The Cardboard Messiah

[Octafish]

From the genius of Pat Oliphant (pub. 1976):



FTW, Punk asks: "Another disaster movie?"

[immoderate]

1. The genius of Reagan...

Was not his "accomplishments:"

• Prolonging the Cold War and the nuclear arms race
  
• Terrorizing the countries of Central America
  
• Tripling the national debt and expanding the MIC
  
• Decimating the working class and the labor movement
  
• Destroying the New Deal prosperity and the rational economy

None of these is why he is lionized by the right wing. It's that he always made people believe the opposite of what he was actually doing. That he probably wasn't aware of what he was doing made him even more effective.

That's the skill they are striving for.


--imm

[FSogol]

2. Add: Completely ingored the largest health crisis in the last half of the 20th Century.

:shrug:

[Octafish]

5. No accident. Ever hear about Operation COFFEECUP?

Operation COFFEECUP - How Reagan Worked to Stop Universal Health Coverage in 1961

[FSogol]

7. This weekend, remember to point out that Reagan armed and funded Sadam Hussien and Osama Bin Laden.

And via Oliver North sold weapons to Iran that were used to kill 260+ Marines in Beirut.

[immoderate]

10. I should have put a "And many more..." point.

There are so many Reagan "tribute" threads around that list the "20 worst" or "50 worst" things that Ronnie did. I couldn't compete.:smoke: So that's a representative summary, LOL.


--imm

[Octafish]

3. Excellent summation, yours, of the Reverse Robin Hood, Red-Ink Ronnie.

Well. More from WSWS:

Ronald Reagan (1911-2004): an obituary

By David North
9 June 2004

EXCERPT...

One is compelled to admit that there is nothing quite so awesome to behold as the total mobilization of the American media. Since the announcement of Reagan’s death on Saturday, the massive weight of this propaganda machine has been set into motion in what amounts to a vast exercise in historical falsification. The modern media version of the air brush is being applied to the years of the Reagan administration. The social misery in the United States caused by Reagan’s policies; the tens of thousands of lives lost in Central America at the hands of fascist death squads funded illegally by his government; the rampant criminality in an administration that was the most corrupt in twentieth century America—all this and other similarly smelly details are being more or less ignored. One reads nothing of his defense of apartheid in South Africa, his funding of countless right-wing dictatorships, or even of his tribute to SS soldiers buried in a cemetery in Bitburg, Germany. The media strives not only to suppress any objective appraisal of Reagan’s life and political career, but even to censor reference to the more unsavory elements of his administration’s policies.

The aim of this unrelenting propaganda is not only to mislead and confuse, but also to intimidate public opinion, that is, to foster a sense of political and social isolation among countless Americans who despised Reagan and everything he represented, to create in their minds, if not doubt about their own judgment, then at least a sense of futility about the prospects for dissenting views in the United States.

But the entire affair—the five days of official mourning, the endless media coverage, the spectacle of a state funeral—leaves the country cold. On Monday morning, in the schools, in offices and factories, there was little indication that the citizenry felt that they had witnessed the passing of a great and significant man, that they, as individuals and as a people, had suffered a genuine loss. For those old enough to remember the death of Roosevelt, let alone that of Kennedy, the contrast could not have been starker. Yes, those men, too, were bourgeois politicians and defenders of the existing social order. But Roosevelt and Kennedy had with genuine eloquence given voice, at different stages of their political careers, to the democratic aspirations of the working class and other oppressed strata of American society; and won for themselves an affection that was deeply felt. Real tears were shed when those men died.

But for the great mass of ordinary working people, the death of Ronald Reagan is a non-event. It makes no claim whatever upon their emotions. This is not only because Reagan had been out of the public eye for a decade, since the announcement that he was suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease. Too many working people still remember the impact of “Reaganomics” on their lives, which was entirely for the worse. Indeed, among broad sections of the working class he was the most hated president since Herbert Hoover. Even taking into account the support for Reaganism among significant sections of the middle class and more affluent layers of workers, the overwhelming popularity attributed to Reagan was largely of a synthetic character, a myth concocted by the media to endow the policies of his administration with an aura of public approval that they lacked in reality.

CONTINUED...

http://www3.wsws.org/articles/2004/jun2004/reag-j09.shtml

Hypocrisy reached new heights with the guy: A member of the Screen Actors Guild, he crushed the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization.

[immoderate]

11. Thanks. Reagan took us down the rabbit hole.

Everything since Reagan has been like an out of body experience. We live in a surreal world now.


--imm

[unblock]

6. and that is why shrub was really a bad president

oh, of course, shrub screwed the country in more ways than i could count, but his real failing was that he was too unsubtle.
he was so simple-minded that he made it obvious that the administration was lying, that the administration had no intention of balancing the budget or that there was ever enough money to pay for the tax cut and everything else, and so on. the ever-changing excuses and rationalizations for going to war and staying at war with iraq. all of it.

reagan could lie very effectively because he was ACTING. a lie didn't register on his face or in his voice because to him it wasn't a lie. it wasn't the truth, either; it was just READING A SCRIPT. it's neither a lie nor a truth, it's just telling a story.

shrub was so bad at his role that he couldn't cover up the fact that when he was lying he often knew he was lying. it was written all over his face, his smirk, his chuckle, his verbal stumbling, etc.


had the media been what it was even back in the '80s, they would have torn shrub up. but the right-wing so controlled things by the time shrub ran that they just got together and decided to run with it, hey, this propaganda thing will work just fine if we all act like the emperor has new clothes.

[immoderate]

9. Yes. Bush was the Ralph Kramden of subtlety.

:)

--imm

[Hubert Flottz]

4. Might have even had a lower IQ than W while he was in Washington.

A night crawler would probably scored better on a test of mental agility.

