RONALD REAGAN, ROT IN HELL!

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Richard Nixon, another corrupt scumbag that became president. Saturday, at 4:09 PM EST, Ronald Wilson Reagan went to join Nixon as Satan’s footstool in Hell. Today is a very good day. Now to all the conservatives and other assorted right-wingers that are reading this and are getting pissed, stay that way. After National Review’s attack on Bella Abzug, saying “we’re better off without her,” Freak Republic’s attacks on Paul Wellstone and Rachel Corrie, not to mention the threats right-wingers repeatedly throw our way (and by the way, one of their posters named Bogey 78O asked, “Why couldn’t God take Carter first?”), we feel we don’t owe you anything except a middle finger and a smile. And remember this: it was Reagan who enabled another fascist scumbag named Sadaam Hussein. Reagan is responsible for the deaths of Iraqis at Hussein’s hand, us being in Iraq today, and why some of us are not coming home. And as this falls on the 60th anniversary of D-Day, remember that Reagan, who served in Hollywood during World War II paid tribute to those SS soldiers we fought, saying they were just as much victims as those in the concentration camps. He does not deserve praise, he does not deserve honor. It is now truly Morning in America.

Oh, and you know that all throughout the Republican National Convention we are going to hear “Win one for the Gipper”. They won’t.

By One People’s Project

On Saturday June 5, 2004 at 4:06 EST Reagan died at his Los Angeles home of pneumonia complicated by Alzheimer’s disease. Nancy Reagan, along with children Ron and Patti Davis were there when he died and his adopted son Michael, a radio talk-shit host, came a short while later. The rest of the world partied.

Reagan was born in Tampico, Illinois, the second of two sons to John (Jack) Reagan, who was an alcoholic, and Nelle Wilson. In 1920, after years of moving from town to town, the family settled in the Illinois town of Dixon. In 1921, at the age of 11, Reagan was baptized in his mother’s Disciples of Christ church in Dixon, and in 1924 he began attending Dixon’s Northside High School. In 1932, he graduated from Eureka College in Eureka Illinois. He eventually scored a job as radio announcer for Chicago Cubs games as “Dutch” Reagan. This was also a name he reportedly ran under as a bootlegger during prohibition in the Chicago area. Eventually he found himself in Hollywood as a B-movie actor, starring in 19 movies. One of his better-known roles was that of George “The Gipper” Gipp in the film Knute Rockne All American (1940). Reagan was also one of those chicken hawks that never could find the time to go to war when called, although like the current president, he was able to wear the uniform and say he did his part. Reagan was commissioned as a reserve cavalry officer in the U.S. Army in 1935. After Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941, he was activated and was assigned to the First Motion Picture Unit in the Army Air Corps, which made training and education films. He remained in Hollywood for the duration of the war, and the enemy never attacked there, preferring instead to kill over 400,000 US soldiers in Europe and the Pacific. After the war he went on to do some television but his career never again saw the success he had with films like “Bedtime for Bonzo”.

Apparently Reagan was pissed off that better actors were able to get better roles than him because it was around this time be went from being a liberal Democrat that supported President Roosevelt and his New Deal, to aligning himself with Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to “expose Communist influence in Hollywood”. At the time he was president to the Screen Actors Guild, and he turned in several of his allegedly Communist co-workers, “99% of us are pretty well aware of what is going on, and I think we have done a pretty good job in our business of keeping those people’s activities curtailed,” He said while testifying before the HUAC in 1947. “I do not believe the Communists have ever at any time been able to use the motion picture screen as a sounding board for their philosophy or ideology.”

And with this, Ronald Reagan began his political career, and it was hell of a beginning. It also set his standard of his penchant to violate human rights and due process in the name of an America that excluded those who did not fit his straight white male dominated vision of it. This is also how he found his wife, the former Nancy Davis. She was one of those actresses who went to a meeting and got her name on a list. When Ronnie did his part for Amerikkka, that put her on a list, so she went to him in 1951 and begged him to remove her name. Reagan did more than that. Three years from his divorce from his actress Jane Wyman (they were married for eight years and had two kids, Maureen and Michael whom they adopted), he hooked up with Nancy and married her about a year later. They had two kids, Patty and Ronald (not a Junior), who would go on to work in the media, including hosting a short-lived, Donahue-styled talk show where he would slam his father on his policies as president.

