Reply #172: Hey, look. Better it happens now. Any later in the year would make it

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a little fresher in the wavering voter's mind, too close to THEIR convention and the general election. No. We WANT the time separation that this allows. It's early June. July and August and November are still a way off. PLENTY of time for people to forget, for the war to remain nasty, for flakes and flukes with the "turnover of power," and for the presidential debates and other campaigning upcoming. You do NOT - repeat - DO NOT want Reagan's mountain of obit crap to by vying for airtime during Kerry's coronation week.

And this juuuuuuuuuust might get a few of the oldtime party faithful to reexamine things a little. Reagan was their zenith. The high point of their years' worth of hoping for the big power grab. He brought in the whole newt gingrich nightmare and everything else, not to mention the rise of the religious fundamentalists and other assorted American ayatollas. They think Reagan walks on water. Always have. Always will. And NOW, as a country, we've come to this. Everything that's going on now, with the bush name all over it. In their minds, as the obits play out over the next several who-knows-how-longs, they'll unconsciously be comparing their finest hours - Reagan, with their very lowest - bush two. And they won't like what they see. I GUARANTEE you there will be some of the old guard who look again at the fiasco in Iraq and the lies and the needless carnage and they'll be thinking "Ronnie wouldn't have let that happen." Or "Reagan wouldn't have done that." Or "Reagan would have done this the right way." Or "We'd have been in and out of this by now." Some of them might in closed company over brandy or something even say it aloud. To add insult to injury, there will be others, probably those in various stages of "the inside" who may be well aware of the enmity Nancy Reagan had for the bushes, and they'll feel a lot more likely to cluster around her protectively. Many of them may agree with her about it. Because bush's star is NOT rising, more of the fair-weather types among them may be more favorably predisposed toward doing this now. At any rate, Reagan's passing and all the retrospective dreck will definitely have some people thinking back ruefully on those '80's "Glory Days." It will be painfully clear that those are NOT what we're enjoying, these days.

Unfortunately, there WILL be some snotnose speaker at the gop convention who dares to declare: "let's win one more for the Gipper." Just have your barf bag handy. But this could wind up working to our advantage. There are many people out there, and people have posted here, frequently, about having encounters with them, who are wavering now. Some of them are those "true conservatives" who hate how much he's spending and the nation-building crap from hell in Iraq and how government on his watch is bigger than ever before, and this will only serve to illustrate how greatly things have gone wrong. bush literally pales by comparison. As Ronnie Junior said awhile back (paraphrasing), "my father craps bigger than george bush."

Reagan's dead. The "glory days" of the gop are GONE. Over. Dead as he is. Lots of people are gonna read this as a metaphor. A very painful one. MANY heavy hearts in republi-CON (and Republican) circles this night. Guaranteed.