Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
The Real Reagan
The Wall Street Journal, through a column by Fred Barnes, makes a good point: The legacy of Ronald Reagan is being subtly morphed from the shape in which it was cast by real history, for the entirely political ambition of making President Bush look bad. I’m not one for conspiracy theories, but I’ve found the ones that actually have some merit are the ones that keep their silence on whether said conspiracy involves conscious thought. This theory qualifies for that. Now that I have four decades on the planet, those decades tell me things, things that have weight now if they didn’t before. One of those things is, when we do things that hurt ourselves and others, our capacity for doing so is measured not by temptation but by ignorance. You might say we aren’t struggling with evil, we’re struggling with foolishness.
Not that I mean, in my agreement with Mr. Barnes, to call Patrick Buchanan a fool. But Barnes has him dead-to-rights here.
It’s on foreign policy that liberals and conservatives find common cause. Patrick Buchanan, rehearsing the pieties of the political left, argues that Mr. Bush has turned the world against America. The “endless bellicosity” of Mr. Bush and his neoconservative advisers, he recently argued, “has produced nothing but ill will against us. This was surely not the way of the tough but gracious and genial Ronald Reagan.”
Of all people, Mr. Buchanan ought to know better, having served as Reagan’s communications director from 1984 to 1986. Reagan generated massive antiwar and anti-American demonstrations around the world, far larger and more numerous protests than those Mr. Bush has occasioned. He famously denounced the Soviet “evil empire” headed for “the ash-heap of history.” He was treated by the press as a cowboy warmonger, just as Mr. Bush has been. Ill will? Reagan produced plenty–all in a noble cause.
I’m still coming out of my shock over what I saw two years ago, as President Reagan shucked his mortal coil. Okay, that’s theatrical and silly. But if I do not remain shocked, I definitely remain impressed. All the wonderful, flowery things said about our 40th President as his casket wound ’round the endless funeral procession, by people of both parties. Someone, let’s say, half my age would have found it all terribly confusing I should think. They would have to think — and who can blame them? — that Reagan was some kind of a consensus-builder, someone intent on finding the common-ground, the magic half-way point that will send everyone out of the conference room with an abundance of goodwill and gigantic smiles and dinner party invitations from everybody else rising from the same conference table.
Hey look. I’m not a Washington insider and never have been that. Maybe he did a lot of stuff, in negotiating with people, about which I do not know. Maybe, even, Buchanan knows a few things I don’t. But as someone who was alive at the time, I do know some things, and one of those things is I didn’t hear about donkeys and elephants cavorting in the streets, playing hopscotch together, throwing rose petals before the President’s limousine and singing hosannahs to the glorious leader when President Reagan came in to town. That didn’t happen. The liberal line was that our President Reagan was an evil dunce; a likable klutz with his finger on the button, a lunatic destined to preside over our nation just as the planet blinked out of existence forever. Liberals, today, maintain their cognitive dissonance about our current President by insisting that while he’s bereft of any capacity for intellectual achievement, at the same time he’s an evil genius who fooled us all by stealing our elections. Carping about our Republican President two decades ago, they left out the evil-genius part, opting instead to comment wryly about the boss nodding off in cabinet meetings. Darkly affectionate wishes for the worst outcome possible, were muttered coast to coast when Reagan was diagnosed with water on the brain. Snarky, prickly, and just-plain-mean speculation about those cabinet-meeting naptime sessions, came pouring forth in droves when it was revealed that Reagan had Alzheimer’s. After The Gipper had breathed his last, our left-wingers were kind enough to keep their silence on wishing him a speedy trip to hell, and a memorable stay there. Only the ones with high profile, names worth defending, motivated toward political expediency, though. The “bloggers” held back little or nothing.
“I’m sipping some excellent German white wine now,” one poster over at the Democratic Underground blog wrote. “To Ronald Reagan, may you rot in hell you sorry evil creep! Clink glasses.” A fellow blogger agreed, writing, “R.I.P–In Hell,” with a third adding, “On a Slowly Turning Spit.”
“I thought Reagan died in 1982, and the GOP inserted electrodes into his corpse to make it twitch for the cameras while his cabinet sold missiles to Iran and illegally funded terrorists in Central America,” another, one of hundreds, snickered.
“I thought, as liberals, we were supposed to be benevolent, kind people?” one poster lamented, attempting to appeal to the bloggers’ better instincts. “Yes, Reagan was a terrible President, who’s cannonized by the right-wing. But he was a human being, and to be honest, I doubt he would wish death upon ANY of us Americans. Can you imagine how you would feel if the right-wing would say some of this about Paul Wellstone?”
But any call for restraint or class was immediately shot down as an attempt to curb “first amendment rights” or “free and open discussion.” Apparently free speech extends to everyone in the liberal blogosphere except those who dare to call something tasteless.
Shockingly, some of the most virulent rage was prominently posted on the blog section of the official John Kerry for President website.
Isolated cases? The lately-arriving blogosphere giving a twilight voice to acridity and meanness, which lay solidly buried beneath a veneer of respectful silence during the eighties? Not from where I sit, sorry.
Bellicosity, eh Mr. Buchanan. Pfft. We have no way today of even comprehending the meaning of the word. Reagan forgot more, every day, about how to be bellicose and get people pissed off, than President Bush will ever learn.
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Regan took us very close to a Nuclear war.
- vincentt | 07/17/2006 @ 07:03Don Regan? OhMiGod! Who knew?
- Buck Pennington | 07/19/2006 @ 21:55