillo, President of Mexico. A white horse is a symbol for conquest on the battlefield, likewise Christ returns on a white horse. Visitors to the ranch now report seeing a peculiar figure on horseback, dressed in a cowboy hat and jeans jacket, galloping near the perimeter of the rugged 688-acre property. When guests ask at the office, who is the historical reenactor is, the baffled ranch staff say ‘There in no one at the ranch matching that description.’ Has the spirit of Reagan (like the equestrian ghost of George Washington at Mt. Vernon) returned to the place on where he found the most peace? Sometimes when the 1500 square foot ranch house is unlocked in the mornings, inexplicably Reagan's leather Bible (given to the president by the Cowboy Chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes) is found next to his bed, opened to chapter six of Revelation, ‘And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.’ Could the ‘Gipper’ be sending a message from beyond the grave — a warning that the apocalypse is drawing nigh? It is as though the spirit of Reagan is linked to the Pale Rider of Revelation.

At the ranch Ronald Reagan's favorite form of relaxation was hard physical outdoor labor like building fences, clearing trails, removing overgrown bush, trimming trees, and chopping wood. Soon after Reagan's death, the ranch foreman reported hearing, in the early morning, the sound of an ax chopping wood. When he goes to check it out — nothing is there. At daybreak he occasionally finds a neat pile of newly split logs (although the ranch’s two fireplaces are no longer in use). Ronald Reagan once said, ‘When the Lord calls me home, I will leave with the greatest love for this country of ours and eternal optimism for the future.’ At the ranch, Reagan created a pet cemetery for his favorite dogs and other animals that includes headstones hand-carved by the President himself. Reagan Ranch Visitor Center pr states, ‘Rancho del Cielo conveys the true spirit of Reagan. The very essence of his character is found here at the ranch.’ Reagan often called his Santa Barbara ranch, ‘Heaven itself.’ Could it be that the ghost of Reagan has been drawn back to the place he considered the nearest thing to paradise on Earth? Perhaps for the spirit of Reagan, Rancho de Cielo is truly Heaven.

Reagan Ranch Center
217 State Street
Santa Barbara, California 93101
(877) 797-7325
http://www.reaganranch.org/

Ronald Reagan & Fake Boobs

Courtesy of TheAtlantic.com, from the book American Plastic: Boob Jobs, Credit Cards, and Our Quest for Perfection:

"In the early 1980s, new laws allowing cosmetic surgeons to advertise their businesses helped popularize plastic surgery. At the same time, trickle-down economics enriched the rich and encouraged the stagnating middle classes to go into debt to keep up with their wealthier neighbors. Now, in a service economy, where your value as a worker is closely tied to your appearance, working class moms and dads have more cause to go under the knife. In this way, deliberate government policies dating back to Reaganomics helped fuel the revolution in plastic surgery."

Score one for The Gipper...

How Reaganomics Fueled the Boob Job Boom
Jan 18 2011
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/01/how-reaganomics-fueled-the-boob-job-boom/69720

American Plastic: Boob Jobs, Credit Cards, and the Quest for Perfection
Laurie Essig
http://www.amazon.com/American-Plastic-Credit-Cards-Perfection/dp/0807000558/thekonformist

Obama's 2012 insurance policy?

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/09/30/obama_2012_republicans/index.html

Thursday, Sep 30, 2010
Obama's 2012 insurance policy?
It's remarkable how many of the Republicans in the '12 mix are spectacularly unelectable
Steve Kornacki

What may be most notable in the new Gallup poll on the 2012 Republican presidential race is the significant distance between Mitt Romney, who leads the crowded pack with 19 percent, and the next candidate without obvious and glaring general election liabilities. Just consider the results:

Romney 19%

Sarah Palin 16%

Mike Huckabee 12%

Newt Gingrich 9%

Ron Paul 7%

Tim Pawlenty 3%

With the disclaimer that anything is possible (and the obligatory acknowledgement that many Democrats didn't believe until the very end in 1980 that Ronald Reagan could ever actually win the Whitre House), it's hard to imagine Palin, Huckabee, Gingrich or Paul winning a general election in 2012, even if the economy hasn't improved significantly. They just carry too much baggage, and nominating one of them would likely produce something like what we're now seeing in Delaware, where a radioactive GOP nominee is about to cost the GOP a seat it would otherwise win.

I can't remember so many poiosnous general election prospects near the top of the GOP field at this stage in any recent contest. Last time around, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and (sort of) Romney were all near the top of the pack early. All of them passed the November electability test. (Sure, McCain fell flat against Barack Obama, but that was more a testament to the political climate; that same race in the climate of, say, 2004, could well have produced a different result.) Back in the 2000 cycle, the big GOP fish included George W. Bush, Elizabeth Dole and McCain. For 1996, we had Bob Dole and Jack Kemp, and in 1988, George H.W. Bush, Dole and Kemp. Sure, there were some toxic prospects in these cycles (Dan Quayle figured prominently in '96 talk and actually ran -- briefly -- in '00), but in each race had more than one general election heavyweight out front early. Not so for 2012.

Moreover, as NBC's First Read noted this morning, Romney's grip on the frontrunner's slot is unusually tenuous. The GOP's conservative base is markedly cooler to him than it was to McCain at this point in the '08 cycle and Dole at this point in the '96 cycle, even as that same base seems to be warming up even more to Palin, Gingrich and Huckabee. Factor in the most alarming GOP Senate primary results this year -- a Republican electorate in Delaware that willfully committed political suicide, for instance -- and it's fair to questions the assumption that the GOP primary electorate of 2012 will be as pragamtic as it's been in the past. Don't forget: the last time the Republican base was as angry at its own establishment as it is now was in the late '70s. Back then, the favorite of the restive right for the next GOP nomination also happened to be the next-in-line guy: Reagan. But Romney, to borrow a tired expression, is no Ronald Reagan. To the New Right of the late '70s, Reagan was practically a god. To the Tea Party, though, Romney is just a somewhat likable, extremely ambitious office-seeker.

This should provide at least a little comfort to Barack Obama. I've written before that his 2012 fate will rest on the economy. If it improves significantly between now and then, he'll win, no matter whom the GOP nominates. And if it doesn't, he'll be in serious trouble. But the evolution of the GOP in the Obama era suggests a third possibility: that the economy will be weak enough to give the GOP a winnable race in 2012 -- but that they'll nominate a candidate who's incapable of taking advantage of it.

Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor. Reach him by email at SKornacki@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @SteveKornacki

Who is More Conservative: Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/who-is-more-conservative_b_638947.html

Cenk Uygur
Host of The Young Turks
July 8, 2010
Who is More Conservative: Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama?

If you think that's an absurd question, you're not alone. We had this discussion on The Dylan Ratigan Show when I was filling in for him on MSNBC and both of my guests thought it was absurd. A conservative website led with the headline that it was absurd (though they did not present one single fact to back up their claim). Except as it turns out, based on the facts, it is a really hard question to answer. And it would be absurd to claim otherwise.

Ronald Reagan:

-Gave Amnesty to Illegal Immigrants
-Negotiated with Terrorists (Traded Arms for Hostages with Iran)
-Raised Taxes on a Large Scale Four Times (After Initially Lowering Them)
-Negotiated with the "Evil Empire" without Pre-conditions
-Made a Decision to "Cut and Run" From Lebanon After Our Troops Were Attacked

In fact, as you look at the Reagan list, it seems he is the exact opposite of what conservatives now claim they want. It looks like the caricature of what they think liberals do. There is no way that even Dennis Kucinich would be able to do all of those things; he certainly wouldn't negotiate with terrorists the way Reagan did.

Of course, Reagan also took the country further right in many ways but our political spectrum has moved so far to the right that he looks left behind by comparison. So, let's go to Obama and see what that "socialist" is up to.

Barack Obama:

-Escalated the Afghanistan War (Added 30,000 More Troops)
-Has Ordered Drone Strikes (Assassinations) on US Citizens Outside the Country
-Gave Drug Companies Near Monopoly Power by Barring Imports, Extending Patents and Not Allowing the Government to Negotiate Better Prices
-Funneled Billions into the Biggest Banks in the Country After They Crashed the Economy
-Stacked Deficit Commission with Fiscal Conservatives
-Lowered Taxes Significantly (Stimulus Bill)
-Ordered Increased Offshore Drilling Before BP Spill

The Obama team would argue that they did a lot of this because the Republicans made them do it. First, that's entirely untrue because the Republicans didn't make them pass any bills. The GOP also didn't give most of this legislation a single yes vote, so they could have been entirely ignored if Obama had the courage to do that. And many of the items on the list are executive actions, which the Republicans have no control over.

Second, conservative is as conservative does. If you implement this many conservative positions, are you really sure you're not one?

Now, people will cry and scream that we had the most historic health care reform and will soon have the most historic financial reform ever. Isn't that progressive enough?! No, that's nonsense. They are called historic only because the White House called them that. Financial reform is a joke that still leaves the big banks in charge and has failed to end "too big to fail." And yes, health care reform actually covers more people if they ever get it (maybe in 2014) and if they can afford it (depends on what private insurance decides to charge them), but it still leaves the health care system exactly as it was before. This is the progressive change people voted for?

The bottom line is that, no matter what the reason, Obama seems to be in some important ways significantly to the right of Reagan on the political spectrum. If Reagan ordered the execution of US citizens abroad, he might have been impeached. If Obama tried to give undocumented immigrants blanket amnesty the way Reagan did, he might be impeached.

I don't think Obama is a hard right-winger. It's just that the political establishment in this country has moved so far to the right (though not the public, according to polls on specific issues) that as a natural politician when he goes to appease them, he is solidly center-right on the spectrum.

And the political line has moved so far that if Reagan tried to run as a Republican now he would be the laughing stock of the party. Rush Limbaugh would tear him to shreds and Bill Kristol would say he is Neville Chamberlain. He would be run out of town as a tax-raising, amnesty giving, terrorist negotiating, cut and run no-good lib who hates the troops.

And anyone who claims otherwise is being absurd. As Reagan once said, "Facts are stubborn things."

"Close Friend" Throws Out Suit

http://www.truthout.org/091509S

Cheney and Rumsfeld's "Close Friend" Throws Out Suit Against Alleged Abu Ghraib Torturers
Tuesday 15 September 2009
Jeremy Scahill Rebel Reports

Should Judge Laurence Silberman have recused himself from a case involving alleged torture for which his buddies were ultimately responsible?

On September 11, the US appeals court for the District of Columbia announced in a 2-1 decision that it was throwing out a lawsuit against CACI International and L-3 Communications Titan unit, which are being sued by Iraqi civilians for their alleged role in the torture and abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison. The companies provided interrogators at the prison at the height of the abuses there. The suit alleges that employees of the companies conspired with U.S. Army reservist Charles Graner, who was convicted of prisoner abuse on January 14, 2005 and is currently serving 10 years at Fort Leavenworth, and others to torture prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Several of the plaintiffs are Iraqis whose torture was depicted in graphic photos revealed over the past several years.

The judge who wrote the majority opinion, Laurence H. Silberman, said: "During wartime, where a private service contractor is integrated into combatant activities over which the military retains command authority, a tort claim arising out of the contractor's engagement in such activities shall be preempted."

The decision was swiftly celebrated by the private security industry. "The court's decision today is an important step toward resolving all legal matters regarding the company's mission and duties in Iraq," Jody Brown, executive vice president for public relations at CACI, said in a statement. "We have said from day one that these lawsuits are completely without merit and designed to pursue a political agenda."

"This is big, and this is the kind of good news the contracting community needs," wrote one security contractor on his blog. "Precedents like this are what we need for further protection in the future for similar cases."

Scott Horton, the great military and constitutional law expert wrote at Harper's that Silberman's opinion "reflects an amazing ignorance of or indifference to the basic concepts of the law of armed conflict:"

That law imposes a rule of absolute accountability on any persons fielded in a conflict, including contractors. It does not permit impunity or immunity. Not every aspect of the law of armed conflict is subject to private enforcement in the courts. But the prohibition on torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading conduct is. The United States agreed in ratifying the Convention Against Torture that it would provide individuals who were tortured with legal recourse. The Alien Tort Statute, which formed the basis for the suit, has historically been used in federal courts to give foreigners compensation for claims of torture. But Judge Silberman decided to grant the contractors immunity from such suits.

In a dissenting opinion, Judge Merrick B. Garland wrote:

The plaintiffs in these cases allege that they were beaten, electrocuted, raped, subjected to attacks by dogs, and otherwise abused by private contractors working as interpreters and interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison. At the current stage of the litigation, we must accept these allegations as true ... No act of Congress and no judicial precedent bars the plaintiffs from suing the private contractors - who were neither soldiers nor civilian government employees. Indeed, the only statute to which the defendants point expressly excludes private contractors from the immunity it preserves for the government ... the Department of Defense has repeatedly stated that employees of private contractors accompanying the Armed Forces in the field are not within the military's chain of command, and that such contractors are subject to civil liability.

