Ronald Reagan at 100: The Darker Legacy

[Octafish]

About the Gippet:

Ronald Reagan at 100: The Darker Legacy

David Corn
Politics Daily

Are you ready for Reaganpalooza? February 6 will mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ronald Reagan, and the coming week will be loaded with events, op-eds, and television packages commemorating the day and celebrating the 40th president.

SNIP...

An entire book could be written chronicling the dreadful deeds of the Reagan crowd. But, in an act of pre-emptive counter-programming, here's a partial list.

-- The Reagan administration routinely made common cause with tyrants. It got cozy with the fascist, anti-Semitic, and torture-fancying generals of the Argentine junta and backed human-rights abusing governments throughout Latin America. The administration tried to cover up a massive massacre of civilians in El Salvador, because it was backing the rightwing military there. It resisted efforts to oppose and isolate the racist leaders of apartheid South Africa, instead opting for "constructive engagement" with the white minority government of Pretoria. It enthusiastically endorsed the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, with Vice President George H.W. Bush in 1981 toasting Marcos, "we love your adherence to democratic principles and the democratic process." (Five years later, when a popular uprising threatened Marcos, the Reagan administration did cut him loose.) Much of this despot-coddling was done in the name of anti-communism, revealing that Reagan and his crew had a rather narrow and situational approach to championing freedom and democracy.

-- Its crusade against communism led the Reagan administration to support a not-too-secret secret war in Central America, aiding the Nicaraguan contras fighting against the socialist government of Nicaragua. Reagan referred to the contras as "freedom fighters," but his fondness for them led the U.S. government down the road to hypocrisy -- and worse. The CIA produced an "assassination manual" for the contras. And as a CIA inspector general report later acknowledged, the agency, in supporting the contras, worked with individuals it suspected of being involved in drug-dealing. Ponder this contradiction: As Nancy Reagan was preaching, "Just Say No," the CIA, implementing administration policy, was knowingly using suspected drug-runners in this secret war. Of course, the administration's involvement in this covert war partly led to the Iran-contra scandal, during which the administration secretly sold weapons to Iran to gain the release of hostages held by terrorist groups -- even while the administration was strenuously pressuring NATO allies not to sell such weapons to Iran, and while proclaiming an official position of never negotiating with terrorists. Working out of the White House, Reagan aides funneled the money raised in these Iranian arms deals to furnish munitions to the contras, all as a way of circumventing a congressional ban on such support.

-- Scandals galore marked the Reagan years. The 1980s savings and loan scandal -- partly caused by the administration's aversion to even minimal regulation -- resulted in a bailout that transferred hundreds of billions of dollars from taxpayers to S&L scammers. Top Reagan aide Michael Deaver was convicted of perjury related to influence-peddling. At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Republican-wired consultants pocketed millions for rigging contracts.

CONTINUED...

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2011/01/29/ronald-reagan-at-100-the-darker-legacy/

The guy was all that in his big role. I wonder who put him up to it?

[LeftishBrit]

1. Byron's poem, 'A Vision of Judgement', about the death of George III, always reminds me of Reagan

' ...although no tyrant, one
Who shielded tyrants, till each sense withdrawn
Left him nor mental nor external sun:
A better farmer ne`er brush`d dew from lawn,
A worse king never left a realm undone!
He died — but left his subjects still behind,
One half as mad — and t`other no less blind....


is true, he was a tool from first to last
(I have the workmen safe); but as a tool
So let him be consumed....


`He ever warr`d with freedom and the free:
Nations as men, home subjects, foreign foes,
So that they utter`d the word "Liberty!"
Found George the Third their first opponent. Whose
History was ever stain`d as his will be
With national and individual woes?
I grant his household abstinence; I grant
His neutral virtues, which most monarchs want;


...And this was well for him, but not for those
Millions who found him what oppression chose.'



'Although no tyrant, one who shielded tyrants'; 'a tool from first to last' - yes. Though he did himself often utter the word 'Liberty' while adding to the oppression of people in Latin American countries in particular.

I wonder BTW if this is the first use of 'tool' in its political sense?

