:O Ronald Reagan is dead

RIP.

He was sort of the first president I really remember. He always seemed like a pleasant avuncular figure in my youthful apolitical days.

The GOP may get a sentimental boost from this for a few days, but even staunch conservatives are likely to come away from the whole thing with a reminder that GWB is no Reagan.

The GOP may get a sentimental boost from this for a few days, but even staunch conservatives are likely to come away from the whole thing with a reminder that GWB is no Reagan.

That's for damned sure.

as opposed to reagan. who has now gone and died on them.

It is early 1981, Brezhnev is still in power and the Cold War grinds on, though he is failing. The Iran hostage crisis has been recently resolved, the shadows of Vietnam still hang heavy. Things are what they are...

...and then Hinckley actually hits and kills Reagan, and George Bush (Sr.) becomes president.

If anything different happens from that point on, what might it be?

oh, I don't know about that. there's her kids too. and a majority of Senators just sent Bush a letter supporting stem-cell research.

barf.

There was nothing warm or fuzzy about the Reagan administration. This is the guy who demonized welfare mothers and inaugurated the redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthy. He attacked the core principles of democratic government, in both his domestic and foreign policies. He waged a proxy war against a democratically elected government in Nicaragua, via CIA-trained torturers and terrorists. He was the first president to let the Christian right into the White House.

He was a sonofabitch, and that's all he deserves to be remembered as.

(multi-x-post, obviously)

You should say good things about the dead.

He's dead. Good.

Reaganomics was still a better idea than communism.

RIP

Love is in the Air (1937)

Hollywood Hotel (1938)

Swing your Lady (1938)

Sergeant Murphy (1938)

Accidents will Happen (1938)

Cowboy from Brooklyn (1938)

Boy meets Girl (1938)

Girls on Probation (1938)

Brother Rat (1938)

Going Places (1939)

Secret Service of the Air (1939)

Dark Victory (1939)

Code of the Secret Service (1939)

Naughty but Nice (11939)

Hell's Kitchen (1939)

Angels wash their Faces (1939)

Smashing the Money Ring (1939)

Brother Rat and a Baby (1940)

An Angel from Texas (1940)

Murder in the Air (1940)

Knute Rockne - All American (1940)

Tugboat Annie Sails Again (1940)

Santa Fe Trail (1940)

The Bad Man (1941)

Million Dollar Baby (1941)

Nine Lives are not Enough (941)

International Squadron (1941)

King's Row (1942)

Juke Girl (1942)

Desperate Journey (1942)

This is the Army (1942)

Stallion Road (1947)

That Girl (1947)

The Voice of the Turtle (1947)

John Loves Mary (1949)

Night unto Night (1949)

The Girl from Jones Beach (1949)

It's a Great Feeling (1949)

The Hasty Heart (1950)

Louisa (1950)

Storm Warning (1951)

Bedtime for Bonzo (1951)

The Last Outpost (1951)

Hong Kong (1951)

She's Working Her Way through College (1952)

The Winning Team (1952)

Tropic Zone (1953)

Law and Order (1953)

Prisoner of War (1954)

Cattle Queen of Montana (1954)

Tennessee's Partner (1955)

Hellcats of the Navy (1957)

The Killers (1964)

First Republican to say they're going to 'win one for the Gipper' gets a visit from Alex mit nail-gun.

Yeah, but those weren't the choices in the United States at the time. Remember him fondly if you want, but just be aware of the propaganda.

My grandmother always referred to him as 'that broken-down cowboy actor'.

he was in some good movies. not many, but a few: king's row, the killers, dark victory....

the worst thing i heard on fox was "oh isn't it so profound that he died neat the anniversary of d-day, because one of his great moments was giving a d-day speech blah blah blah." here is a man who stayed in hollywood through the war and indeed seemed to often confuse the actual events of the war with the war movies he made and saw... for instance once alleging that he witnessed the liberation of the concentration camps (!).

haha "reagonomics vs. communism." because we all know about that famous pinko jimmy carter....

Did she give any notice as to when she will follow him?

Better red than dead.

How right J0hn is.

But how sad that Liberals like me end up acknowledging the tragedy of other human beings' death and life, when y'know damn well that they and their supporters are the first to laugh their evil skins off at other peeps' suffering.

-D.O.A.

Wait, what's supposed to be the tragedy here? He was 93! He lived a long fucking time! He got to be rich and famous and president! Why is anyone supposed to be crying for him?

I'm sorry, I just don't get the whole respect-for-the-dead thing. I respect the dead if I respect what they did in life. But if I think that in life they were an actively malevolent presence, what is it about their death that's supposed to make me sympathetic? Our common humanity? Whatever. If Ronald Reagan had had a little more respect for our common humanity in life, I'd think kinder of him in death. But that wasn't his strong suit now, was it?