Reagan would later find employment with General Electric, delivering anti-communist speeches on radio broadcasts and speaking tours. By the 1964 election, Reagan was an outspoken supporter of Barry Goldwater, who appealed to those who were notably active against the Civil Rights movement at the time. Reagan was able to use his prominence to mount a successful campaign for Governor of California in 1966, and by this time not only the civil rights movement was turning into another direction with the rise of the Black Panthers, but the movement against the war in Vietnam was also heating up.  On May 2, 1967, at least two dozen armed Black Panthers, led by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, stormed the California Capitol in Sacramento to protest an anti-gun bill. They got as far as the Assembly chamber before they were disarmed by State Police — who later determined the Panthers had broken no laws since they hadn’t concealed their loaded weapons. Of course two dozen armed black men is enough for your most hardened conservative to suspend their position on the right to keep and bear arms, and Reagan did just that. He called the protest “a ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved by people of good will. There’s no reason why on the street today the citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” It should be noted that later Nancy would admit that she kept a “tiny little gun” near her bed because her husband was away all the time.

Reagan was no friend of the Civil Rights Movement. He never supported the use of federal power to provide blacks with civil rights and opposed the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 1980 he would say the Act was “humiliating to the South”. After pressure however, he would sign the bill in 1982 renewing the Act for another 25 years.

As for the anti-war movement, Reagan targeted the anti-war activists hard on the college campuses, calling out the National Guard on students in Berkley and cutting funding for the University of California, a center of the student protest movement of the late 1960s, After protests died down, he increased the funding again.

In 1968 and in 1976 he tried and failed to capture the Republican presidential nomination. Conservatives were not in their best days after the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and Watergate. Then Jimmy Carter’s presidency changed all that. After the Iran hostage crisis and the gas crisis, voters were fed up with Carter and wanted a change. Overseas press charged that the Reagan camp had made a secret deal to keep the hostages imprisoned until after the election, bu
t there isn’t any real evidence of this. In November 1980, Reagan won 43,901,812 to 35,483,820 in the popular vote, 489-49 in the Electoral College.  When he is inaugurated, the 52 hostages in Iran are released after 444 days.

Reagan wasn’t in office too long before someone decided to take a shot at him. On March 30, 1981, just 69 days into his Presidency, while leaving the Hilton Hotel in Washington, DC, President Reagan, Press Secretary James Brady, a Secret Service agent, and a District of Columbia police officer were shot by John Hinckley, Jr. The story is that he shot Reagan to impress actress Jodie Foster, and he later was found not guilty by reason of insanity. He has been in an insane asylum ever since. When Ronnie sees Nancy at the hospital later he reportedly commented, “Honey, I forgot to duck.” That was a line first said by Jack Dempsey to his wife after being beaten by Gene Tuney in 1926. Not as funny was Secretary of State Alexander Haig forgetting the line of succession and telling the press corp in the briefing room that, “As of now, I am in control here, in the White House, pending return of the Vice-President.” Reagan had a full recovery and returned to work about a month later.

Reagan continued on with his anti-communist stance from his McCarthy days, and boosted defense spending to that end. He was the one who proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which was a missile shield that he thought, would make the United States invulnerable to a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. The problem was this plan, which was called “Star Wars” by detractors, was unworkable and impractical. It was never implemented.

As president however, Reagan showed himself to be a hypocrite. While he would say that his fight against communism was a fight for freedom, he was not too enthusiastic in fighting against oppressive regimes such as apartheid South Africa. He directly and openly embraced the Administration of then-South African Prime Minister P.W. Botha as “an ally and friend,” and was against imposing sanctions against the country. In response to this, in the mid-1980s, a broad-based anti-apartheid movement exploded across the United States, marked by demonstrations in major cities and on college campuses and by a call for tougher U.S. policies toward Pretoria. The introduction in Congress of legislations calling for economic sanctions on South Africa was spearheaded by the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) in 1985.

