Reagan centennial stirs GOP to look back, ahead
As Republicans mark the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth
Sunday, a nostalgic GOP confronts a nagging question: Can the party of
the former president and California governor hope to produce future
leaders who can meet his iconic political gold standard? "Reagan is
still the lodestar for Republicans," said Sacramento political
consultant Sal Russo, a UC Berkeley student activist in 1964 when he
was tapped to be a driver, and later a special assistant, to Reagan
when he was California's governor from 1967 to 1975. "You can't have a
conversation about Republican politics without bringing him up."
Russo - now a leading force behind the Tea Party Express, which is
creating a populist firestorm in GOP politics - said Reagan's legacy
provides a template for Republicans who hope to gain ground, and even
win back the White House, in 2012.
COMMENTS: The day Reagan was inaugurated our national debt stood at
$920 Billion. The day he left, our national debt was approaching $3
Trillion. According to the old math, he tripled it. Today the
Republicans are chastising Obama because our national debt has
increased by 20% on his watch. Tomorrow they'll be celebrating the
birth of a guy who increased it by 300%. Go figure!
Reagan was the worst thing to happen to California and the U.S. The
champion of affable ignorance was the best song-and-dance man for his
corporate masters. No celebration of Ronald Reagan can be considered
complete without deregulation of the savings and loan industry,
followed by a failed attempt to deregulate the banking industry
Reagan was the worst President in my lifetime - yes worse than Nixon
or Bush Jr. In contrast to Kennedy who inspired a generation to public
service, Reagan inspired the best and brightest to go to business
school and pursue personal greed. The legacy of his voodoo trickle
down economics are poised to ruin the country. His extreme free
market, anti-regulation are now a proven failure. He did nothing
positive, yet he is inexplicably adored by dim-witted re-pugs.
REAGAN CREATED AL QUADA - Once upon a time, a dangerous radical
gained control of the US Republican Party. Reagan increased the budget
for support of the radical Muslim Mujahidin conducting terrorism
against the Afghanistan government to half a billion dollars a year.
Not content with creating a vast terrorist network to harass the
Soviets, Reagan then pressured the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia to
match US contributions. Fahd gave in to enormous US pressure. Fahd not
only put Saudi government money into the Afghan Mujahideen networks,
which trained them in bomb making and guerrilla tactics, but he also
instructed the Minister of Intelligence, Turki al-Faisal, to try to
raise money from private sources. Turki al-Faisal discovered that a
young member of the fabulously wealthy Bin Laden construction dynasty,
Usama, was committed to Islamic causes. Turki gave Usama the task of
raising money from Gulf millionaires for the Afghan struggle. This
whole effort was undertaken, remember, on Reagan Administration
instructions. Bin Laden not only raised millions for the effort, but
helped encourage Arab volunteers to go fight for Reagan against the
Soviets and the Afghan communists. Bin Laden kept a database of these
volunteers. In Arabic the word for base is al-Qaeda. In the US, the
Christian Right adopted the Mujahideen as their favorite project. They
even sent around a "biblical checklist" for grading US congressman. If
a congressman didn't support the radical Muslim Muj, he or she was
downgraded by the evangelicals and fundamentalists.
Reagan helped create the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. Reagan fought a
proxy war with the Soviet Union by training, arming, equipping, and
funding Islamist mujahidin fighters in Afghanistan. Reagan funneled
billions of dollars, along with top-secret intelligence and
sophisticated weaponry to these fighters through the Pakistani
intelligence service. The Talbian and Osama Bin Laden — a prominent
mujahidin commander — emerged from these mujahidin groups Reagan
helped create, and U.S. policy towards Pakistan remains strained
because of the intelligence services' close relations to these
fighters. In fact, Reagan's decision to continue the proxy war after
the Soviets were willing to retreat played a direct role in Bin
Laden's ascendency.
All these people living in the past, clinging to deluded memories of a
mostly fictional period of prosperity conjured up thanks to the
wizardry of Paul Volcker and the brief euphoria of deficit spending.