"Republican legal architects talk about a culture of accountability, but what they are introducing is actually a culture in which corporate surrogates torture, rape, and abuse with no consequences whatsoever," writes Horton.

Beyond the legal issues here, which Horton deftly tackles, there is another issue: Judge Laurence Silberman himself. Silberman was appointed to the bench by President Reagan in 1985, but he had already made a name for himself in right wing political circles. Several journalists have dug deep into Silberman's alleged involvement with the arms-for-hostages deal, his exoneration of Iran-Contra figures Oliver North and John Poindexter and Silberman's role in promoting the career of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. For a good summary of Silberman's career see this excellent article by Michele Goldberg on Salon.com. Goldberg writes:

[Silberman] has been near the febrile center of the largest political scandals of the past two decades, from the rumored "October surprise" of 1980 and the Iran-contra trials to the character assassination of Anita Hill and the impeachment of President Clinton. Whenever right-wing conspiracies swing into action, Silberman is there.

A veteran of the Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan administrations who is close to Vice President Dick Cheney, Silberman has a reputation as a fierce ideologue who doesn't let his judicial responsibilities get in the way of his Republican activism.

Judge Silberman also counts among his "close friends" former vice president Dick Cheney and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld - going back to their time in the Ford Administration. Rumsfeld was ultimately the official responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib at the time of the alleged torture of the plaintiffs in this case and Cheney was a major architect of the torture program. One of Bush/Cheney's key "torture lawyers," John Yoo, clerked under Silberman. Silberman also was chosen by President George W Bush to co-chair the Iraq Intelligence Commission. The 600+ page report Silberman's commission produced placed the blame for "intelligence failures" squarely on intelligence analysts and exonerated officials, like Cheney, who worked tirelessly to politicize intelligence to fit the White House's political agenda and its drive to invade Iraq. In June 2008, Bush awarded Silberman the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2004, former Nixon staffer Kevin Phillips said, "In the past, Silberman has been more involved with coverups in the Middle East than with any attempts to unravel them."

Should Silberman have recused himself from this case?

In 1994, the Supreme Court found that "Disqualification is required if an objective observer would entertain reasonable questions about the judge's impartiality. If a judge's attitude or state of mind leads a detached observer to conclude that a fair and impartial hearing is unlikely, the judge must be disqualified." [Liteky v. U.S., 114 S.Ct. 1147, 1162 (1994)] There are also these decisions: Courts have found that Section 455(a) of the Judicial Code, 28 U.S.C. §455(a) "requires a judge to recuse himself in any proceeding in which her impartiality might reasonably be questioned." [Taylor v. O'Grady, 888 F.2d 1189 (7th Cir. 1989)]. In Pfizer Inc. v. Lord, the Court stated that "It is important that the litigant not only actually receive justice, but that he believes that he has received justice." [456 F.2d 532 (8th Cir. 1972)]

Do Silberman's relationships to Cheney and Rumsfeld whose policies ultimately led to the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib constitute "reasonable questions" about his "impartiality?"

Gingrich-Based History Curriculum Go National?

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/09/could_texas_gingrich_based_curriculum_go_national.php

Could Texas' Gingrich-Based High School History Curriculum Go National?
Justin Elliott September 4, 2009

While Republicans are busy gnashing their teeth over President Obama's imminent indoctrination of the nation's schoolchildren, there's an education story bubbling up in Texas that could have considerably more far-reaching consequences.

The GOP-controlled State Board of Education is working on a new set of statewide textbook standards for, among other subjects, U.S. History Studies Since Reconstruction. And it turns out what the board decides may end up having implications far beyond the Lone Star State.

The first draft of the standards, released at the end of July, is a doozy. It lays out a kind of Human Events version of U.S. history.

Approved textbooks, the standards say, must teach the Texan student to "identify significant conservative advocacy organizations and individuals, such as Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly, and the Moral Majority." No analogous liberal figures or groups are required, prompting protests from some legislators and committee members. (Read an excerpt here.)

The standards on Nixon: "describe Richard M. Nixon's role in the normalization of relations with China and the policy of detente."

On Reagan: "describe Ronald Reagan's role in restoring national confidence, such as Reaganomics and Peace with Strength." (That's it.)

The Cold War section is rendered as "U.S. responses to Soviet aggression after World War II ... "

The state board of education, made up of 10 Republicans and five Democrats, has to vote on the standards twice in the coming months before they would go into effect.

Comments in the margin of the draft explain the proposed changes. And a persistent, tendentious conservative voice comes through throughout. Next to the section listing key names and groups from the civil rights movement and 60s activism, including Martin Luther King, Betty Friedan, and the American Indian Movement, it's noted that a committee member demanded parity ... for late 20th century conservative groups:

MV[Multiple Views]: One person: inclusion of 7 names and organizations disproportionate compared to only 3 in conservative section.Next to a noncontroversial seeming item requiring students to "describe how McCarthyism, the arms race, and the space race increased Cold War tensions" is the note:

"MV[Multiple Views]: One member thinks that if McCarthyism is noted, then the Venona papers need to be explained that exonerates him."

A bullet point on "women and minority employment" as an economic effect of World II caused "one member" to gripe "there is too much emphasis on multiculturalism."

And "one member" deemed a section on "effective leadership" a perfect place to bring to students' attention Charlton Heston's celebrated (among right-wingers) culture war speech.

Here's what makes this a national story: what happens in Texas doesn't stay in Texas, says Diane Ravitch, professor of education at NYU.

That's because Texas is one of the two states with the largest student enrollments, along with California. "The publishers vie to get their books adopted for them, and the changes that are inserted to please Texas and California are then part of the textbooks made available to every other state," says Ravitch, who wrote a book about the politics of textbooks.

Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute explains it as a simple economic calculation by the big textbook publishers. "Publishers are generally reticent to run two different versions of a textbook," he says. "You can imagine the headache the expense the logistics, the storage, all of it."

But don't start saving for private school tuition just yet. A spokeswoman for the Texas State Board of Education tells TPMmuckraker the board will have to pass the standards first in January, in a "first reading and filing authorization vote," and then in March in a final vote, before they would go into effect. In an article on the controversy in the Houston Chronicle, one of the conservative leaders on the board actually predicted the standards will pass at least the first vote.

