Ronald Reagan in Truth and Fiction (and Yes, He Doomed the Crew of the Cha

[kalian]

Full title:
Ronald Reagan in Truth and Fiction (and Yes, He Doomed the Crew of the Challenger)

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn06112004.html

Reagan had absolutely no moral sense about truth or falsity. Forty years after Fort Wacky, as commander-in-chief, R.R. told Yitzhak Shamir, then prime minister of Israel, that he had helped to liberate Auschwitz, had returned to Hollywood with film footage of the ghastly scenes he had witnessed, and if in later years anyone controverted the reality of the Holocaust over the Reagan dinner table, he would roll the footage till the doubts were stilled. He said the same thing to Rabbi Martin Hier of Los Angeles. It was all fantasy, but I'm sure Reagan believed it, the same way he regarded his trip to the SS cemetery in Bitburg as a useful reminder to Europeans of the great days of World War II, when the people of the Free World-American, British, French and German-fought shoulder to shoulder against Soviet totalitarianism.

The problem for the press (which groveled before him, at least until the Iran-contra scandal broke) was that Reagan didn't really care that he'd been caught out with another set of phony statistics or a bogus anecdote about Auschwitz. Truth, for him, was what he happened to be saying at the time. When the Iran/contra scandal broke, he held a press conference in which he said to Helen Thomas, "I want to get to the bottom of this and find out all that has happened. And so far, I've told you all that I know and, you know, the truth of the matter is, for quite some time, all that you knew was what I'd told you." He went one better that George Wasdhington in that he could't tell a lie and he couldn't tell the truth, since he couldn't tell the difference between the two.

His mind was a wastebasket of old clippings from Popular Science , SF magazines (the origin of Star Wars) lines from movies and homely saws from the Reader's Digest and the Sunday supplements. He had a stout belief in astrology, the stars being the twinkling penumbra of his incandescent belief in the "free market," with whose motions it was blasphemous to tamper. Astrologers exulted when they saw his visit to Bitburg was timed to coincide with a concurrence of a full moon while at its perigree with the earth, along with a total eclipse of the moon. Elsewhere in the heavens Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto appeared to move retrograde. The same four planets appeared retrograde a year later when Reagan bombed Libya.

He believed Armageddon was right around the corner. He also believed tomato ketchup could be classified as a school meal, striking back at the nose-candy crowd who, as Stevie Earle once said, spent the Seventies trying to get cocaine classified as a vegetable.

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Awesome editorial showing what Reagan really was about...

[struggle4progress]

1. Sad to say, this is exactly how I remember him. eom