Naeem — Reagan-Palooza +
Topic(s): Media | Comments Off on Naeem — Reagan-Palooza +4 Articles assembled by Naeem
compliments of Shobak
1.Reagan-Palooza
2.Reagan & Media: A Love Story
3.Reagan in Truth and Fiction
4.A Nice Guy’s Nasty Policies
Reagan-Palooza
Will Durst ,
AlterNet
Q. Isn’t there some sort of
time limit on these things? A. You’re right, it seemed
like about a year. But Reagan-Palooza has wound down,
and they finally put the old man in the ground.
Reluctantly. I mean, c’mon, JFK only got 4 days.
Q. Is it really over over, or is this just an
intermission? A. Well, if Karl Rove had his way,
they’d still be dragging the body back and forth
across the country in the bed of a Ford F-150 pickup,
stopping at county fairs, right up till the election.
He probably approached the widow with a contingency
plan to dig up the carcass of conservatism in case
Bush’s prospects head South later this summer.
Q. Why did the networks go so crazy with non-stop
footage? A. This is going to sound silly, but they
went crazy because they could. Eight years as
President piled on top of eight years as governor
added to 20 years in film and TV: they had footage up
the wazoo.
Q. Still, don’t you think it was kind of overdone? A.
You think so? I switched on the national news on
Thursday and they cut from another unctuous paean to
Reagan to a story on the Laci Peterson trial and I
actually heard myself mutter out loud, “Thank God.”
Q. Does Reagan get frequent flyer miles for all those
cross-country coffin trips? A. Probably not, but then
the chances of him cashing them in are pretty slim
anyway.
Q. Is this going to help Bush? A. What a repugnant
suggestion. To sully the death and mourning of a
national legend by raising the ugly specter of
partisan politics.
Q. Does that mean yes? A. A 168-hour commercial on the
ideals of conservatism? Yeah, you could say this is
going to help Bush. You could also say wolverines make
lousy crib toys.
Q. What long-term repercussions are expected? A. Well,
if this unfortunate demise and subsequent memorial
buoys Bush, and Kerry falls behind in the polls, you
know his people are going to have to consider taking
out Clinton in October. If they don’t need that big of
a bounce, Carter.
Q. Any advice for the former Presidents? A. I’ve heard
Gstaad is nice in the fall.
Q. Do you really think they’ll put Ronnie’s face on
the 10 dollar bill? A. I’m thinking the ten thousand
dollar bill would be much more appropriate.
Q. Wasn’t it a mite cruel to honor a man who suffered
through the throes of Alzheimer’s for more than ten
years with logos entitled “Remembering Ronald Reagan”?
A. I refuse to dignify that question with an answer.
Q. Okay, moving on. What was that whole “they’ve been
planning this deal for over 10 years” crap? A. Settle
down, after you’ve fossilized into a beloved
institution for a couple decades, you get the same
free pass to arrange your burial for maximum press
coverage.
Q. Does Nancy Reagan get to take a nap now? A.
Hopefully. As the week wore on, the poor lady looked
more like a Pez Dispenser every day.
Q. What do you think of Kerry’s decision to suspend
his campaign during Reagan Death Week? A. It might
help in that the people who are aware he suspended his
campaign are also now aware that he at one time had
one — and might again someday.
===
Reagan and the Media: A Love Story
David Corn
,
The Nation
Viewed on Jun 16, 2004
What
is it about Republicans and their distrust of the
mainstream media? As most news outlets are portraying
the dead Ronald Reagan as an iconic and heroic figure,
the Pew Research Center has released a survey that
shows GOPers trust the major media organizations much
less than Democrats. Only 15 to 17 percent of
Republicans believe the network news shows are
credible. Even Fox News Channel is trusted by only 29
percent of Republicans; CNN is trusted by 26 percent
of this band. About a third of Democrats said they
have faith in the networks, and 45 percent said they
consider CNN credible. (Only one in four Democrats
considered Fox a trustworthy news source.) The Pew
report notes, “Republicans have become more
distrustful of virtually all major media outlets over
the past four years, while Democratic evaluations of
the news media have been mostly unchanged.”