[Octafish]

5. Awesome, indeed, the power of words.

Thank you for Byron's.
They sum up The Gippet, perfectly.

"Tool" is right, one wielded by evil unimagined in Byron's day.



A bad actor, the guy thought
he really was better than other people
and so could act the part.

What Shelley, Heisenberg and LeftishBrit said:

"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

[Ichingcarpenter]

2. A kick and

a question..

Besides being an asshole, fascist, union breaking republican.

What was his obsession with UFOs and extraterrestrial invasions?
I wonder what he had heard or knew.

http://www.suite101.com/content/ronald-reagan-ufos-and-the-alien-threat-a301596

[Octafish]

6. Looking in the mirror, I'd guess it came from watching too much television while drunk. OTOH...

...he seemed to have given the subject considerable thought:

"I occasionally think how quickly our differences, worldwide, would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world." -- Then-president Ronald Reagan during the 1988 summit with Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev

The war criminal and traitor Henry Kissinger raised similar language:

"Today, America would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order (referring to the 1991 LA Riot). Tomorrow they will be grateful! This is especially true if they were told that there were an outside threat from beyond (i.e., an "extraterrestrial" invasion), whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by the World Government." -- Dr. Henry Kissinger, Bilderberger Conference, Evians, France, 1991

Speaking of Capitalism’s Invisible Army, Jacques Vallee talked about a CIA Cuba Project that involved projecting an image of the Virgin Mary or other UP on to the side of a cloud. The thing was supposed to scare the daylights out of the Cuban people and get them think the End of Days had arrived.

Vallee Dimensions Cuba UFO Cloud Projector

In “Dimensions,” Vallee wrote:

It may seem preposterous for government to spend time and money testing the public’s reaction to the idea of contact with extraterrestrials. Yet, I strongly suspect at least two major UFO cases were covert experiments in rumor generation and in the deliberate of contactee cults (one of these cases took place in Spain, one in France). To the skeptical reader, I can only point out that there are people on the government payroll who’s job it is to devise contingency plans for all sorts of extreme situations. Under the Nixon administration, a White House task force had even proposed a scheme for the invasion of Cuba that involved a submarine equipped with lasers. It would “paint” an image of Christ over the island to simulate the Second Coming. This “miracle,” it was thought, would disturb the Catholic population in Havana, paralyze communications, and disorganize the Cuban armed forces long enough for commandos to seize strategic points and overthrow the Castro regime.

In his well-documented book, “War on the Mind,” clinical psychologist Peter Watson, who was a member of The Sunday Times Insight team which investigated (among other things) the use of psychological warfare by the British, reveals that the equipment has been developed to use low-lying clouds as a screen off which to bounce huge propaganda shows. Tape recordings of primitive gods had been prepared to be played from helicopters, thus frightening tribes.

During the Vietnam War, a U.S. military unit called the 4th Psyop Group, invented an image projector called the “Miralux.” It used 85mm slides and 1,000-watt bulb to project pictures on buildings, mountains, and cloudbanks.

I believe that it is imperative for scientists to study UFOs. But we should not do it naively. With the process of human technology, it is becoming possible to study any UFO report without considering the possibility of a deliberate deception, along with the other classical hypotheses. Many UFO groups are gullible to any rumor that seems to support the extraterrestrial credo, without seriously investigating where the rumor comes from and who may have been interested in spreading it. The skeptical zeal of some of the more vocal debunkers is also inspired by the need to maintain political control. To prevent genuine scientific study from being organized, all that is needed is to maintain a certain threshold of ridicule around the phenomenon. This can be done easily enough by a few influential science writers under the guise of humanism and rationalism. UFO research is equated by them with false science, thus creating an atmosphere of guilt by association which is deadly to any independent scientist. Efforts are made to systematically discredit professional researchers who investigate the phenomenon.

Source: “Dimensions: A Casebook for Alien Contact," pp. 248-249, 1988, Contemporary Books, Chicago.

UFOs don't have to little green men to be tools for the political classes.

[rurallib]

3. Scares me to think what kind of a rendering Obama will have

The guy was a force against america, Barack.

[pnorman]

4. Spotted this cartoon at that site: