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Reagan: The Road To Victory 

Grizzled Reagan era schemer [and Iraq War facilitator] Michael Ledeen has offered his insights into Iran’s release of  journalist and former North Plains beauty pageant winner Roxana Saber.

Ledeen says those Teheran rug merchants are always dealing.

“anyone familiar with the workings of the Islamic Republic has to assume that there was a payoff“

The Economist calls attention to an interesting response from one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers.

” …he insists there were no exceptions; Iran never gave up hostages without getting something in return.   This is in obvious contrast to the mythology that the right has built up that Iran was afraid of Reagan; it is not inconsistent with speculation of an October Surprise that has been part of conspiracy theories on the left.

Tell us, Mr. Ledeen, what was that something that Reagan gave Iran in 1979/80?”

                                             

He Kept Us Safe!

One of George W. Bush’s most exciting legacies is the deal de-nuking Libya, bringing Ronald Reagan’s “Mad Dog of the Middle East” into our family of nations. Now we are learning just how friendly our man in Tripoli became.

From the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya comes word of the prison death of al-Qaeda suspect Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi.

  Al Libi was arrested in Pakistan, tortured by the United States and our partners in peace, Egypt, and dumped on our new revolutionary guide friend.  Despite Bush administration hopes, al Libi would not claim ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda except under torture, so we hid him away in freedom’s new frontier.

Dead Man To Tell No Tales           
Libya says he was a suicide, although Human Rights Watch reports Al Libi seemed healthy if huffy when encountered recently, asking “Where were you when I was being tortured in American jails.”

Making A List, Not Checking For Nice     

We’re working on that too, as our gallant Libyan allies are making visitations to fellow countrymen at Guantanamo.

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Freedom’s New Face  

Kids Explain The Darnedest Things

John Emerson’s Social Design Notes blog studies recent self-explanations by museum and presidential library creators, and sums up the their evil work:

“I keep seeing this trend: stories of monuments and memorials sold on infantilism, using the lens of “childhood” to conjure an air of authenticity and gravitas.“

Emerson quotes the Washington Post on presidential library market maker Ralph Appelbaum’s Nigeria project:

“What does it take to make a Nigerian child?’ It’s an unanswerable question, but it provided the necessary aha moment that made it all come together, a positive theme that finesses some of the philosophical problems of a presidential library in a country riven by corruption, violence, and religious, ethnic, linguistic and economic divisions.”

Stiff Competition

Applebaum’s firm is the American equivilant of Lenin’s embalmers touching down in Angola and Vietnam, loosing upon the world our packaged solutions for immortality.

Chronicle Of A Fool Foretold  

CBS TV Funnyman David Feherty  has attracted concerned stares over the murderous fantasies about Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid  he revealed while welcoming George Bush to Dallas, but Bush’s fellow Preston Hollow resident clearly has other issues.

If you worry who Bush has settled amongst in Dallas, be of good cheer. Bush’s neighbors share his willful myopia, because after all, “what a nightmare of a time that was to be president of the United States!”

Yes, poor George did his best, or was stabbed in the back, or something, as he  “he played some of the rotten cards he was dealt.”

Feherty is quite the student of  Middle Eastern affairs, as  shown in his evocation of “my own experience visiting the troops in the Middle East,” and  “having spent considerable time in the Middle East myself.”

This expertise leads the golf comedian to the bold conclusion that “Americans in America have been safe since 9/11, almost the whole length of G2’s term as president, and for that we should be thankful.”

And just how did he acquire this hard won knowledge of facts on the ground [with added sweep of history] in a dangerous neighborhood?

USO tours!

Yes, 2007 and 2008 crotch joke performances before military audiences, and classic man-dress and camel dung material for the readers back home of have taught Feherty all he needs to know about The Man Who Kept Us Safe. Feherty adds a touch of magic to his tales of desert redemption by saying the stirring war scenes he witnessed caused him to apply for US citizenship

Feherty’s Call to Citizenship

But by his own account he has been applying since July of 2003, back when the mission was accomplished, all we feared was dead-enders, and he had yet to travel to freedom’s new found land.

 In A Foreign Field

Now With Dignified Forms! 

The New York Times identifies a looming menace in presidential monumental-ism:  a renowned architectural crackpot’s involvement in Washington’s prospective Adams family memorial.

Rodney Mims Cook Jr is a man with a mission: hurling architecture back in time to an era of stately forms, and a whole lot of pillars. Cook gave Atlanta a taste of Washington’s magic to come when he erected an enormous faux Arc de Triomphe plotzed amidst big box stores.

     The Adams monument got a boost when America’s Tom Hanks brought David McCullough’s stirring vision of our first one term president to tony HBO. Not since Ken Burns invented the letter-scan-with-voice-over shot has the written word exploded from the screen with such pith and power.

With Cook on board we can look forward to a monumental granite remembrance of flinty New Englanders Adams, the Mrs., and offspring/president Quincy Adams.

Washington’s embrace of the tried, true and trite has a long pedigree. Cook is at the nexus,  tying in Bush Library architect Robert A.M. Stern, McCullough again, artful wordsmith of reaction Tom Wolfe, and voice for all those a little concerned about this Obama fellow, Cokie Roberts.

We could of course do worse, and probably will when Lynn Cheney’s next bio surfaces.  Watch for much of this same crowd engage in still more founder-swoon when this friend of liberty turns her loving gaze on our next to slavingist president, James Madison.

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