This one bears close watching.

Donate the three books to your community

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One way is to take advantage of our 3-for-the-price-of-1 book offer and then to donate the three books - Lost History, Secrecy & Privilege, and Neck Deep - to your community or school library.

If we could get the books into the collections of 1,000 libraries, hundreds of thousands of people would have access to the honest history that the books present - from the Reagan-era scandals of the 1980s to the crimes and abuses under George W. Bush this decade.

For instance, more people would learn the true stories of cocaine trafficking by Ronald Reagan's Nicaraguan contras (in Lost History); George H.W. Bush's dark role in U.S. politics (in Secrecy & Privilege); and George W. Bush's brazen theft of Election 2000 (in Neck Deep).

Now, for a limited time, you can get all three books for only $20, plus $5 for shipping ($25 total). Then, you can contact your local library about placing them in the permanent collection. (If you wish, we can send them to the library directly although it's more effective if a local person donates them.)

Beyond getting this honest history to many more people, we will put $5 from each sale into the coffers of Consortiumnews.com so the Web site can keep publishing important articles by Ray McGovern, Coleen Rowley, Peter Dyer, Lisa Pease and many others.

So help us reach our goal of putting this important three-book set into 1,000 libraries.

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Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. He founded Consortiumnews.com in 1995 as the Internet's first investigative magazine. He saw it as a way to combine modern technology and old-fashioned journalism to counter the increasing triviality of the mainstream U.S. news media.

Republican VP candidate, congressman Kemp dies

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/02/kemp.obit/

Former Republican VP candidate, congressman Kemp dies
Story Highlights
Jack Kemp, former congressman and vice presidential candidate, dies at 73
Kemp announced in January he was battling cancer
Before politics, Kemp was a professional football quarterback
Kemp also served as secretary of housing and urban development (1989-1993)
5-2-9

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Former congressman and Republican vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp died Saturday at age 73 after a battle with cancer, his family announced.

Jack Kemp, a former congressman from New York, was the GOP's vice presidential candidate in 1996.

A onetime professional football player, Kemp served nine terms in Congress as a representative from New York and was former Sen. Bob Dole's running mate in 1996. He was a leading advocate of "supply-side" tax cuts, advancing the argument that cutting taxes would boost economic growth and yield more revenue for the federal government.

"The only way to oppose a bad idea is to replace it with a good idea, and I like to think that I have spent my life trying to promote good ideas," he told CNN in a 1996 interview.

Kemp "passed peacefully into the presence of the Lord" Sunday evening, a family statement said. He disclosed his illness in January.

"During the treatment of his cancer, Jack expressed his gratitude for the thoughts and prayers of so many friends, a gratitude which the Kemp family shares," the family said.

Kemp quarterbacked the Buffalo Bills to back-to-back American Football League championships in 1964 and 1965, before the merger that created the modern NFL. When he retired in 1970 after 13 seasons, the California native ran for Congress and represented the Buffalo area for 18 years in the House of Representatives. View photos of Jack Kemp's life »

"He championed free-market principles that improved the lives of millions of Americans and helped unleash an entrepreneurial spirit that all of us still benefit from today," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, said in a statement issued late Saturday.

The 1981 tax cuts signed into law by Ronald Reagan, which cut marginal tax rates from 70 percent to 50 percent, bore Kemp's name as a co-sponsor. Critics mocked the policy as "trickle-down" economics and pointed to the decade's growing budget deficits as evidence that supply-side theories didn't work, but it has been GOP orthodoxy ever since.

Kemp mounted an unsuccessful presidential bid in 1988, losing the Republican primaries to George H.W. Bush. But once in office, Bush made Kemp his secretary of housing and urban development -- a post Kemp used to promote what he called an "empowerment" agenda of tax breaks for urban businesses and expanded home ownership.

Unlike many of the other conservatives of his era, Kemp actively courted African-American support. In 1992, he told CNN's "Larry King Live" that the GOP "could be a Lincoln party in terms of attracting black and brown and men and women of color and low-income status and immigrant status who want a shot at the American dream for their children."

Harry S. Truman is rolling over in his grave

From Conspiracy Nation ( http://www.shout.net/~bigred/cn.html ):

(Melchizedek Communique, MC031609) Harry S. Truman is rolling over in his grave due to the latest antics of George W. Bush. And a special division of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, charged with response to former presidents rolling over in their graves, is on high alert.

It was Fitzgerald, the mighty U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois, who had responded earlier when, here in Illinois, Abraham Lincoln had been rolling over in his grave. But this latest restlessness of the deceased Harry S. Truman has stunned even the case-hardened Fitzgerald.

When Harry S. Truman left the White House in 1953, "he had to take out a bank loan to tide him over in private life. He had no official government income or support except for his Army pension of $112.56 a month." But Truman had too much honor to accept any money for "endorsements" and "consultings". Said Truman, "I could never lend myself to any transaction, however respectable, that would commercialize on the prestige and dignity of the office of the presidency." [1]

It was beneath the personal honor of Truman to trade off the presidency for "speaking fees" and such.

Gerald Ford was the first to decide, "What is honor, compared with speaking fees?" Ford cashed in by giving paid speeches and by joining some 20 corporate boards. [1]

Then good old Ronald Reagan soared past Ford in income by trading the prestige of the U.S. presidency for $2 million annually. [1]

Along came George H.W. Bush, father of "Dubya" Bush. "Poppy" Bush raked in $$$ millions on the lecture circuit, after he left office in 1993. [1]

"Bill Clinton, though," notices The Week magazine, "has taken the moneymaking ability of ex-presidents to a new level." Today (Nov. 2008), "thanks to thousands of speeches, lucrative consulting jobs, and book advances and royalties, he and Hillary are worth more than $100 million." [1]

Who says the U.S. presidency isn't for sale?

Asked in November 2008 about his plans, Dubya Bush replied, "I'll give some speeches, just to replenish the ol' coffers." [1] Now, in an update ironically titled, "Replenishing the ol' coffers", The Week magazine reveals that George W. Bush "announced he was launching an international speaking tour." The Dubya Bush Replenishing The Ol' Coffers International Speaking Tour is scheduled to begin tomorrow, March 17th (St. Patrick's Day), in Canada. [2]

It is not known if Dubya Bush will be guzzling Jim Beam whisky during the tour. It has been rumored ol' Dubya has been hitting the sauce pretty hard. [3]

The special division of Patrick Fitzgerald's Rolling Over In Their Graves department is on high alert. Harry S. Truman could not be reached for comment.
------- Sources -------
[1] "Briefing: Life after the White House", The Week magazine, Nov. 21, 2008, p. 15
[2] "Replenishing the ol' coffers", from "Good Week For" section of The Week magazine, March 20, 2009, p. 6
[3] Melchizedek Communique MC022809
http://www.shout.net/~bigred/mc022809.html

Right Wing Obama Love

http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=843

Freedom Rider: Right Wing Obama Love
Presidential Politics 2008 - Obama
Wednesday, 22 October 2008
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

Barack Obama's charms seem to work even on the least promising prospects. "Right wingers who openly follow the doctrine of America's right to empire and conquest are now endorsing Obama." William Buckley's son, Christopher, has been won over by Obama, causing Buckley to be excommunicated from the Church of the Hard Right. Christopher Hitchens, the former radical who has learned to love the war on terror, has found a warm place in his heart for Michelle's husband. It must be those things Obama says so alluringly, like, I'm going to have a foreign policy like Ronald Reagan's.

"Obama has said that he will have a foreign policy like Ronald Reagan's."

There are no omens of victory for John McCain. While Barack Obama can concentrate on campaigning in swing states like Missouri, John McCain is forced to work the crowds in red states which should be firmly in his column at this late stage in the campaign. Not one poll shows McCain victories in enough of the right states for him to be elected.

Everyone loves a winner. Perhaps that is why so many conservatives are jumping on the Obama bandwagon. McCain is a goner and they know it. Yet there is something else at work here. Barack Obama has exceeded expectations in soothing the concerns of the racist, imperialist mindset. Right wingers who openly follow the doctrine of America's right to empire and conquest are now endorsing Obama.

Christopher Buckley, son of the late William Buckley, broke ranks with his fellow conservatives and endorsed Barack Obama, declaring that he will vote for a Democrat for the first time in his life. Unlike others in the openly racist right wing, Buckley can see the forest for the trees. He doesn't care if the president has the middle name Hussein. Obama has made it clear that he will maintain white America's right to moral exception by continuing its war machine and allowing the criminals who destroyed the financial system to keep their set at the table.

"Buckley is certain that Obama will not make waves."

Buckley has no doubts about Obama. "But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren't going to get us out of this pit we've dug for ourselves." So certain is Buckley that Obama will not make waves, that he bid good-bye to his friends and resigned from the National Review, the conservative publication founded by his father.

Another Christopher, Christopher Hitchens, has likewise seen the path to victory pointing in Obama's direction. Hitchens used to call himself a leftist, a Trotskyite in fact. Hitchens realized that he would be a much hotter commodity if he eschewed his political positions and became a professional white man. He now spends his time writing endlessly hateful screeds defending America's war of terror and looking for new reasons to kill brown skinned people who pray towards Mecca.

Hitchens spent the early part of the campaign year showing open disdain for Obama, his former pastor and for Michelle Obama's senior thesis. He foamed at the mouth at every utterance of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, calling his words ". . . wicked and stupid and false . . ."

The McCain campaign death march and Obama's consistent promise to change very little have swayed Hitchens to switch sides again. He opines that ". . . the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one." In other words, they will keeping killing Iraqis and Afghans, giving Hitchens confidence that his endorsement will not be in vain.

"Hitchens now spends his time writing endlessly hateful screeds defending America's war of terror."

These endorsements are partly a result of the critically ill Republican brand, but Obama must get much of the credit for the eleventh hour conversions. He has said that he will have a foreign policy like Ronald Reagan's. He makes it clear he will address black people directly only when chastisement is on the agenda. If anyone has doubts, the sight of Obama campaign commercials featuring one or two black faces, Obama's included, seal the deal for the two Christophers and their friends.

What will Progressives for Obama have to say about the conservative pitching and wooing for their candidate? If past history is any indication, they and other progressives will say nothing at all. They made a decision to collude with the Obama agenda that progressives ought to oppose. The praises of Buckley and Hitchens will have no effect on them any more than the pledges to keep troops in Iraq or to escalate the war in Afghanistan.

Obama will make history in more ways than one. He won't just be the first black president. He will be the first president in modern history who convinced millions of people not to believe the words that came out of his own mouth. "Change" is the campaign slogan, but his policy agenda tells us we will see anything but that. Hitchens and Buckley are certainly convinced that there won't be any changes that aren't to their liking.

Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgandaReport.Com. Ms. Kimberley maintains an edifying and frequently updated blog at freedomrider.blogspot.com. More of her work is also available at her Black Agenda Report archive page.

Health Care Destruction

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/opinion/06krugman.html

October 6, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Health Care Destruction
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Sarah Palin ended her debate performance last Thursday with a slightly garbled quote from Ronald Reagan about how, if we aren’t vigilant, we’ll end up “telling our children and our children’s children” about the days when America was free. It was a revealing choice.

You see, when Reagan said this he wasn’t warning about Soviet aggression. He was warning against legislation that would guarantee health care for older Americans — the program now known as Medicare.

Conservative Republicans still hate Medicare, and would kill it if they could — in fact, they tried to gut it during the Clinton years (that’s what the 1995 shutdown of the government was all about). But so far they haven’t been able to pull that off.

So John McCain wants to destroy the health insurance of nonelderly Americans instead.

Most Americans under 65 currently get health insurance through their employers. That’s largely because the tax code favors such insurance: your employer’s contribution to insurance premiums isn’t considered taxable income, as long as the employer’s health plan follows certain rules. In particular, the same plan has to be available to all employees, regardless of the size of their paycheck or the state of their health.

This system does a fairly effective job of protecting those it reaches, but it leaves many Americans out in the cold. Workers whose employers don’t offer coverage are forced to seek individual health insurance, often in vain. For one thing, insurance companies offering “nongroup” coverage generally refuse to cover anyone with a pre-existing medical condition. And individual insurance is very expensive, because insurers spend large sums weeding out “high-risk” applicants — that is, anyone who seems likely to actually need the insurance.

So what should be done? Barack Obama offers incremental reform: regulation of insurers to prevent discrimination against the less healthy, subsidies to help lower-income families buy insurance, and public insurance plans that compete with the private sector. His plan falls short of universal coverage, but it would sharply reduce the number of uninsured.

Mr. McCain, on the other hand, wants to blow up the current system, by eliminating the tax break for employer-provided insurance. And he doesn’t offer a workable alternative.

Without the tax break, many employers would drop their current health plans. Several recent nonpartisan studies estimate that under the McCain plan around 20 million Americans currently covered by their employers would lose their health insurance.

