...by Any Other Name... cont.

And the saga continues. A few days back, I posted a reply I'd gotten from a friend on my Facebook page in response to the original post. That provoked a reader to write the following:

Reality check! Whoever you are, you are badly unresearched, like far too many Americans: Your darling Reagan began his political career by destroying California's economy, especially its educational system, which has yet to recover. He set a new precedent in live-action government propaganda in the sixties, while gov of California, by making up arbitrary figures at press conferences to back up his anti-government-spending agenda, which would appear on the front pages of newspapers while the corrections to the previous week's Ron-figures appeared on the back page. It really was a great performance; gotta give him that. Of COURSE he became the hero of the GOP; I guess those are the 'leadership skills' you speak of.

My mom was his biographer AND a newspaper journalist in the Bay Area during his governorship; your hero hid under his f**king desk from her at one point. Sadly, it gets worse.... Having won his doddering, demented, evangelical-apocalyptic-vision suffering ass into the White House (and its red button) through the same ignorance and gullibility of the American voting public that landed George the 2nd there (and Arnold in Ron's old office in Sac'to) he proceeded---with a cabinet containing not only Cheney, but Rumsfeld---to apply his failed economic policies at a national/ international level, creating the (infamous) deficit inherited by Clinton. Remember, Bush-the-first's economic agenda was more Reaganomics, with exactly the same group of individuals and their ideas in charge. America's educational system (alas and not surprisingly) has yet to recover. Crikey, we're still suffering under the amazingly far-reaching and visionary crimes committed by the Sec'y of the Interior RR put into office, James Watt, who was perhaps the most [corrupt] public official in American history previous to Bush II's admin.

As regards where we go from here, we can only grab shovels and hope, and be as active as possible (and researched and aware, thankyouverymuch). Perhaps your tenet of thought, if not you personally, are a result of this broken educational system. Reaganism, like many conservative paradigms, requires an ignorant public; hence the under-funding of schools. Gosh, lower taxes for the rich fits nicely into that model, doesn't it? The big snowball rolls DOWNHILL, gaining mass and momentum....

Your idea that Reagan ended wars and fixed the economy is hallucinatory, easily countered by the most remedial level of awareness or research, and frankly, you owe your country more than that. If you care enough about America to weigh in at political blogs, have some realism backing you up. Gorbachev envisioned and implemented Perestroika---an amazingly heroic and courageous string of acts, risking not only his life, but that of his very country---and Ron stood in front of the Berlin wall taking credit with his "tear down this wall" speech. [ed. note: actually, Reagan's Berlin Wall speech preceded Gorbachev's reforms by about a year, per Wikipedia]

Sadly, it gets worse... Boldly going where no President had gone, He and George the 1st used George's CIA-machine to sell drugs to fund their junta in foreign Central-American countries. It was proven beyond the shadow of a doubt, is common knowledge, and was called the "Iran-Contra scandal." Perhaps you've heard of it. Astonishingly, they escaped due process---that We The People failed to prosecute has ired me for over fifteen years, and has cost the world much death, trial and tribulation. We should have prosecuted; perhaps if we had, American non-cognoscenti would have gotten it. The failure was all of ours. Aye, and the price, too. The price will be handed down through generations, alas, by way of precedent for future criminals to take advantage of.

I hope I'm not about to see history repeat itself, setting the stage for god-knows-what future crimes---the Reagan admin set a dangerous precedent, standing upon whose shoulders George the 2nd's admin was able to commit horrific acts against the American Constitution, the International Community, and the Geneva Conventions. How well we come out of this, buddy, ALL OF US, will be a matter of how SMART we can be. Suffice to say, if We The People fail to prosecute Bushco for their crimes, things look very bleak for our children, and for the future of America. Heck, just in the immediate context, if we want to hold onto any credulity as the people behind the Statue of Liberty and under The Constitution, we HAVE TO prosecute. The U.N. is taking the matter up. Spain is taking it up. This will grow, if the world is a sensible place. We The People have to either lead the effort with pitch-forks, or lose our legitimacy.

TAKE THE HINT. There's a reason the GOP has imploded; it's political tenets are fatally un-American. Tragically, RR makes a fitting hero for the idolatry of the GOP, so you're welcome to warship HE of the would-be apocalypse, but I'd rather buy you a beer, and make you AWARE.

The reader, a good friend, needed to fix that one fact about Reagan taking credit for Gorbachev's vision. Truth is, however, we'll probably never know what happened behind the scenes. Reagan could have gotten intel that Gorbachev was planning to open up the Soviet Union to more transparency. He could have taken the opportunity to upstage Gorbachev at the Brandenburg Gate and made it look like glasnost and perestroika were responses to Reagan's rhetorical challenge.