Who’s Crying Now?  
From his controversial campaign embrace of Reagan nostalgia onward, Barack Obama has set Fantasy Reagan as the standard to be measured against.  But he’s lacked the twinkling whimsy to pull off the big whoppers Reagan could do with half a brain, and the shamelessness of his handlers in putting them across.
But now, light from the East.
Obama was already three up on the Gipper in the coveted killing Qaddafi relatives category, hitting a son and three grandchildren. Reagan had to make to do with his sole Qaddafi hit, the adopted daughter killed when the US bombed Libya in 1986.
Now the rebel conquest of Tripoli threatens even that Reagan accomplishment.  The Irish Times reports from the wreckage that Hana Qaddafi may have never died, and had gone on to a career as a doctor.
The Reagan bomb run was storied in legend and song, featuring daring-do, plucky Maggie Thatcher as Churchill in drag, and the perfidious French.
But now all we may have gotten out of it was the Lockerbie bombing.
My Country, Writer Wrong  
Before they were [accused] felons….
Barry Landau, “America’s Presidential Historian,” remains in a Baltimore jail and a heap of trouble, accused of pinching presidential documents and ephemera from a Maryland archive.
Such trouble that his lawyer is directing attention to Landau’s alleged partner in crime, emphasising that Barry had none of the loot in his possession when arrested.
Barry Often WrongÂ
We can all look forward to Landau’s credibility being tested at trial, the credibility of a man associated with McCarthy and Mafia mouthpiece Roy Cohn and  called a liar by a presidential special counsel, who claimed voicemail sniffer Rupert Murdoch inspired him  to write a book.  The veracity of a man who invents numbers and accounts for his “collections,” who this month shaved three years off a Woodrow Wilson visit to Iowa for a piece of CNN holiday fluff when he wasn’t filling space yammering on about flag desecration [against it!].
Barry sees what others can only imagine.
The”Presidential Historian” and dinner plate collector of the stars rushed to inform New York Post readers, and through them the world, that he alone spotted Tricia Nixon, daughter of disgraced former President Richard Nixon among Macy’s  shoppers one day. They, or at least Barry, recalled halcyon days of yore when Trish was married at the White House, an event memorialized in an Executive Mansion hallway, according to Barry.
Landau also shared the  good news that President Barack Obama recently placed a wreath at Nixon’s grave, a trick he managed without the White House or any news organ discovering it.
….in that, like Reagan, his apologists will now rush to credit him with something that didn’t happen on his watch.
The “Who Got  bin Laden” myth-making has already begun, with Republican House leaders reluctantly adding Obama to the Bush victory parade. 
Osama bin Laden:Â
Your Washington Post reluctantly conceded that bin Laden died during Barack Obama’s presidency.   Homeland Security Committee Chair Peter King [Provisional IRA, New York] sees Bush’s empty bluster as the foundation of victory:  “President Bush deserves great credit for putting action behind those words.“And what words they were!
  “If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! 
 The Twitter-sphere is awash in bizarre statements like  “Obama gets to enjoy the feeling of a (prior) cic’s victory.”
   Forgotten in the wave of Bush Revisionism are Bush’s frenzied efforts to dot this particular “I” before leaving office.
 And Obama’s weekend topping of the Gipper’s record by killing both a child and three of the strongman’s grandchildren.  Reagan only got one.*
*Subject to controversy as of August 2011
Action Jackson, Generally Disreputable  Â
A future President’s lynching of two Britons for aiding slave escapes is the latest defense offered for the ill-starred Guantanamo military tribunals.
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  In a since withdrawn legal argument, prosecutors pointed to Bloody Andrew Jackson’s energetic response to Georgia slaves escaping to the Seminole Indians in then Spanish Florida.Â
 
  The Seminole tribe objected to being compared with al Qaeda, and escaped slave descendants might have something to say as well.
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   Defending the military tribunerals’ ever shape-shifting “procedures” was a challenge even before the Pentagon took to enlisting slave catchers as freedom’s legions.