Ronnie Reagan deserved every last moment of misery and pain he ever received - I only wish he had lived longer and in more misery.

Anyway, good riddance. I'm going to leave the TV off for the next week.

He was a nauseating figure on the world stage. That's all really.

I don't respect Reagan because he's dead. I just don't want to mirror the twats who supported him whilst alive by showing contempt for life.

Alzheimer's isn't funny. Evil motherfuckers suffering is.

We've got a discussion going in the LBJ vs Nixon thread.

George Packer's review: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/11/uses-division

Huge Buzzfeed story on the Reagan White House turning down Rock Hudson's people's request for army hospital treatment in France:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/chrisgeidner/nancy-reagan-turned-down-rock-hudsons-plea-for-help-seven-we#.fqx4Q1MqNe

and of course this bit:

When Koop drafted Reagan’s remarks for the dinner, he wrote, in part, “It’s also important that America not judge those who have the disease but care for them with dignity and kindness. Passing moral judgments is up to God; our part is to ease the suffering and to find a cure.”

Within the White House and throughout the administration, though, many conservatives vigorously disagreed with Koop’s report and recommendations. Regularly, those with anti-gay opinions ruled the day. For Carl Anderson — then a special assistant to Reagan who worked in the White House Office of Public Liaison and now the current Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus — such language was completely unacceptable.

someone asked greil marcus on his website who he hated more, nixon or reagan. here's what he said:

I was raised in a Nixon-hating California family. His Senate campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas—“The Pink Lady,” as he red-baited her—was family lore. Watergate was scary but more than anything thrilling. My friend Sean Wilentz, an historian of American democracy with as long and deep a view as anyone, once said to me, “We didn’t deserve Lincoln, and we didn’t deserve Nixon”—meaning someone that good, and someone that evil.

For all that Nixon did to traduce our democracy, though, my loathing for Reagan goes much farther. Nixon did many bad things—the Christmas bombing of Hanoi, the invasion of Cambodia, the murder of countless Vietnamese, setting the stage for the Khmer Rouge, debasing our political culture, COINTELPRO, the Hughes program, the enemies list, “If the president does it, that means it’s not illegal”—and many good things, including inviting Duke Ellington to the White House. But Reagan changed our political language and the terms of the debate. He was a smart man who knew what he wanted and how to get it. (Phil Hartman’s SNL portrayal of him as a tireless political genius behind his mask of bumbling imbecility is the best biography of him we have.) He removed many things from the public sphere and added many more. His influence—not just rote Republican worship—is greater today than it was when he was president. People cannot even think of him as he really was—in the words of the great political critic Walter Karp, a “vile tyrant”—which leads to Hillary Clinton saying, out of nowhere anyone has ever actually lived, that Reagan and Nancy Reagan started the national conversation on AIDS, which is like saying I won the Civil War.

Plus, I remember Reagan as governor of California all too well. As president, he seemed like a genial ideologue, trying to do his best. As governor he was cruel, hateful, contemptuous. See his last movie role, as a murderer and a crime boss in Don Siegel’s 1964 The Killers, for a glimpse of who he really was. Plus you get to see him shot to death by Lee Marvin.

http://greilmarcus.net/ask-greil/

otm

i assume this sentence is bleakly funny on purpose tho

For all that Nixon did to traduce our democracy, though, my loathing for Reagan goes much farther. Nixon did many bad things—the Christmas bombing of Hanoi, the invasion of Cambodia, the murder of countless Vietnamese, setting the stage for the Khmer Rouge, debasing our political culture, COINTELPRO, the Hughes program, the enemies list, “If the president does it, that means it’s not illegal”—and many good things, including inviting Duke Ellington to the White House.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af0Yei2sAbE

*further

He was a smart man

Having problems with this tbh

There are many different kinds of smart. Reagan lacked some and was a genius at others.

Plus, I remember Reagan as governor of California all too well. As president, he seemed like a genial ideologue, trying to do his best. As governor he was cruel, hateful, contemptuous. See his last movie role, as a murderer and a crime boss in Don Siegel’s 1964 The Killers, for a glimpse of who he really was.

J.G Ballard says exactly this in a footnote in the Annotated edition of The Atrocity Exhibition.

so lol greil marcus copying his homework

J.G Ballard says exactly this in a footnote in the Annotated edition of The Atrocity Exhibition.

reading this now, his footnotes are the best part!

Corey Robin on FB, re the death of Robert Parry and his '80s reportage:

I want to strongly recommend this piece by Jefferson Morley about the journalist Robert Parry who just died. Morley was an editor at The New Republic in the 1980s. Parry was one of the very few journalists who was on to the story of CIA funding of the Contras from the beginning. Aside from the story itself, here's why it's important:

1. As Morley shows, despite Congress passing a law prohibiting funding of the Contras, the Reagan administration and their apologists were completely open about Reagan's intention to break the law. Which is exactly what he did. We often hear that what makes Trump different is that his predecessors at least pretended to honor the norms and forms, thereby demonstrating the tribute that vice pays to virtue, whereas he openly flouts them. As Morley shows, that's just bullshit.