Reagan didn’t like the CBC picking on his friend Botha but introduced a series of limited economic sanctions in a Presidential Executive Order issued on September 9, 1985. In a statement accompanying the order, he said he was issuing the order only to forestall Congress from adopting even harsher measures. He also started up a policy of  “constructive engagement” which attempted to strengthen ties to the South African Government whenever new sanctions were imposed. As Darlene Love sang on the anti-apartheid record Sun City at the time, “This quiet diplomacy ain’t nothing but a joke”.

Congress got their way a year later, however when they passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 over President Reagan’s veto. The Act prohibited U.S. trade and other economic relations with South Africa. It anticipated the need for sanctions by other countries and specifically directed the president to seek the cooperation of industrialized democracies as well as South Africa’s other trading partners. But because of its opposition to sanctions, the Reagan Administration did little to gain cooperation from other countries and refused to support mandatory international sanctions against South Africa in the United Nations.

Reconciliation was also Reagan’s excuse when in 1985 he visited the Bitburg military cemetery together with Chancellor Helmut Kohl, to lay a wreath in honor of German soldiers who died in both World Wars. This became controversial when it came to public attention that a number of gravesites contained remains of soldiers who had served in Waffen-SS units. Despite protests from various quarters, most notably Elie Wiesel, Reagan defended his visit by saying the German soldiers “were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.” That didn’t even go over well with his one people, an aide heard to exclaim, “Oh, my God!”

Wiesel received an award from the Reagan the next day, the same day the New York Times carried the headline “Reagan Likens Nazi War Dead to Concentration Camp Victims.” He tells Reagan, “That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS.”

Fighting against communism also found Reagan fighting against human rights in other parts of the globe in addition to South Africa. He was a strong ally of anti-communist and Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos who in the seventies suspended the Philippine constitution. That didn’t stop Vice President George Bush from toasting him for his “adherence to democratic principles and the democratic process.” In 1986, when Corazon Aquino led the “people power” revolution against Marcos, Ronald Reagan tried to persuade her to compromise with Marcos – who had murdered her husband  Benigno Aquino, a major political rival and critic, when he returned to the Philippines from exile. The Philippine people had other ideas and ran Marcos out of the country. Reagan took him in and he lived in Hawaii until his death in 1989.

Reagan’s fight against communists in Latin America led some to charge that Reagan was undertaking secret and illegal guerilla wars. In 1983 Reagan ordered a formal military invasion of the small island nation of Grenada after it underwent a Communist coup.

The Middle East was a favorite target of Reagan’s, only it was not communism that was the rallying cry, it was terrorism. Palestinians, Libyans (who were famously bombed by the Reagan administration), Iranians, and the Lebanonese were all victims of his anti-terrorism campaign. One regime was allowed free reign however, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Under Reagan, the US normalized relations with Iraq in 1984 and did nothing as the murderous dictator filled those mass graves we would later find during the current war against that country. In Lebanon, it was the US who filled mass graves when an attack on a Marine barracks killed 241 soldiers. This hurt Reagan domestically and some say it led to the attack on Grenada two days later as an attempt to boost his popularity.

The human rights abuses abroad were also felt domestically. As was the case when he was Governor of California, Reagan was not too partial to civil rights. He sided with Bob Jones University in a lawsuit to obtain federal tax exemptions that had been denied by the IRS. The IRS denied tax exemptions to segregated private schools, and Bob Jones prohibited interracial dating and marriage. Reagan would later say that the case had never been presented to him as a civil rights issue and that he did not even know that many Christian schools practiced segregation. Reagan also opposed the establishment of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as a national holiday, but after an outcry from the public and support from both the house and the senate, he reluctantly signed the bill establishing the holiday into law. It was noted that after the bill signing, guests began singing, ”We Shall Overcome,” as the soft hymnal chorus swelled row after row until the entire audience was on its feet singing. Reagan and Vice President Bush chose not to join in.