Remember what many were saying at that time - yes it's nice now, but
our children and our children's children will pay for this
recklessness, which is precisely what's happening today.
My favorite Reagan fact: Reagan sold weapon to Iran then went on
national TV to lie about it.
He was an actor portraying a leader. In the early fifties he was a
spokesman for the Crusade For Freedom, a CIA program to import Nazis
and fascists into the US, insert them into European immigrant
communities, and push those communities to the right. That's why Nazi
spawn like Hans von Spakovsky's folks were resettled in Huntsville,
Alabama along with the Nazi rocket scientists, and why Hans eventually
got a spot in W. Bush's Justice Department with the job of blocking
blacks from voting. Like father like son, only the father was doing
Hitler's work. During the Reagan Administration the CIA ran an off-the-
books war against Nicaragua in violation of law, traded with the enemy
(Iran) and ran drug smuggling operations, moving heroin through
Lebanon and cocaine on Southern Air Transport planes flying up from
Latin America. Reagan promulgated the magical thinking of "trickle-
down", ran up the national debt three times the size of America's
national debt accrued from Washington through Carter. Meanwhile, those
tax cuts for the uber-wealthy set America on the path of economic rot
that now exists. Reagan wasn't a leader. He played one on TV. In
short, Ronald Reagan helped to make America what it is today. A mess.
How appropriate that it's a "looking back" thing. Like, 1860 back!
Ronald was a gifted politician. An even more gifted puppet. A man able
to gain consensus, which set this country on a long path to decline.
Anyone that could get America to buy into Trickle down has a gift. But
let me ask, how do rich people get rich? By spending money or by
keeping it to themselves? How does hording huge amounts of money help
anyone? The idea is to keep the money flowing and circulating to
everyone’s benefit. Reagan was incapable of understanding even basic
economics. All he did was for the benefit of the rich. To celebrate
the man is to celebrate dysfunction, greed and stupidity. All these
are things the current GOP stands for. Best to let that dinosaur die
and let evolution take its course.
Forced to raise taxes twice to avert financial catastrophe (a fact
conveniently forgotten in the conservative hagiography of Reagan
manufactured by the GOP's 2008 ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin),
the Gipper nonetheless presided over a tripling of the American
national debt. By the time he left office in 1989, Ronald Reagan more
than equaled the entire debt burden produced by the previous 200 years
of American history.
Ketchup is a vegetable. Poor people are evil. We have enough nukes to
blow the world to bits 100 times over but we need more (he was
installed by GE after all.) The wealthy shouldn't pay any taxes, ever,
under any circumstances. Only the working stiffs need pay taxes.
Unions totally suck because they get people organized to protect their
own rights and they can be political too. I'm was the only 80 year old
man in history with not one gray hair. Protecting the environment is
bad. The oceans suck. Air sucks. I ratted out my friends to HUAC and
that's how my political career started. It worked out for me. Nancy
was preggo before we got married, and I was married when I was
boinking her but I really am all about family values. My wrecking
California was a dry run to see how things would work out if I became
president. I ran for president for over 20 years. By the time I was
out of office Republicans hated my guts. We conquered Granada. That
was pretty cool. I got out of going to WW 2. I was a coward. I made
lots of WW 2 movies where I was hero because all the real actors
joined up and me and Van Johnson were the only people left. If I ran
for president today I would have to run as a democrat. I used to be a
Democrat. I was also president of the union, SAG. What happened to
the communist takeover of the USA? Oh they just purchased us? I
forget.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/02/03/MNVT1HF6KG.DTL
+++===+++===+++===+++===+++
How Republicans created the myth of Ronald Reagan With the Gipper's
reputation flagging after Clinton, neoconservatives launched a
stealthy campaign to remake him as a "great" president.
The myth of Ronald Reagan was already looming in the spring of 1997 —
when a highly popular President Bill Clinton was launching his second-
term, pre-Monica Lewinsky, and the Republican brand seemed at low ebb.
But what neoconservative activist Grover Norquist and his allies
proposed that spring was virtually unheard of — an active, mapped-out,
audacious campaign to spread a distorted vision of Reagan's legacy
across America.
