Media Fight Among Selves Over Who Killed Communism, Reagan Apparently Not Present

Your Role In Its Downfall 

Yet another instance of European condescension towards Ronald Reagan, The Man Who Wasn’t There®.

A spat amongst former East Berlin correspondents over who triggered an East German official’s incoherent statement which opened the Berlin Wall has somehow completely ignored Reagan.

Riccardo Ehrman and Peter Brinkmann both questioned Politburo member Günter Schabowski the fateful night of November 9, 1989, as he stumbled through presenting half-way measures easing travel from East to West Berlin.  Reporters pressed the poorly briefed Schabowski over the announcement’s meaning, leading the German Democratic Republic’s unwitting funeral director to say that border controls would relax “Immediately. Without delay.”

Demoralized guards and popular pressure did the rest, and the Wall was breached.

But did either of these esteemed gentlemen put it in writing?

 

To mark his retrospective genius the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library is getting all gussied up,  celebrating the Berlin events Reagan wasn’t President for.

US News & World Report: The Blog breathlessly reports spirited new efforts in the  continuing campaign to link Reagan’s stirring 1987 call for Communism to die swiftly with actual events more than two years later. The Library is going all out: conference on past glories, Checkpoint Charlie memorabilia, and for the kids,

“…the library will display a replica where visitors can scrawl their messages of peace just as the East and West Germans did on the original.”

      No apparent mention of actual events at the time, like the heroic marchers in Leipzig who challenged East Germany’s leadership on the ground.

Reagan-Wall Tumbling claims have settled into a cliche resolutely polished for all occasions,   like the wall fragments incorporated into Reagan’s recently unveiled Capitol Hill statue.

But fact-based snubbing of the Great Communicator remains treasured tradition in some circles.  Who can forget James Mann’s cruel tallying of previous equally ineffectual Berlin occasions when Reagan waxed wistful about the Wall’s fall.

   And lest we forget, Reagan trained his steely gaze upon North Korea too, still standing at last report .

   

    Bill Due   Â

To the storied Plains of Kosovo, where the embattled former Yugoslav dominion rebuilds itself as an alternative Albania.

Like the Land of Eagles, Kosovo loves them some US Presidents.  Pristina pines for former President Bill Clinton to dedicate the massive statue they’ve erected on Clinton Boulevard in his honor, but he won’t be able to come until next month.

Kosovars love of Freedom’s Own Land and its former leaders is apparent at every turn.

Feet Tragically Obscured     

Good news from the watery Philippines, where tragic flooding ends on a happy note.  Renowned shoe fetishist and drag queen ideal Imelda Marcos’s shoe collection at the Marikina Shoe Museum was plucked from the rising waters by quick thinking museum staff.

Now the Marcos family can concentrate on the career of Strongman Scion Bong-Bong Marcos.