2. What's more, Reagan's defiance of the law involved two of the central questions of the second half of the Cold War: whether the US should be prosecuting that war and so violently (one of the scandals of the Contras involved the publication of a CIA manual for how to assassinate the Sandinistas and their supporters), and what power the president should have, independent of Congress, in doing so. Whenever I bring up Iran-Contra in the context of Trump, I feel like people's eyes glaze over, as if it were just an accounting error. It wasn't. It was a big fucking deal, involving fundamental questions of state violence and unaccountable state power.

3. For months and years, the press refused to touch the story. Even though it was an open secret in DC. It was only the introduction of the Iranian element (trading arms for money that would then be used to fund the Contras) that blew this story open and forced the media to start reporting on it. Again, we hear a lot about the threat to the media posed by Trump. There is just no comparison to the Reagan years. None at all. It was that much worse.

4. As an editor at The New Republic, Morley tried for months to get Parry's reporting in there. He was consistently stopped by Charles Krauthammer (yes, he was at TNR) and Marty Peretz. Again, things are better now.

https://www.alternet.org/bob-parry-rip-reporter-who-broke-iran-contra-story

Peretz was very pro-Contra, he even had at least one of them write a piece for TNR. And of course he had a bunch of neocons in there. Controversies among contributors, staff and readers, a number of whom, like me, ditched their subscriptions. Wild talk for a while of a breakaway mag, edited by Hendrick Hertzberg!

Parry died? Damn. Secrecy and Privilege is among the best of the Reagan/October Surprise exposes.

Peretz was a real POS

Is 14 years a respectful amount of time passed if one might want to dig up a dead president and punch him in the dick?

Nice as that sounds, it probably wouldn't be all that satisfying.

Pretty sure Reagan had no dick.

where do you think trickle down economic came from?

<q>Pretty sure Reagan had no dick.

― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, January 31, 2018 1:57 PM (twenty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink</q>

Good point. I guess I'll punch Nancy in the dick instead.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DU5--nFU8AADMtG.jpg
I can only imagine the conversations recorded in this book will set all-time records for fatuousness.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DU5--nFU8AADMtG.jpg

Still dead, though, right?

Deader than a whippet on a pikestaff.

Grim

Pretty grim when he was animate, too.

https://i.imgur.com/RWfYv2V.gif

The strangest thing about using Reagan to attack Trump is that Reagan was, by far, more like Trump than any other president. You could even say Reagan was the prototype and Trump's the final product. pic.twitter.com/w2Fb3kAy07

— Jon Schwarz (@schwarz) February 7, 2018

"Confronted Russian strongmen"

http://legendarystrength.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/saxons.jpg

Also LOL @ spoke of inclusion.

that ana navarro quote is a good reminder that a lot of the republicans who say they dislike trump would almost certainly have no problem with him if he had movie-star looks and charisma, looked more convincingly hurt and puzzled when someone accused him of corruption, and expressed his racism in the form of dog-whistle metaphors, dad jokes, and made-up stories.

There are also plenty in the Dem/indie rank-and-file who seem to hate Yam most for his bad manners and cravenness.

Friends of mine too. It's why I keep pointing out Trump as culmination of the horror that started on January 1981.

^^^^^^

he’s back

https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/politics/Ronald-Reagan-Hitting-Campaign-Trail-as-a-Hologram-496764531.html

more lifelike than the second-term version

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/ronald-reagans-racist-conversation-richard-nixon/595102/

from there to Philadephia, Mississippi

just remembered the Democrats' resolution condemning Trump's racist comments about the Squad was all about Reagan lmao https://t.co/Npkbq9lApS

— Sam Adler-Bell (@SamAdlerBell) July 30, 2019

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/ronald-reagan-presidential-library-evacuated-184430801.html

The wildfire in CA is closing in on the Reagan library, which is where he is buried. So the army corps of engineers is trying to dig up the coffins & corpse to move it to safety. This is the exact scenario all of punk rock historically has been an effort to summon.

— rustbeltjacobin 🌹 (@rustbeltjacobin) October 31, 2019

idk i think for some of us, we were thinking of the scenario where he was burned alive

you take what you can get

true -- at least they aren't forcing prison inmates making $1/hr to dig up the coffin of the man whose horrible policies contributed to them being in prison in the first place.

Man, I'd pay somebody a dollar to let me do that.

you only die twice

digging up Franco and Reagan in the same month must be a sign of something

"we, um...lost the corpse, sir"

JG Ballard was a Scorpio too!