Of course, Reagan did everything he could to make himself an enemy of the black community. One way his tough-on-crime routine. His policies in the “War on Drugs” was one area where this was felt as drugs ravaged the black community. The policies emphasized imprisonment for drug offenders while cutting funding for addiction treatment. This resulted in a dramatic increase in the USA’s prison population, and resulted in a great financial and human cost for American society, but it did nothing to actually reduce the availability
of drugs or crime on the street while resulting. Due to this policy and various cuts in spending for social programs during his Presidency, Reagan was seen as one of the more racist presidents, and from this atmosphere rose a number of black leaders like Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and scores of progressive artists, actors, directors and musicians like Spike Lee, Public Enemy, KRS-ONE, and Whoopi Goldberg. They have been so effective in changing the national and global landscape, that conservatives will spend the next two decades complaining about these figures, but to no avail.

Reagan was also seen as a union buster, and no better example of that could be found than when on August 5, 1981 Reagan fired 11,359 striking air traffic controllers who had ignored his order to return to work. Ironically, PATCO, the air traffic controller’s union, had been one of the few unions that had supported Reagan over Carter in the election nine months previously.

The Iran-Contra affair will be seen as Reagan’s biggest scandal and for many a testament to his legacy. National Security Advisor John Poindexter and Col. Oliver North had hatched an elaborate plot to sell arms to the Iranian government and give the profits to the anti-Communist Contras guerillas in Nicaragua, who were engaged in a bloody civil war. Both actions were contrary to acts of Congress. Reagan professed ignorance of the plot, but admitted that he had supported the initial sale of arms to Iran, on the grounds that such sales were supposed to help secure the release of Americans being held hostage by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorist group in Lebanon. With this, the policy of never making deals with terrorists went straight to hell. Everyone involved was eventually whitewashed and never saw any real damage to their reputations, but by this point it was expected. Reagan’s was one of the most scandal-ridden presidencies in modern times, with more than 130 officials in the Reagan Administration either being convicted or forced to resign their posts to avoid prosecution.

In 1992, four years after leaving office, Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. He made his last major appearance at the Republican National Convention that year, coming on just after Pat Buchanan called for the GOP to fight a culture war to “take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country” the same way they took back the street after the LA Uprising a few months before.  On November 5, 1994 a letter he wrote was released announcing he had Alzheimer’s disease and that be was beginning “the long goodbye”. Realizing that the world, let alone the country was evolving towards a different direction than the one Reagan went Right-wingers began an outrageous campaign to build a Reagan mythology. As would be expected, buildings and an aircraft carrier were named in his honor, but the campaign began to either attempt to displace others being honored, place him on a par or above those that are much more deserving, take a swipe at those who were his detractors, or both. On February 6, 1998, Washington National Airport in Washington, DC was renamed Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. This was seen was insulting to the air traffic controllers he fired in 1981. There was also an attempt in 1999 to rename the town of Clinton, NJ to Reagan, NJ. Clinton is named after a 17th century Governor of New Jersey, but Bill Clinton was president at the time and it was seen as a way for conservatives to take a shot at him. The attempt failed. One other campaign was shelved, that to replace Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s portrait on the dime with Reagan’s. Congressional Republicans introduced the “Ronald Reagan Dime Act” (HR 3633), in response to an unflattering television miniseries, The Reagans that was to air on CBS in Nov. 2003, but after protests from conservative activists ended up on Showtime instead.  The bill did not have widespread support because despite whatever popularity Reagan might have, Roosevelt had more and for much longer. As of this writing, the bill appeared unlikely to be put up for a vote.

A campaign to have Reagan’s face etched into Mount Rushmore is ongoing. Many Americans however feel this takes away from what the original artist envisioned, and considers this campaign to be a joke.

When Reagan died, his legacy was being observed as 500 persons stood outside the White House demanding an end to the War in Iraq, a war that would not have happened if Reagan did not enable Saddam Hussein. It is expected that Republicans will use his death as a rallying point, but it is doubtful it will be enough to cover up the dismal failure of the Bosh Administration.