As compensation, the McCain plan would give people a tax credit — $2,500 for an individual, $5,000 for a family — that could be used to buy health insurance in the individual market. At the same time, Mr. McCain would deregulate insurance, leaving insurance companies free to deny coverage to those with health problems — and his proposal for a “high-risk pool” for hard cases would provide little help.

So what would happen?

The good news, such as it is, is that more people would buy individual insurance. Indeed, the total number of uninsured Americans might decline marginally under the McCain plan — although many more Americans would be without insurance than under the Obama plan.

But the people gaining insurance would be those who need it least: relatively healthy Americans with high incomes. Why? Because insurance companies want to cover only healthy people, and even among the healthy only those able to pay a lot in addition to their tax credit would be able to afford coverage (remember, it’s a $5,000 credit, but the average family policy actually costs more than $12,000).

Meanwhile, the people losing insurance would be those who need it most: lower-income workers who wouldn’t be able to afford individual insurance even with the tax credit, and Americans with health problems whom insurance companies won’t cover.

And in the process of comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted, the McCain plan would also lead to a huge, expensive increase in bureaucracy: insurers selling individual health plans spend 29 percent of the premiums they receive on administration, largely because they employ so many people to screen applicants. This compares with costs of 12 percent for group plans and just 3 percent for Medicare.

In short, the McCain plan makes no sense at all, unless you have faith that the magic of the marketplace can solve all problems. And Mr. McCain does: a much-quoted article published under his name declares that “Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.”

I agree: the McCain plan would do for health care what deregulation has done for banking. And I’m terrified.

Charlton Heston, Epic Film Star and Voice of N.R.A.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/movies/06heston.html

April 6, 2008
Charlton Heston, Epic Film Star and Voice of N.R.A., Dies at 84
By ROBERT BERKVIST

Charlton Heston, who appeared in some 100 films in his 60-year acting career but who is remembered chiefly for his monumental, jut-jawed portrayals of Moses, Ben-Hur and Michelangelo, died Saturday night at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 84.

His death was confirmed by a spokesman for the family, Bill Powers, who did not specify a cause. In August 2002, Mr. Heston announced that he had received a diagnosis of neurological symptoms “consistent with Alzheimer’s disease.”

“I’m neither giving up nor giving in,” he said.

Every actor dreams of a breakthrough role, the part that stamps him in the public memory, and Mr. Heston’s life changed forever when he caught the eye of the director Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille, who was planning his next biblical spectacular, “The Ten Commandments,” looked at the young, physically imposing Mr. Heston and saw his Moses.

When the film was released, in 1956, more than three and a half hours long and the most expensive that De Mille had ever made, Mr. Heston became a marquee name. Whether leading the Israelites through the wilderness, parting the Red Sea or coming down from Mount Sinai with the tablets from God in hand, he was a Moses to remember.

Writing in The New York Times nearly 30 years afterward, when the film was re-released for a brief run, Vincent Canby called it “a gaudy, grandiloquent Hollywood classic” and suggested there was more than a touch of “the rugged American frontiersman of myth” in Mr. Heston’s Moses.

The same quality made Mr. Heston an effective spokesman, off screen, for the causes he believed in. Late in life he became a staunch opponent of gun control. Elected president of the National Rifle Association in 1998, he proved to be a powerful campaigner against what he saw as the government’s attempt to infringe on a constitutional guarantee — the right to bear arms.

In Mr. Heston, the N.R.A. found its embodiment of pioneer values — pride, independence and valor. In a speech at the N.R.A.’s annual convention in 2000, he brought the audience to its feet with a ringing attack on gun-control advocates. Paraphrasing an N.R.A. bumper sticker (“I’ll give you my gun when you take it from my cold, dead hands”), he waved a replica of a colonial musket above his head and shouted defiantly, “From my cold, dead hands!”

Mr. Heston’s screen presence was so commanding that he was never dominated by mammoth sets, spectacular effects or throngs of spear-waving extras. In his films, whether playing Buffalo Bill, an airline pilot, a naval captain or the commander of a spaceship, he essentially projected the same image — muscular, steely-eyed, courageous. If critics used terms like “marble-monumental” or “granitic” to describe his acting style, they just as often praised his forthright, no-nonsense characterizations.

After his success in “The Ten Commandments,” Mr. Heston tried a change of pace. Working for another legendary Hollywood director, Orson Welles, he played a Mexican narcotics investigator in the thriller “Touch of Evil,” in which Welles himself played a murderous sheriff in a border town. Also starring Janet Leigh and Marlene Dietrich, the film, a modest success when it opened in 1958, came to be accepted as a noir classic.

A Biblical Specialty

But the following year Mr. Heston stepped back into the world of the biblical epic, this time for the director William Wyler. The movie was “Ben-Hur.” Cast as a prince in ancient Judea who rebels against the rule of Rome, Mr. Heston again dominated the screen. In the film’s most spectacular sequence, he and his co-star, Stephen Boyd, as his Roman rival, fight a thrilling duel with whips as their horse-drawn chariots career wheel-to-wheel around an arena filled with roaring spectators.

“Ben-Hur” won 11 Academy Awards — a record at the time — including those for best picture, best director and, for Mr. Heston, best actor.

He went on to star opposite Sophia Loren in the 1961 film “El Cid,” battling the Moors in medieval Spain. As a Marine officer at the Forbidden City in 1900, he helped put down the Boxer Rebellion in Nicholas Ray’s 1963 epic “55 Days at Peking.” In “Khartoum” (1966), he played Gen. Charles (Chinese) Gordon, who was killed in a desert uprising, led in the film by Laurence Olivier’s Mahdi. When George Stevens produced and directed “The Greatest Story Ever Told” in 1965, there was Mr. Heston, back in ancient Judea, playing John the Baptist to Max von Sydow’s Jesus.

He portrayed Andrew Jackson twice, in “The President’s Lady” (1953) and “The Buccaneer” (1958). There were westerns (“Major Dundee,” “Will Penny,” “The Mountain Men”), costume dramas (“The Three Musketeers” and its sequel, “The Four Musketeers,” with Mr. Heston as the crafty Cardinal Richelieu in both) and action films aplenty. Whether playing a hard-bitten landowner in an adaptation of James Michener’s novel “The Hawaiians” (1970), or a daring pilot in “Airport 1975,” he could be relied on to give moviegoers their money’s worth.

In 1965 he was cast as Michelangelo in the film version of Irving Stone’s novel “The Agony and the Ecstasy.” Directed by Carol Reed, the film pitted Mr. Heston’s temperamental artist against Rex Harrison’s testy Pope Julius II, who commissioned Michelangelo to create frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Mr. Heston’s performance took a critical drubbing, but to audiences, the larger-than-life role seemed to be another perfect fit. Mr. Heston once joked: “I have played three presidents, three saints and two geniuses. If that doesn’t create an ego problem, nothing does.”

Foray Into the Future

Mr. Heston was catapulted into the distant future in the 1968 science-fiction film “Planet of the Apes,” in which he played an astronaut marooned on a desolate planet and then enslaved by its rulers, a race of anthropomorphic apes. The film was a hit. He reprised the role two years later in the sequel, “Beneath the Planet of the Apes.”

It was all a long way from Evanston, Ill., where Charlton Carter was born on Oct. 4, 1923, and from the small town of St. Helen, Mich., where his family moved when he was a small boy and where his father ran a lumber mill. He attended a one-room school and learned to fish and hunt and to savor the feeling of being self-reliant in the wild, where his shyness was no handicap.

When his parents divorced in the 1930s and his mother remarried — his stepfather’s surname was Heston — the family moved back to the Chicago suburbs, this time Winnetka. He joined the theater program at his new high school and went on to enroll at Northwestern University on a scholarship. By that time, he was convinced he had found his life’s work.

Mr. Heston also found a fellow drama student, Lydia Clarke, whom he married in 1944, just before he enlisted in the Army Air Forces. He became a radio-gunner and spent three years stationed in the Aleutian Islands. After his discharge, the Hestons moved to New York, failed to find work in the theater and, somewhat disenchanted but still determined, moved to North Carolina, where they spent several seasons working at the Thomas Wolfe memorial theater in Asheville.

When they returned to New York in 1947, Mr. Heston got his first big break, landing the role of Caesar’s lieutenant in a Broadway production of Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra” staged by Guthrie McClintick and starring Katharine Cornell. The production ran for seven months and proved to be the high point of Mr. Heston’s New York stage career. He appeared in a handful of other plays, most of them dismal failures.

If Broadway had little to offer him, television was another matter. He made frequent appearances in dramatic series like “Robert Montgomery Presents” and “Philco Playhouse.” The door to Hollywood opened when the film producer Hal B. Wallis saw Mr. Heston’s performance as Rochester in a “Studio One” production of “Jane Eyre.” Wallis offered him a contract.

Mr. Heston made his film debut in 1950 in Wallis’s “Dark City,” a low-grade thriller in which he played a small-time gambler. Two years later, he did his first work for DeMille as a hard-driving circus boss in “The Greatest Show on Earth.”

Throughout his career he studied long and hard for his roles. He prepared for the part of Moses by memorizing passages from the Old Testament. When filming began on the sun-baked slopes of Mount Sinai, he suggested to DeMille that he play the role barefoot — a decision that he felt lent an edge of truth to his performance.

Preparing for “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” he read hundreds of Michelangelo’s letters and practiced how to sculpt and paint convincingly. When filming “The Wreck of the Mary Deare” (1959), in which he played the pilot of a salvage boat, he learned deep-water diving. And he mostly rejected stunt doubles. In “Ben-Hur,” he said, he drove his own chariot for “about 80 percent of the race.”

“I worked six weeks learning how to manage the four white horses,” he said. “Nearly pulled my arms right out of their sockets.”

As the years wore on, the leading roles began to go to younger men, and by the 1980s, Mr. Heston’s appearances on screen were less frequent. He turned to stage work again, not on Broadway but in Los Angeles, at the Ahmanson Theater, where he played roles ranging from Macbeth to James Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” He also returned to television, appearing in 1983 as a paternalistic banker in the mini-series “Chiefs” and as an oil baron in the series “The Colbys.”

Mr. Heston was always able to channel some energies into the public arena. He was an active supporter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., calling him “a 20th-century Moses for his people,” and participated in the historic march on Washington in 1963.

Inspired by Reagan

He served as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1966 to 1971, following in the footsteps of his friend and role model Ronald Reagan. A registered Democrat for many years, he was nevertheless selective in the candidates he chose to support and often campaigned for conservatives.

In 1981, President Reagan appointed him co-chairman of the President’s Task Force on the Arts and Humanities, a group formed to devise ways to obtain financing for arts organizations. Although he had reservations about some projects supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Mr. Heston wound up defending the agency against charges of elitism.

Again and again, he proved himself a cogent and effective speaker, but he rejected suggestions that he run for office. “I’d rather play a senator than be one,” he said.

He became a Republican after Democrats in the Senate blocked the confirmation of Judge Robert Bork, a conservative, to the Supreme Court in 1987. Mr. Heston had supported the nomination and was critical of the Reagan White House for misreading the depth of the liberal opposition.

Mr. Heston frequently spoke out against what he saw as evidence of the decline and debasement of American culture. In 1992, appalled by the lyrics on “Cop Killer,” a recording by the rap artist Ice T, he blasted the album at a Time Warner stockholders meeting and was a force in having it withdrawn from the marketplace.

In the 1996 elections, he campaigned on behalf of some 50 Republican candidates and began to speak out against gun control. In 1997, he was elected vice president of the N.R.A.

In December of that year, as the keynote speaker at the 20th anniversary gala of the Free Congress Foundation, Mr. Heston described “a cultural war” raging across America, “storming our values, assaulting our freedoms, killing our self-confidence in who we are and what we believe.”

A Relentless Drive

The next year, in his 70’s, he was elected president of the N.R.A. In his speech at the association’s convention before his election, he trained his oratorical artillery on President Bill Clinton: “Mr. Clinton, sir, America didn’t trust you with our health care system. America didn’t trust you with gays in the military. America doesn’t trust you with our 21-year-old daughters, and we sure, Lord, don’t trust you with our guns.”

He was in the news again after the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in April 1999, when he said that the N.R.A.’s annual membership meeting, scheduled to be held the following week in Denver, would be scaled back in light of the killings but not canceled.

In a memorable scene from “Bowling for Columbine,” a 2002 documentary about violence in America, the director, Michael Moore, visited Mr. Heston at his home and asked him how he could defend his pro-gun stance. Mr. Heston ended the interview without comment.

In May 2001, he was unanimously re-elected to an unprecedented fourth term by the association’s board of directors. The association had amended its bylaws in 2000 to allow Mr. Heston to serve a third one-year term as president. Two months after his celebrated speech at the 2000 convention, it was disclosed that he had checked himself into an alcohol rehabilitation program.