But doesn’t the current Reaganmania in the media
undercut the old conservative bromide that the media
are dishonest bastions filled to the brim with
liberals seeking to undermine Republicans? On NPR,
interviewer Susan Stamberg eagerly participated in the
rah-rah and raved that Reagan was an “extremely
handsome” and “physically vibrant guy,” saying little
about his policies. CNN’s Judy Woodruff repeatedly
referenced Reagan’s “extraordinary optimism” and
reported that “everyone admired” his marriage with
Nancy Reagan. Crossfire initially booked only Reagan
friends, aides, and admirers. The Washington Post has
devoted far more inches to the man than his policies.
There have been some voices of gentle criticism. But
mostly it has been a gushfest, as if the divisive and
bitter battles that occurred on Reagan’s watch — over
his trickle-down tax cuts for the wealthy, his contra
war in Central America, his severe cutbacks in social
programs such as food stamps and Medicaid, his effort
to expand the nuclear arsenal, his firing of 13,000
air traffic controllers, his defense of the apartheid
regime of South Africa — never happened. (For a cheat
sheet on the worst of the Reagan years, see this piece
I wrote in 1998.) As this week’s lead editorial of The
Nation (drafted by yours truly) notes, “It’s as if
Gore Vidal coined the phrase ‘United States of
Amnesia’ for the moment of Ronald Reagan’s death.”
Much of the media coverage accepted and promoted — as
fact — the right’s favorite mantras about Reagan: He
won the Cold War, he renewed patriotism, he was a
lover of freedom and democracy. (For a challenge to
that last point, see my piece at TomPaine.com.) There
was little in the way of counterbalance. His role in
the demise of the Soviet Union remains a question of
historical debate, yet he has been depicted as the man
who brought the Commies to their knees. Even Democrats
got into the act. Senator Barbara Boxer of California
praised Reagan because America “regained respect” in
the world during his presidency. (She was trying to
make a not-too-subtle point about the current occupant
of the White House, but she should go back and check
what she had to say about Reagan’s foreign policy in
the 1980s.)
Strong. Optimistic. Visionary. Reagan was described in
warm, fuzzy and glorious terms. In the coverage that
I’ve seen, there was little discussion of his less
positive features, such as his not infrequent flights
from reality. While commander-in-chief, he commented
that submarine-based nuclear missiles once launched
could be recalled. They cannot. Of the brutal military
in El Salvador, he said, “We are helping the forces
that are supporting human rights in El Salvador.”
(These forces — backed and trained by the US
government — massacred 800 civilians in the village
of El Mozote in December 1981, and the Reagan
administration denied this mass murder happened.)
Justifying his constructive engagement policy with the
racist government of South Africa, he said, “Can we
abandon this country that has stood beside us in every
war we’ve ever fought?” The leaders of the ruling
Afrikaners of South Africa had been Nazi sympathizers.
He also claimed that segregation had been eliminated
in South Africa — when blacks still did not have the
right to vote and were banned from certain areas and
facilities.
Reagan maintained that real earnings were increasing
in the United States when they were decreasing. In
1983, he said, “There is today in the United States as
much forest as there was when Washington was at Valley
Forge.” But the US Forest Service estimated only about
30 percent of forest lands of 1775 still existed 208
years later. He once told the story of a brave WWII
bomber commander who stayed behind with an injured
subordinate and went down with the plane, noting that
this commander was posthumously awarded the
Congressional Medal of Honor. Lars-Erik Nelson of the
New York Daily News checked and found no such event
had occurred — except in a 1944 movie. In 1985,
Reagan quipped, “I’ve been told that in the Russian
language there isn’t even a word for freedom.” There
is; it’s svoboda. In the 1987 book, Reagan’s America:
Innocents at Home, Gary Wills notes that on two
occasions, Reagan told visitors to the White House
that when he was in the military he had filmed the
Nazi concentration camps. That was false. He had
served in Los Angeles, where he had made training
films.
