66 Things to Think About When Flying Into Reagan National Airport

From David Corn at The Nation:

...Michael Deaver's conviction for influence peddling, Lyn Nofziger's conviction for influence peddling, Caspar Weinberger's five-count indictment, Ed Meese ('You don't have many suspects who are innocent of a crime'), Donald Regan (women don't 'understand throw-weights'), education cuts, massacres in El Salvador.

'The bombing begins in five minutes,' $640 Pentagon toilet seats, African- American judicial appointees (1.9 percent), Reader's Digest, C.I.A.-sponsored car-bombing in Lebanon (more than eighty civilians killed), 200 officials accused of wrongdoing, William Casey, Iran/contra.

'Facts are stupid things,' three-by-five cards, the MX missile, Bitburg, S.D.I., Robert Bork, naps, Teflon.

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NYT whitewashes Reagan's AIDS legacy

Whitewash is too nice a word. The New York Times has literally erased the entire history of Reagan's inaction and animus on the AIDS issue. Here are the words of a close friend of mine who alerted me to the contents of the NYT's MASSIVE, nearly 11,000-word review of Reagan's political legacy on the front page of Sunday's paper (we're talking a 4-page spread):

The New York Times' front page mega-review of Reagan's presidency contains not a single word about AIDS. It mentions timber deregulations, for God's sake, but not AIDS. Got to Nytimes.com, click through the 16 online pages of text, and watch the memories of all our dead friends disappear. This is an outrage. Unless we each do something right away, the Times will have succeeded in writing AIDS out of the history of the Reagan years.

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Designer's NY Store Selling Bush Deck of Cards

About time. Read the rest of this post...

Crowds lining up to reserve copies of Clinton book

Oh yeah. Prepare for the Clinton juggernaut. The Limbaughs and Faux News nudnicks won't be able to control their rage when Clinton's book comes out. What will be more interesting will be whether the Bush campaign takes the bait or leaves well enough alone.

It's not clear why Bush would want to help fuel Clinton-mania. Sure, the Republicans like to pretend that any Democrat would be crazy - just crazy - to associate themselves with that horrible president, Bill Clinton. But I didn't buy that line 4 years ago, and I don't buy it now. The Republicans know that Clinton is our ace in the hole. He's the guy we all still love, warts and all, he had some amazing accomplishments as president (the economy, for one), and he had pretty damn good approval ratings when he left office. The Republicans would like nothing better than to scare us off of using our secret weapons, like they did to Gore 4 years ago (when he mistakenly distanced himself from Clinton).

The only problem now is that the more the Repos attack Clinton, the more Clinton is the story rather than Bush vs. Kerry. Just like Ronald Reagan's death poses a potential disaster for Bush if the public watches TV a little too closely and sees what a REAL president looks, the same danger is in the air if the public remembers what Clinton is like at his best, charm, wit and all. Sure, there's a potential downside for Kerry here as well - the more Clinton is the story, the less the story is about Kerry. But, in the end, I think Clinton will shine, and diminish Bush as a result. And that can only help Kerry.

From Reuters:

New Yorkers waited hours on Monday to reserve a copy of the memoirs of Bill Clinton, although some fans said they were unlikely to read all 957 pages of the former U.S. president's book.

The line of buyers stretched down the sidewalk outside the Hue-Man Bookstore, just blocks from Clinton's Harlem office, where scores of people arrived as early as dawn to reserve a $35 copy of "My Life," to be published on June 22.

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"He was as dumb as a stump"

Christopher Hitchens reminds us of the rest of the story:

"The fox, as has been pointed out by more than one philosopher, knows many small things, whereas the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump. He could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies. His children didn't like him all that much. He met his second wife - the one that you remember - because she needed to get off a Hollywood blacklist and he was the man to see. Year in and year out in Washington, I could not believe that such a man had even been a poor governor of California in a bad year, let alone that such a smart country would put up with such an obvious phony and loon."

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I was right

The Bushies are already trying to use Reagan's death for political gain:

'In many ways, George W. Bush and the policies that he put forward stand on the shoulders of Ronald Reagan,' Ken Mehlman, Mr. Bush's campaign manager, said Sunday in discussing the connections between the two presidents. 'Ronald Reagan was someone who believed and viewed the Soviet Union with moral clarity, who understood that peace came through strength and who believed at a time when a lot of people didn't agree with him that the key to prosperity in this country was to trust the American people.'