[Octafish]

8. Well. Who really was running the show?

George Bush Takes Charge: The Uses of ‘Counter-Terrorism’

By Christopher Simpson
Covert Action Quarterly 58

A paper trail of declassified documents from the Reagan‑Bush era yields valuable information on how counter‑terrorism provided a powerful mechanism for solidifying Bush's power base and launching a broad range of national security initiatives.

During the Reagan years, George Bush used "crisis management" and "counter‑terrorism" as vehicles for running key parts of the clandestine side of the US government.

Bush proved especially adept at plausible denial. Some measure of his skill in avoiding responsibility can be taken from the fact that even after the Iran‑Contra affair blew the Reagan administration apart, Bush went on to become the "foreign policy president," while CIA Director William Casey, by then conveniently dead, took most of the blame for a number of covert foreign policy debacles that Bush had set in motion.

The trail of National Security Decision Directives (NSDDS) left by the Reagan administration begins to tell the story. True, much remains classified, and still more was never committed to paper in the first place. Even so, the main picture is clear: As vice president, George Bush was at the center of secret wars, political murders, and America's convoluted oil politics in the Middle East.

CONTINUED...

http://covertaction.org//content/view/137/75/

SORRY NO LONGER AVAILABLE ONLINE.

Anyone wants a copy, PM me.

Interesting theory about IQ, Hubert Flottz. Either way, they both were smart enough to sell out for cash at the expense of the nation and planet.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

12. H.L. Mencken said it best:

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” - H.L. Mencken

And, then, we repeated it with Dubya.

[deutsey]

15. Prophetic. n/t

[Octafish]

17. Mencken was my model in curmudgeonry. There was a divine intervention in Florida.

Or, more accurately, five people who thought of themselves as deities decided to act like ones and used their powers overrule the electoral will of the People...



... with disastrous effect upon the nation and world.

[bobthedrummer]

13. Before he entered politics he took a stand against all those Hollywood communists, commie supporters

potential commies, and then organized his crimes against humanity by calling it democracy and the free world and delivered US from communism...
:puke:
:argh:

[Octafish]

18. The Corruption of Ronald Reagan

News for most of America, bobthedrummer:

The Corruption of Ronald Reagan

By Dan Moldea
July 15, 1999

EXCERPT...

Ronald Reagan was an invention of the Hollywood conglomerate, MCA, which was founded in 1924 by Jules Stein, a Chicago ophthalmologist who quickly became friendly with the local underworld. Every facet of Reagan’s life, from his careers in acting and politics to his financial successes, were directed by MCA, which, with the help of the Mafia, was the most powerful force in Hollywood from the mid-1940s until the Bronfman family purchased the company in 1995.

Reagan came to Los Angeles in 1937 to make motion pictures, and, in 1940, MCA bought out his talent agency. Lew Wasserman became Reagan's personal agent; he negotiated a million-dollar contract with Warner Brothers on Reagan's behalf. In 1946, Wasserman became the president of MCA, and the following year, Reagan, with his film career already in decline, became the president of the Screen Actors Guild. By his own admission, Reagan immediately aligned himself with the corrupt Teamsters and other mob-connected unions in an effort to combat Hollywood Reds.

A sweetheart relationship developed between MCA and the guild, which culminated in July 1952 during Reagan's fifth consecutive term as SAG's president. Reagan and Laurence Beilenson, an attorney for MCA who had previously served as SAG's general counsel and had represented Reagan in his 1949 divorce from Jane Wyman, negotiated an exclusive blanket waiver with SAG that permitted MCA to engage in unlimited film production. The agreement violated SAG's bylaws, which prohibited talent agencies from employing their own clients, and no other talent agency was granted a similar agreement at that time. A Justice Department memorandum indicated that the waiver became "the central fact of MCA's whole rise to power."

At the end of Reagan's fifth term, he began to have serious financial problems, particularly with the IRS. In response, MCA negotiated a deal with the Last Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas--which was then operated by Chicago mobsters--for Reagan to host a song-and-dance show for two weeks and to receive enough money to cover his back tax debt. When Reagan returned to Hollywood, MCA, through its newly formed Revue Productions, hired him to host its flagship television program, The General Electric Theater for $125,000 a year. He was paid additional fees when he produced episodes for the series.

Despite his status as a television producer, Reagan remained on SAG's board in another violation of the guild's bylaws, which prohibited producers from holding office in SAG. In 1959, when Reagan ran for an unprecedented sixth term as SAG's president, his opponents raised the bylaws issue. Publicly, Reagan denied that he had ever produced The General Electric Theater--a flat-out lie.

CONTINUED...

http://www.moldea.com/ReaganRedux.html

A vessel of opportunity: slick on the outside, empty on the inside.

[bobthedrummer]

21. You and I have seen enough badly scripted movies to last a lifetime-lol n/t

[bulloney]

14. Reagan was a political "Weekend at Bernie's."

Take a dead man, prop him up and everybody thinks he's the life of the party.

[Initech]

16. Raygun was the birth of the coporate thieves era.

[lonestarnot]

19. Propaganda propogating machines. Here's to hoping they break down!

:coffee: :donut:

[bobthedrummer]

20. He hasn't left US, in this projected New American Century...n/t

[bobthedrummer]

22. More truth about Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan, Enabler of Atrocities
by Robert Parry (2-6-11 Consortium News)
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2011/020611.html

[MisterP]

23. alert! the Party has now adopted Reagan's policies, so attacks on Reagan

are a BROAD-BRUSH SMEAR on the party!
prepare to go under the bus!

[bobthedrummer]

24. RIP kick

[madmom]

25. Goes hand in hand with their cardboard cowboy.