Even Reagan’s devotees could not avoid the obvious. In
Triumph of Politics, David Stockman, Reagan’s White
House budget director, writes of one meeting with the
boss: “What do you do when your president ignores all
the palpable, relevant facts and wanders in circles? I
could not bear to watch this good and decent man go on
in this embarrassing way. I buried my head in my
plate.”
But now Reagan is hailed as a decisive and passionate
leader. Few of the examples above are included in the
glowing media coverage. How do the media-bashers of
the right account for that? On NPR, the subject of
Reagan’s drifts from reality was politely raised by
Talk of the Nation host Neal Conan during an interview
with David Gergen, who was communications director for
Reagan. Gergen’s response was illuminating. Here’s the
exchange.
Conan: Hmm. For a while, the press used to keep a
running record of his malapropisms, his mistakes and
things that he’d gotten wrong, facts he’d remembered
from the movies that he presented as real. After a
while, they stopped because people didn’t care.
Gergen: Well, that’s right. You know, I was one of the
people that had to keep a total on those things and
he’d ask me to go check them out. He had said during
— after he became president, he said, ‘I want you to
go look up these various things that I said that
people accuse me as being wrong and let’s get the
record straight.’ So I went and looked up — you know,
he said during the [1980] campaign that trees kill
more people than — pollution from trees kills more
people than — from pollution from automobiles. Well,
as you can imagine, the press had a field day with
that. They all went crazy and he said that in New
Hampshire … And there were a lot of things like
that. You know, “50 taxes on a loaf of bread,” and
there were not 50 taxes on a loaf of bread. As to the
pollution issue, there is a question about — it’s a
little bit like cows: Do cows cause pollution? There
are some issues that scientists raise, but of course,
trees by and large are very good for us.
I came to defend him, Neal, on the basis on some of
these things, that Reagan was telling larger truths,
that — I went out and defended him once, you know,
‘You’ve got to remember the importance of parables in
life. Don’t try to use every one of these stories as
an absolute truth to see them in parables.” And I
think that’s the way the country saw him. I got a lot
of grief for saying “parables.” I got attacked by some
people. But I think the country did see them as sort
of stories that pointed to larger truths rather than
stories that were necessarily, you know, grounded in a
day-to-day reality. I mean, he remembered things out
of movies he thought actually happened.
I’m not going to second-guess Conan, who did not
follow up on this point, but isn’t one obvious
question: What was the “larger truth” that was served
by Reagan’s claim that trees cause pollution? How did
it enhance public discourse by making false claims
about the amount of taxation levied on a loaf of
bread? Parables? Imagine if during the 2000 campaign,
Al Gore, caught in factual inaccuracies, had defended
himself by saying he was speaking in parables. How
would the media have covered that?
It is no fun to kick the dead. And I am not suggesting
that journalists, anchors and media commentators do so
— especially when the man in the casket was beloved
by so many. But it is not unreasonable — or
disrespectful — to have an honest discussion about
Reagan and his legacy and to acknowledge (and explain
why) he was hardly a hero to all. The media too often
gave him a free ride when he was president (see Mark
Hertsgaard’s On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan
Presidency), and that ride has continued this week.
===
beat the devil by Alexander Cockburn
Reagan in Truth and Fiction
[from the June 28, 2004 issue]
Nixon thought Reagan was “strange” and, so he told the
secret tape recorder in the Oval Office in 1972, “just
an uncomfortable man to be around.” The late President
certainly was a very weird human being, not at all
like the fellow being hailed this week as the man who
gave America back its sense of confidence and destiny
after the Carter years.