In a sense, some of the credit for triggering this may belong to those
supposedly liberal editors at the New York Times, and their decision
at the end of 1996 to publish that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. survey of
the presidents. The below-average rating by the historians for Reagan,
coming right on the heels of Clintons’ easy reelection victory, was a
wake-up call for these people who came to Washington in the 1980s as
the shock troops of a revolution and now saw everything slipping away.
The first Reagan salvos came from the Heritage Foundation, the same
conservative think tank that also had feted the 10th anniversary of
the Reagan tax cut in 1991. After its initial article slamming the
Times, the foundation’s magazine, Policy Review, came back in July
1997 with a second piece for its 20th anniversary issue: “Reagan
Betrayed: Are Conservatives Fumbling His Legacy?”
The coming contours of the Reagan myth were neatly laid out in a
series of short essays from the leaders of the conservative movement:
that the Gipper deserved all or at least most of the credit for
winning the Cold War, that the economic boom that Americans were
enjoying in 1997 was the result of the Reagan tax cut (and not the
march toward balanced budgets, lower interest rates and targeted
investment), and that the biggest problem with the GOP was, as the
title suggested, not Reagan’s legacy but a new generation of weak-
kneed leaders who were getting it all wrong. The tone was established
by none other than Reagan’s own son, Michael, now himself a talk-radio
host, who wrote: “Although my father is the one afflicted with
Alzheimer's disease, I sometimes think the Republicans are suffering a
much greater memory loss. They have forgotten Ronald Reagan's
accomplishments — and that is why we have lost so many of them.”
Michael Reagan, like most of the others, mentioned Reagan’s frequent
calls for less government — presumably his accomplishment there was
simply in calling for it, since he never came close to achieving it.
Gary Bauer, another former Reagan aide who later ran for president as
an antiabortion “family values” candidate, took a similar tack on the
speaking-out issue, noting that Reagan “spoke of the sanctity of human
life with passion” — again regardless of his lack of concrete results
on that front. One of the writers argued: “On the international scene,
Reagan knew that only America could lead the forces of freedom” — it
was former assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, who’d pleaded
guilty in a deal to withholding information about Iran-Contra from
Congress and was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush. Oklahoma Gov.
Frank Keating even went the distance and compared Reagan to the 16th
president with his argument that “Reagan's achievement can be compared
to Lincoln's, because he faced immense challenges in an era
characterized by deep and fundamental philosophical divisions among
the people he set out to lead.” Of course, Keating’s analogy implied
that stagflation and a left-wing government in Nicaragua were on an
equivalent plane with slavery and a civil war that killed hundreds of
thousands of Americans on our own soil — dramatizing the rhetorical
extent to which conservatives were now willing to go in order to
salvage their movement.
One of the more down-to-earth tributes was written by Norquist, who
said: “Every conservative knows that we will win radical tax reform
and reduction as soon as we elect a president who will sign the bill.
The flow of history is with us. Our victories can be delayed, but not
denied. This is the change wrought by Ronald Reagan.” Norquist all but
revealed one of his missions in the coming two years — finding a
presidential candidate who would assume the Reagan mantle in a way
that neither Bush 41 nor Dole ever could — but not the other. His
second big push was practically a guerrilla marketing campaign to make
sure that the less-engaged Middle America would get the message that
Reagan belonged in the pantheon of all-time greats right next to
Lincoln, Washington and FDR. Norquist had learned the lessons of
Normandy and of the Brandenburg Gate, which was that powerful symbols
can mean a lot more than words (especially in a little-read policy
journal), that a motorist under the big Sunbelt sky of Ronald Reagan
Boulevard will absorb the message of the Gipper’s greatness without
ever pondering if ketchup should be a vegetable in federally funded
school lunches or if “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers” in
Central America were drug-dealing thugs, the kind of stubborn things
that popped up in those newspaper articles ranking the presidents.