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Ok, just a wee bit suspicious

Bush is cutting our troop deployment to South Korea by a third, at the same time we're supposedly trying to pressure North Korea to stop building nukes. Hard to imagine how pulling out of South Korea is going to convince the North Koreans of anything other than the fact we're overstretched in Iraq and now are going to ignore other pressing global committments and threats in order to make up for George's Big Adventure in Iraq. Read the rest of this post...

Bush already using Reagan's death to campaign

I just got an email from the Bush campaign, ostensibly to "mourn" Ronald Reagan, but interestingly the email asks me to visit the Bush campaign Web site and to tell all my friends to do the same. The Bush-Cheney 2004 home page has now been made into one BIG Reagan memorial page, with a convenient link to visit the rest of the campaign site.

I have to give the Bushies credit. As Kerry has said he's taking the week off of campaigning, this is a cute way to get their Web traffic up while at the same time not appearing to "campaign." And before anyone defends the Bushies, the bottom line is that they are of course within their rights to send a message mourning Reagan, but any special section they put up on their campaign Web site is PER SE campaign related. There are a lot of sites out there honoring Ronald Reagan - they could have sent them to any non-partisan site. Instead, the Bush campaign has made their home page into one big Ronald Reagan fest as a cheap opportunity to increase their own Web traffic, thus making Reagan's death a part of their presidential campaign. And that stinks.

Here's the email I got from the Bush campaign about the site:

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Reagan actually raised taxes, a lot

The Washington Monthly explains how Reagan actually RAISED taxes a lot:

It's conservative lore that Reagan the icon cut taxes, while George H.W. Bush the renegade raised them. As Stockman recalls, "No one was authorized to talk about tax increases on Ronald Reagan's watch, no matter what kind of tax, no matter how justified it was." Yet raising taxes is exactly what Reagan did. He did not always instigate those hikes or agree to them willingly--but he signed off on them. One year after his massive tax cut, Reagan agreed to a tax increase to reduce the deficit that restored fully one-third of the previous year's reduction. (In a bizarre bit of self-deception, Reagan, who never came to terms with this episode of ideological apostasy, persuaded himself that the three-year, $100 billion tax hike--the largest since World War II--was actually "tax reform" that closed loopholes in his earlier cut and therefore didn't count as raising taxes.)

Faced with looming deficits, Reagan raised taxes again in 1983 with a gasoline tax and once more in 1984, this time by $50 billion over three years, mainly through closing tax loopholes for business. Despite the fact that such increases were anathema to conservatives--and probably cost Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush, reelection--Reagan raised taxes a grand total of four times just between 1982-84.

Reagan continued these "modest rollbacks" in his second term. The historic Tax Reform Act of 1986, though it achieved the supply side goal of lowering individual income tax rates, was a startlingly progressive reform. The plan imposed the largest corporate tax increase in history--an act utterly unimaginable for any conservative to support today. Just two years after declaring, "there is no justification" for taxing corporate income, Reagan raised corporate taxes by $120 billion over five years and closed corporate tax loopholes worth about $300 billion over that same period.

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W: the new Great Communicator? C'mon, get real.

The connection that I see between Reagan and Bush is that Reagan is the person who brought in the religious nut balls who are now trying to remove the traditional separate of church and state. I may not have agreed with Reagan but I credit him for his ability to connect with the public and persuade opponents to go along with his programs. He may have been scripted but he was at least able to read or deliver a scripted message and make it sound natural. A stark contrast to that might be yesterday’s interview between Bush and Brokaw. Just reading it is a painful experience and it washes away any potential comparison between the "Great Communicator" and Bush.

Bush may be forwarding the political legacy of Reagan but he is severely lacking in the trait that made Reagan a success and may likely sink Bush in November. Even a lot of Republicans are uncomfortable with the comparison because Bush is not even in the same ballpark and it is not even close. It is no wonder that Bush didn't want to draw a parallel between himself and Reagan. Read the rest of this post...