The ceremonial schedule for Reagan’s corpse the week
after his death had it lying “in repose” for several
days. What else was it supposed to be doing? Anyway,
Reagan always stuck to his script, and even if he had
come to in the presidential library in Simi Valley, he
would have stayed with his allotted role and lain
doggo.
Reagan was “in repose” much of his second term, his
day easing forward through a forgiving schedule of
morning nap, afternoon snooze, TV supper and early
bed. He couldn’t recall the names of many of his
aides, even of his dog. Stories occasionally swirled
around Washington that his aides pondered from time to
time whether to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment. I
saw him at the Republican convention in New Orleans in
August of 1988, where he sat in his presidential box
entirely immobile, with the kind of somber passivity
one associates with the shrouded figure in some newly
opened Egyptian tomb before oxygen commences its
mission of decay. I never saw him being “sunny,” a
favorite adjective of the hagiographers. As an orator
or “communicator” he was terrible, with one turgid
cliché following another, delivered in a folksy drone
punctuated by wags of the head.
There was no internationally recognized border in
Reagan’s mind between fantasy and fact, the dividing
line having been abolished in the early 1940s when his
studio’s PR department turned him into a war hero,
courtesy of his labors in “Fort Wacky” in Culver City,
where they made training films. The fanzines disclosed
the loneliness of R.R.’s first wife, Jane Wyman, her
absent man (a few miles away in Fort Wacky, home by
suppertime) and her knowledge of R.R.’s hatred of the
foe. “She’d seen Ronnie’s sick face,” Modern Screen
reported in 1942, bent over photos of starved babies
in Poland, gritting between “set lips” that “this
would make it a pleasure to kill.” A photographer for
Modern Screen recalled later that Reagan wished to be
photographed on his front step in full uniform,
kissing his wife goodbye.
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. 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 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 had a sound 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. He
believed Armageddon was right around the corner.
After Jimmy Carter’s timid efforts to make America
adjust to late-twentieth-century realities, Reagan
installed fantasy as the motor of national
consciousness, and it’s still pumping disastrously
along. He was an awful President, never as popular as
the press pretended, presiding over a carnival of
corruption and greed at home, terror in Central
America and Africa. On March 23, 1983, a friend of
mine watched as a naval officer and a defense
contractor in the Fort Myer Officers’ Club in Virginia
listened impatiently as Reagan churned his way through
a longish overture to his excited launch of Star Wars.
Then, as Reagan began to token forth the
billion-dollar feeding trough of SDI, they screamed to
each other in incredulous delight, “He’s going to do
it…he’s doing it…he’s done it! We’re rich, we’re
rich!” With these words, they both made a rush to the
telephones.
There were many such shouts of joy for the rich down
through Reagan-time and beyond. The East Coast elite
distrusted him as late as the 1980 campaign, trying to
head off his nomination by running Gerald Ford again.
Learning of the Ford bid, Reagan turned to an aide and
cried, “What have they got against me? I support big
oil. I support big business. Why don’t they trust me?”
Probably because they thought he would blow them up,
along with everyone else. He didn’t, but they never
did trust him, though they had a hell of a party while
he was around.
The people who did trust Reagan were mostly white
men, small-business owners, some (sometimes many)
construction workers, many ordinary folk up and down
the map who wanted a world much as it had been in the
1950s. Them he betrayed.
As Reagan shambled toward the stairway of Air Force
One at Andrews Air Force Base on Inauguration Day,
1989, Bryant Gumbel mused to Tom Brokaw that this
seemed to him “quite remarkable.” It turned out that
Gumbel was mightily impressed that the 78-year-old
Reagan had not sought to stave off retirement by
mounting a coup d’état. All around the world, Gumbel
said, leaders “cling to power.” James Baker, the man
who, with Paul Volcker, ran the world for Reagan,
probably could have done it. The press would have gone
along. As it was, Baker just bided his time for twelve
years.