The Ronald Reagan Legacy Project was hatched in the spring of 1997 —
and perhaps like any successful guerrilla operation, there was an
element of surprise. There was no formal announcement, nothing to tip
off any alarmists on the left. Rather than incorporate the Reagan
project as a separate entity, which carried the potential of greater
scrutiny of its operations and its finances, it was simply a unit of
the group that Norquist had been overseeing for more than a decade,
the Americans for Tax Reform. The Reagan Legacy Project would not even
get its first mention in print until October 23, 1997 — by then its
first bold proposal had two key backers in Georgia Rep. Bob Barr and
that state’s Republican Sen. Paul Coverdell. They had endorsed
legislation that would rename the Capitol region’s busy domestic
airport, Washington National, as Reagan National. The renaming would
not only mean that millions of air travelers would pass through the
facility named for the 40th president, but a disproportionate number
would be from the nation’s liberal elites, especially in Big Media,
who used the airport’s popular shuttle service. Simply put, Reagan
National Airport would be a weekly thumb in the eye of the Yankee
elites who were still belittling the aging Gipper’s presidency.
The announcement didn’t even get coverage in the hometown Washington
Post until exactly one month later, when Norquist’s behind-the-scenes
lobbying push had already bagged the endorsement of the influential
Republican Governors Association — including George Allen, the
governor of the state where the airport is located (in Arlington, Va.)
on federal land — as well as House Speaker Gingrich. With Reagan out
of public view with Alzheimer’s for three years now, advocate Barr
cast the measure as a feel-good proposal that surpassed partisanship.
“People appreciate how Ronald Reagan gave voice to Americans' basic
good feelings, including a lot of Democrats, ” he said. Democrats, in
fact, did what you would expect them to do … they hemmed and hawed.
The mayor of Washington, D.C., at the time — with thus the largest
presence on the regional panel that ran Washington National — was
Democrat Marion Barry, a bitter foe of Reagan’s politics, who could
only fret that there were a “host of other” people who should be
considered, too; in a later article, Geraldine Ferraro, who was Walter
Mondale’s running mate in 1984, said that Reagan’s real legacy was the
mountain of debt, but then she offered a verbal shrug: “The man was
president of the United States; he served two terms.” It almost
brought to mind Reagan’s cruel remark about Michael Dukakis a decade
earlier, that “I’m not going to pick on an invalid.”
After a couple of years in the wilderness with the rest of the inside-
the-Beltway right wing, Norquist had found a new cause that not only
advanced the movement but that he could also have fun with. "The guy
ended the Cold War; he turned the economy around," Norquist told the
Baltimore Sun. “He deserves a monument like the Jefferson or the FDR —
or the Colossus at Rhodes! National Airport is a good place to start.”
Norquist was the leader of a new breed, the College Republican-trained
version of a bomb thrower. Molded by the 1970s and that political void
between the hangover of campus radicalism and the Carter malaise, he
was a true believer, with an iconoclastic outlook, who called the
countercultural drug-overdosing rock star Janis Joplin a hero even as
he forged political ties with the Christian Right. Like most political
junkies, his ideas were a mix of heredity — his father, a Polaroid
executive who raised Norquist in the Boston suburbs, taught his young
son to hate taxes at the Daily Joy ice-cream parlor by taking the
first two licks of his son’s cone and calling it the income and sales
tax — and generational rebellion. But that rebellion was against the
liberal norms at Harvard, which he attended in the mid-1970s, even
while working on the left-leaning Harvard Crimson. When he escaped to
Washington in 1978, it was still as an outsider; he would later tell
the Washington Post that the sight of the more opulent federal
buildings there made him “physically ill” because they were built with
taxpayer dollars, that they were a kind of “neo-American fascism,”
that “[t]hey took people's money to build those things, people who
were just getting by, [they] stole their money and built those things
out of marble...”