Mr. Heston was proud of his collection of some 30 guns at his longtime home in the Coldwater Canyon area of Los Angeles, where he and his wife raised their son, Fraser, and daughter, Holly Ann. They all survive him, along with three grandchildren.

Never much for socializing , he spent his days either working, exercising, reading (he was fond of biographies) or sketching. An active diarist, he published several accounts of his career, including “The Actor’s Life: Journals 1956-1976.”

In 2003, Mr. Heston was among the recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded by President Bush. In 1997, he was also a recipient of the annual Kennedy Center honors.

Mr. Heston continued working through the 1990s, acting more frequently on television but also in occasional films. His most recent film appearance found him playing a cameo role, in simian makeup, in Tim Burton’s 2001 remake of “Planet of the Apes.”

He announced in 1999 that he was receiving radiation treatments for prostate cancer, but said he would continue his film work and go on making appearances on behalf of Republicans running for office.

He had always hated the thought of retirement and once explained his relentless drive as an actor. “You never get it right,” he said in a 1986 interview. “Never once was it the way I imagined it lying awake at 4 o’clock in the morning thinking about it the next day.” His goal remained, he said, “to get it right one time.”

What Would Reagan Do?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/books/review/Heilbrunn2-t.html

March 2, 2008
What Would Reagan Do?
By JACOB HEILBRUNN
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REAGAN’S DISCIPLE

George W. Bush’s Troubled Quest for a Presidential Legacy.
By Lou Cannon and Carl M. Cannon.
382 pp. PublicAffairs. $27.95.

When George W. Bush became president, he set out to honor Ronald Reagan’s approach to foreign and domestic policy. He succeeded. The more Bush flounders, the better Reagan looks by comparison. The result has been a fresh wave of Reagan nostalgia.

Among Republicans the yearning for a new Reagan to blot out memories of the Bush era is palpable. First Fred Thompson was supposed to be the next movie star who could restore good, old-fashioned conservative values.

Then Mitt Romney depicted himself as the true Reaganite. Now John McCain, who calls himself a member of the “school of Ronald Reagan,” is trying to reassure conservatives that he is the genuine article.

And among liberals, Reagan’s reputation is enjoying a distinct uptick: Russell Baker, writing in The New York Review of Books, described Reagan as a canny old bird in contrast to Bush, while Senator Barack Obama has hailed Reagan’s ability to change the “trajectory” of America.

In “Reagan’s Disciple,” Lou Cannon and Carl M. Cannon contrast the two presidents. Lou Cannon, who has written five books on Reagan, is a veteran journalist. His son Carl, the co-author of a Karl Rove biography, is the White House correspondent for The National Journal.

The Cannons contend that far from being a militant crusader, Reagan was a prudent leader — prepared to compromise with Congressional Democrats, hesitant to embroil the United States in foreign wars, eager to maintain America’s alliances and acutely aware of the limits of American power. Their sharp and discriminating account suggests that in seeking to win one for the Gipper, Bush, like not a few conservatives, has substituted a cartoon for reality.

Misunderstandings about Reagan were endemic among the conservatives in his own administration, the Cannons demonstrate, beginning with his truculent secretary of state Alexander Haig, who confused Reagan’s hard-line rhetoric with his actual intentions. Haig, they write, wanted to lay down what he called “markers” in Central America to stop Communist subversion. The markers included the threat of bombing Cuba. Reagan was not amused.

In 1982 he replaced Haig with George Shultz. To the frustration of bellicose conservatives, Reagan lifted the grain embargo on the Soviet Union and, at Shultz’s urging, proceeded to sign arms treaties with Moscow. And when it came to warfare, Reagan’s dominant approach was to fund proxy forces like the contras or the Afghan mujahedeen rather than send in American troops.

When he did deploy troops, it was in highly limited and staged operations like the liberation of Grenada from a Marxist government and its Cuban allies. His one debacle came in Lebanon, where he deployed about 1,200 marines in September 1982 as part of a multinational peacekeeping force.

There was, however, no peace to keep. In October 1983, a suicide bomber drove into a Marine headquarters and murdered 241 servicemen — the worst loss of troops in any single incident since the battle of Iwo Jima. According to the Cannons, “Lebanon left a mark on Reagan that would make him even more disinclined to risk U.S. troops in foreign adventures.”

His disinclination went so far, the Cannons report, that Reagan overrode his advisers’ opposition to his efforts to arrange the peaceful departure of the Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega from office. Reagan tried negotiation. His successor, George H. W. Bush, invaded. (Reagan, we learn, apparently viewed the invasion with misgivings.) The irony, of course, is that George W. Bush came into office determined to look not to his supposedly wimpy father but to the tough Reagan as his lodestar.

Bush II, the Cannons write, had been transfixed by Reagan ever since he defeated Bush I for the Republican nomination in 1980. He called Reagan a “Western man” and “a man of decisive action.”

As president, Bush reverentially invoked Reagan’s name on behalf of the war on terror and became, the Cannons write, “a de facto neocon.” Where Reagan had wisely kept his own counsel, “Bush had surrounded himself with dreamers telling him what they hoped would happen.”

The Cannons have little that is really fresh to add about Iraq. Nevertheless, as Bush’s presidency lurches to its desultory conclusion, even familiar stories offer potent reminders of why the Iraq venture went wrong. Paul Wolfowitz, for example, makes a cameo appearance here, once more to inform Congress that when Gen. Eric Shinseki estimated several hundred thousand occupation troops would be needed after the invasion, he was “wildly off the mark.”

The Cannons point out: “This was not how civilian leaders of the Pentagon usually talked publicly about four-star generals. It never happened in Reagan’s presidency.” They insist that Reagan would never have engaged in a foolish adventure like invading Iraq. They’re probably correct.

Though his followers on the right demanded that White House aides should “let Reagan be Reagan,” in fact he always was. He decried the evil empire and wound down the cold war by embracing the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Reagan said that he would never deal with terrorists and secretly sold missiles to the mullahs in Tehran. He embraced the Christian right and family values, but rarely attended church, let alone anti-abortion rallies. Were Reagan to witness the latest efforts by conservatives to claim his mantle, he might well cry out, as he did in the favorite of his films, “King’s Row,” “Where’s the rest of me?”

Jacob Heilbrunn, a regular contributor to the Book Review, is the author of “They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons.”