Jan. 19, 2008
If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?
~ Thomas Carlyle
During a week punctuated by due tribute for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the incongruity was more flagrant than it might’ve been, but I’d be shuddering at your recent paeans to Ronald Reagan, even if the week had contained nothing more notable than a day in praise of egg whisks.
This is no small thing, Senator Obama. Compared to aiding the radical right by raising alarms about a false Social Security crisis, calling unions “special interests” and decrying health care as a moral peril if Americans are “forced” to have it, your apologia for Reagan is worse. Because his was the smiley face painted on their whole poison pill.
It’s still serving that function today. Your supposed rivals, whose debates are All-the-Reagan-You-Can-Gag-Down buffets, are invoking his ghost in hope that voters will share the same lapse of memory and discernment you displayed on Monday in Reno, telling the Journal Gazette that Ronald Reagan “put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. They felt like with all the excesses of the 60s and the 70s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think he tapped into what people were already feeling. Which is we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.” (Video and an excellent precis are HERE.)
While I can’t fault your saying, “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America,” that trajectory — which sadly we’ll remain on, until the last neocon policy bites the dust — has been, for most, a path to ruin. As for his encouraging entrepreneurship, small businesses ranked among the first victims of his presidency, along with the poor. Throughout the 30+ years of his abiding revolution, everything has been rigged to profit large corporations and the ultra-rich.
This reality is glibly glossed over in your book, where another defense of Reagan appears: “That Reagan’s message found such a receptive audience … spoke to the failures of liberal government, during a period of economic stagnation, to give middle-class voters any sense that it was fighting for them. For the fact was government at every level had become too cavalier about spending taxpayer money. Too often bureaucracies were oblivious to the cost of their mandates. A lot of liberal rhetoric did seem to value rights and entitlements over duties and responsibilities. Reagan may have exaggerated the sins of the welfare state, and certainly liberals were right to complain that his domestic policies tilted heavily toward elites, with corporate raiders making tidy profits throughout the eighties while unions were busted and the income for the average working stiff flatlined. Nevertheless, by promising to side with those who worked hard, obeyed the law, cared for their families, loved their country, Reagan offered Americans a sense of common purpose that liberals seemed no longer able to muster.” (Page 31)
Senator Obama, are you tragically uninformed, trying to contrive “unity” by pandering to right-wingers or legitimizing their idol from conviction? Surely we can rule out option one, because you’re entirely too smart to speak and write about matters you haven’t studied seriously. Yes, when Reagan started spouting his political vitriol, you were a child. So was I, a somewhat bigger kid, but his words and deeds are well-documented from the mid-1960s onward. Thus, everything I know about him, you must also know.
For instance, while governor of California, he dehumanized welfare recipients, calling the needy “bums”, “cheats” and “a faceless mass waiting for a handout.” He’d campaigned on cutting funds for the poor, saying, “The time has come to stop being our brother’s keeper”. (Some “Christian” sentiment from one who soon styled himself a righteous Bible-thumper, huh?)
Condemning help for working people who lost their jobs, he sneered, “Unemployment insurance is a pre-paid vacation for freeloaders,” and he dismissed upholding minority rights with this argument: “It doesn’t do good to open doors for someone who doesn’t have the price to get in. If he has the price, he may not need the laws. There is no law saying the Negro has to live in Harlem or Watts.”
Our environment meant no more to him than marginalized citizens did. In opposing expanded protection of his state’s majestic redwoods, unique in all the world, he shrugged, “A tree’s a tree. How many do you need to look at?” Given that attitude, it’s fair to say he never really saw one. Something else he never saw was military action. During World War II, Reagan served in an Army film studio — but, with bring-’em-on bravado, he blustered in 1966: “We should declare war on North Vietnam. We could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it, and still be home by Christmas.”
Consigned to a special hell of hatred in his heart were the young. Of students who dared protest the war, he said they didn’t deserve an education and added, “I’d like to harness their youthful energy with a strap.” His later words were more violent: “If it’s a bloodbath they want, let’s get it over with.” He meant it. Let’s not forget he imposed martial law on the Berkeley campus and endorsed shootings there. As for experimentation with drugs, he deemed it “a repudiation of everything America is” — never mind that no national drug laws existed in this country until after his own birth.
This was a man born in 1911, who was past 50 when he began his life in politics. On generational grounds, the merciful might excuse his weirding-out about the Berkeley scene (short of the shootings), but would any halfway decent human being slash funds to feed low-income and retarded children on the very day when he, freshly made a multi-millionaire via a shady land deal, budgeted a hike in his own salary?
While age alone can’t be fairly be held against anyone, Reagan absolutely represented an Old Guard oligarchy bent on crushing the emerging power of a new, well-educated and open-minded middle class. Between 1964 — when he made his first entrance on the Republican national stage by endorsing Barry Goldwater and was talent-spotted for a gubernatorial run — and his 1980 election as president, he was carefully groomed to sell the corporatist agenda to the masses, while his backers were also spending billions on “think tanks” and hired-gun academics to distort public discourse.
It would be an insult to suggest that you know less than I do about the genesis and development of their colossal Noise Machine — devised in the early Nixon years, when the most powerful gathered to script their reversal of all middle class gains since the New Deal — so how, Senator Obama, can you possibly state that people were “ready for” Reagan with no reference to how they were MADE ready by a constant barrage of deceptions calculated to overwhelm objective journalism and scholarship?
And how can you couch Reagan’s victory in terms of liberal shortcomings, without recognizing that lies were spread daily to mask Jimmy Carter’s real successes? Those were good times. The war, Watergate and the Ford recession were past, unemployment was falling dramatically, real GDP was growing at five percent yearly, the national debt relative to GDP was lower than in 50 years, the inflation rate was reasonable and, on average, we brought home twice the real income that our parents earned. International diplomacy was paying off, too; we had détente with the USSR, troop reductions in Korea, even the Camp David Mideast Peace Accords. A funny thing happened on the way to national satisfaction, though: The better things got, the more the Noise Machine told us to see Carter as incompetent and ourselves as in Big Trouble. For no legitimate reason, the number of Americans who believed we were on the brink of disaster jumped from 41 percent to 64 between 1978 and 1979 and Carter’s approval dropped from 65 percent to 39. The right-wing freakazoids even got the media to question his sanity!
In fact, they were out to drive the citizenry nuts and they succeeded. Fanning fears of runaway inflation and impending economic collapse, they drove Americans to spend now – which people did so madly in 1979 that inflation spiked briefly to 14 percent. Analysts blamed this on Carter – having formed the habit of blaming him for everything that couldn’t be pinned on unions, “bureaucrats” or “entitlements”, but they couldn’t name any particular policy as responsible.
Likewise, the radical right targeted Carter’s sensible energy program aimed at curtailing oil imports and fostering extensive use of solar power. We’d be sitting pretty now, if the neocons hadn’t assured us there was no energy problem and gone back to business as usual under Reagan, who had solar collectors ripped off the White House roof as soon as he moved in.
They further roused the populace to scream for war on Iran. The whole hostage crisis was needless.
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2008/01/19/dream-versus-nightmare-pick-one-an-open-letter-to-barack-obama-by-the-other-katherine-harris/Ronald Reagan (may he rot in hell) was the most evil man to ever walk the earth. I hope this is cleared up now!
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