Ronald Reagan came three years later to rescue Grover Norquist, to
take a young single Republican nerd and make him a player, albeit a
small-time one at first. It was through Reagan’s team that Norquist
came to launch the Americans for Tax Reform in 1986, to win support
for that year’s overhaul (even though, as noted earlier, the bill
raised taxes on corporations substantially — one of the early
contradictions among many that would pile up over Norquist’s long
career). During those days, the geeky 20-something took strength from
Reagan’s support of so-called freedom fighters like Jonas Savimbi in
Angola, a right-wing rebel backed by South Africa’s then-apartheid
government — his office would be lined with pictures of Norquist’s gun-
toting days in the jungle, interspersed with the Joplin memorabilia.
By the 1990s, Norquist was in a new political mode, survivor. He
served as a close ally of Gingrich, helping to draft and promulgate
the 1994 Contract with America, but the bitter chain of events that
seemed to start the day his heroic Gipper headed into the California
sunset — followed by Bush 41 and his betrayal on taxes and then the
anti-Gingrich backlash — caused him to again focus on the presidency
as the place where the action was. Of course, by now Norquist was not
so much a rebel as a conglomerate, enmeshed in a tangled web of
alliances, sometimes for money. By 1997, Norquist was a registered
lobbyist for what was becoming the most powerful business monopoly of
the computer era, the software giant Microsoft Corp., while his ATR
umbrella group was being probed for its multimillion ad campaign on
behalf of GOP candidates in the 1996 elections. In fact, the very
spring that Norquist launched the Reagan Legacy Project, his fellow
conservative Tucker Carlson wrote a scathing profile that accused the
activist of cynically selling out — the article that ran in the left-
leaning New Republic (after the conservative Weekly Standard rejected
it) carried the headline “What I Sold at the Revolution” and said
that, among other things, Norquist was now receiving $10,000 a month
from the left-wing strongman who controlled the African nation of
Seychelles, the polar opposite of the type of anti-communist rebels he
once supported.
So maybe the Reagan project was a little escape for Norquist, a little
getting back to his roots, with the kind of in-your-face surprising
ploy that had been his youthful trademark. From the start, he handed
the task of running the legacy project to a young aide named Michael
Kamburowski, who had recently arrived from his native Australia with a
kind of zeal for Reaganism that maybe only a newcomer could carry. A
decade later, it would come out that Kamburowski — who also lobbied
with Norquist on issues such as immigration reform — was here in the
United States illegally (and even jailed for a time in 2001, which
somehow didn’t prevent Kamburowski from landing a subsequent job as
chief operating officer of the California Republican Party). But while
he apparently was in the United States as an illegal alien,
Kamburowski still seemed to “get” the Reagan Legacy Project from Day
One, that it wasn’t just about honoring Reagan but enshrining Reagan’s
conservative principles as the American ideal. "Someone 30 to 40 years
from now who may never have heard of Reagan will be forced to ask
himself, 'Who was this man to have so many things named after him?'”
Kamburowski said to the left-oriented magazine Mother Jones in 1997,
writing about Norquist’s legacy scheme. The initial media coverage of
the idea tended to range from bemusement to amusement. People magazine
— the ultimate vehicle for connecting with the Silent Majority of
unengaged voters — covered an early effort of the legacy campaign that
was a six-foot portrait of Reagan made from 14,000 jelly beans. The
item was headlined: “Reagan’s Sweet Legacy.”
All the sweetness and yuks masked a somewhat startling fact — that by
enshrining a national myth about Reagan so soon after his presidency,
while he was still alive (albeit incapacitated), and for purposes that
were essentially partisan in nature, Norquist, Kamburowski and their
powerful and growing list of conservative allies were pulling off a
maneuver that was unprecedented in American history. Other presidents
and leaders had surely been mythologized — a walk from Norquist’s
office near K Street to the National Mall would show that — but not
while they were still living, or in a manner so blatantly calculated
in the very spirit of a presidency built around effective public
relations. This may have been American history, circa 1984 — but as if
the textbook had been authored by Orwell himself. As young Kamburowski
said flatly to the Hartford Courant in December 1997: “The left has
been far better at rewriting history. Conservatives just haven't paid
that much attention to this kind of thing.”
http://www.salon.com/books/excerpt/2009/02/02/ronald_reagan/print.html