===
column left by Robert Scheer
A Nice Guy’s Nasty Policies
[posted online on June 10, 2004]
I liked Ronald Reagan, despite the huge divide between
us politically. Reagan was a charming old pro who gave
me hours of his time in a series of interviews
beginning in 1966 when he was running for governor,
simply because he enjoyed the give and take. In fact,
I often found myself defending the Gipper whenever I
was confronted with an East Coast pundit determined to
denigrate anyone, particularly actors, from my adopted
state. Yet, looking back at his record, I am appalled
that I warmed to the man as much as I did.
The fact is that Reagan abandoned the Roosevelt New
Deal–which he admitted had saved his family during
the Great Depression–in favor of a belief in the
efficacy of massive corporate welfare inculcated in
him by his paymasters at Warner Bros., General
Electric and the conservative lecture circuit. Though
Reagan the man was hardly mean-spirited, Reagan the
politician betrayed the social programs and trade
unionism he once believed in so fiercely.
Let’s start with his leadership of California, where
he launched attacks on the state’s once-incomparable
public universities and devastated its mental health
system. Foreshadowing future trumped-up invasions of
tiny Grenada and Nicaragua, he sent thousands of
National Guardsmen to tear-gas Berkeley.
It also became increasingly clear that although the
man wasn’t unintelligent, his ability to mingle truth
with fantasy was frightening. At different times,
Reagan–who infamously said that “facts are stupid
things”–falsely claimed to have ended poverty in Los
Angeles; implied he was personally involved in the
liberation of Europe’s concentration camps; argued
that trees cause most pollution; said that the
Hollywood blacklist, to which he contributed names,
never existed; described as “freedom fighters” the
contra thugs and the religious fundamentalists in
Afghanistan who would later become Al Qaeda; and
claimed that fighting a “limited” nuclear war was not
an insane idea.
But to see him as only a bumpkin–as some did–was to
very much underestimate him. Like Nixon, the Teflon
President was a survivor who’d come up the hard way,
and many journalists and politicians who didn’t
understand that invariably were surprised by his
resiliency and savvy. Although he generally was
compliant with his handlers, whenever the campaign
pros or rigid ideologues got in the way of his or
Nancy’s instincts, they were summarily discarded.
Even when his ideas were silly, his intentions often
seemed good. For example, one of his dumbest and
costliest pet projects, the “Star Wars” missile
defense program, which he first announced when I
interviewed him for the Los Angeles Times in 1980, was
touted by Reagan as a peace offering to the Soviets.
And his legendary ability to effectively project an
upbeat, confident worldview managed to obscure many of
the negative consequences of his policies. For
example, he made the terrible mistake of willfully
ignoring the burgeoning AIDS epidemic at a time when
action could have saved millions. Unlike many
conservatives, however, he was not driven by
homophobia. Instead, Reagan allowed AIDS to spread for
the same reason he pointedly savaged programs to help
the poor: He was genuinely convinced that government
programs exacerbated problems–unless they catered to
the needs of the businessmen he had come to revere.
In the White House, he ran up more debt than any
earlier President–primarily to serve the requests of
what Republican President Eisenhower had, with alarm,
termed the “military-industrial complex.” (George W.
Bush has broken that record.)
Apologists for this waste argue that throwing money
at the defense industry broke the back of the Soviet
Union and ended the cold war. But the Soviet Union was
already broken, as Mikhail S. Gorbachev acknowledged
quite freely when he came to power in the 1980s.
Rather, what Reagan does deserve considerable credit
for is ignoring the dire warnings of the hawks and
responding enthusiastically to Gorbachev in their
historic Reykjavík summit, where the two leaders
called for a nuclear-free world.
Let it be remembered, then, that in the closing scene
of his presidency Reagan embraced the peacemakers,
rejecting the cheerleaders of Armageddon, and was then
loudly castigated by the very neoconservatives–most
vociferously Richard Perle–who have claimed the
Reagan mantle for the post-cold war militarism of the
current Administration.