Death trumps Teflon
My stomach is already turning at the prospect of seeing Ronald Reagan canonized in death. Here was a man who defined the Peter Principle. He achieved his level of competence as a sportscaster. He then went on to achieve his level of incompetence as an actor. Having succeeded at becoming a lousy actor, he took incompetence to its illogical conclusion by becoming a politician.
Americans have a bad habit of celebrating mediocrity. We did it by making Reagan a movie star. We further shamed ourselves by electing him governor of California, although there is a certain cosmic justice in having him govern a state that long ago sold its glossy soul to the gods of celebrity. Given its current chief executive, it is obvious that the Golden State has a severe learning disability. There was a time when I was proud to claim that state as my place of birth. It hasn’t happened recently.
The idea of this genial, bumbling fool becoming president of the United States was so ridiculous that even science fiction writers weren’t shameless enough to suggest such an obviously impossible scenario.
The truth, as always, is much stranger than fiction.
Reagan was the perfect Hollywood whore. He peddled his ass to anyone desperate enough to cast him. Once known as the liberal head of the Screen Actors Guild, he wasted no time in peddling his ideals to the highest bidder once he was in a position to do so. Like many celebrities, he’d low bridge his grandmother for a buck.
You’d think that a country that had been reamed royally by Nixon and his gang would have learned something. Apparently not. So we elected The Great Communicator, who was, in reality, the Great Prevaricator. The Reagan administration proved beyond doubt that an ounce of image was worth several hundred pounds of substance. Tell a lie convincingly and often and no matter how obviously false, most Americans will believe it. Nixon blazed that trail, Reagan paved the road and Bush is now cruising the Interstate.
To give credit where blame is due, Reagan probably wasn’t an inherently evil man. He was, however, easily manipulated by men who were demonstrably evil. He encompassed monumental immorality on his watch as captain of the ship and tolerance of iniquity comes from the top down.
His underlings committed treason, mass murder, extortion, and enough perjury to inspire his successors to even greater heights. He gave us Reaganomics, also known as voodoo economics. This theory should boggle the minds of even the most arithmetically challenged. Spend billions on demonstrably ineffective boondoggles while cutting taxes for the wealthy. Sound familiar? You didn’t really think that Bush had an original thought did you?
Those nasty tax and spend Democrats managed to reverse the idiocy of Reaganomics and actually put us in a situation where we had a national surplus for the first time in recent memory. We voted them back into office, but the corruption of the American political system is such that Reagan’s spiritual heirs were able to subvert the system and raise political corruption to the art form pioneered by Nixon and perfected by Reagan’s handlers.
Teflon Ron has already been lionized as the man who singlehandedly destroyed communism, as though that system didn’t self-destruct as the result of its own corruption. You can’t argue with Reagan’s sense of timing. He was in charge when the internal rot caused the communist implosion, thereby getting credit for an event he had nothing to do with. Anyone with the brains of a cabbage could see the truth, but, again, if you tell a lie loudly and often enough, it will be believed.
All of this nonsense will undoubtedly be rehashed ad extreme nauseum by the so-called liberal media in the next few days. That doesn’t make it any more true.
It was obvious to all but the most extreme ideologues that Reagan was suffering from Alzheimer’s long before he left office. A friend of mine offered a telling example. Jerry (not his real name) was a very high level engineer with Boeing before he retired. He recounted to me the story of the time his team was called in to make a presentation before President Reagan. In prepping the Boeing group for their audience with Reagan, the presidential team made it quite clear that the engineers must not use words in their presentation. They were to use only pictures, since the president could not handle too much verbiage.
It would be too much to hope that the shameful legacy of Ronald Reagan would die with him. It won’t. It will be inflated and magnified until he becomes someone for whom an airport should be named.
Meanwhile, the insane economic and foreign policies he espoused will continue to destroy the American ideal for years to come. As a forgiving former priest, I hope his corrupt soul roasts in an appropriate level of hell for as long as it takes this country to recover from his incompetent leadership.
That should be a satisfyingly long time given our current administration.
12:05:37 AM 
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