Ronald Reagan Really Racist?
05-Sep-13
Four Telling The Defense      
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Your Washington Post op/ed page outdid itself this past Sunday, cementing its role as the home for thoughtful conservative refutations of arguments never seen in the Post.
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Your Washington Post op/ed page outdid itself this past Sunday, cementing its role as the home for thoughtful conservative refutations of arguments never seen in the Post.
This week four clowns identified as “Ronald Reagan historians” went on at great length, trying to refute accusations of Reagan’s racism found in contemporary cinema classic “The Butler.”
The Charge: Reagan’s enthusiasm for South Africa’s aparthied regime reflected something other than fear Castro’s armies would reach the Cape of Good Hope. Â Here’s where the Right’s frenzied creation of “facts” on the ground and in their own minds really earn the honoraria. Â The Right’s dense layers of hackery, resident scholarship and dead horse beating pay off in the form of robot armies available for instant mobilization.
Your Voices of Outrage:
                      Steven F. Hayward  
From his climate denialist American Enterprise institute day job, Hayward sallies forth to write Reagan books and muse in the pages of the Weekly Standard about all things climate and  Churchillian.  Churchill is the giveaway: Imperial Nostalgia is self explaining.
                      Paul Kengor  
The author of  “What Bush and Moses Have in Common” flirted with birthers while promoting his book “The Communist,”  explaining Obama’s evil as stemming from youthful consorting with Stalinists.  Kengor emits a steady stream of Reagan-ish tomes, notable even within the genre for their reverent tone. Reagan’s lifeguard duties are analyzed for seeds of greatness, and Reagan administration enthusiasm for Saddam Hussein is blithely minimized, with Kengor taking for gospel somewhat selective memories of our assistance to Saddam’s poison gassing Iranians.
                      Craig Shirley  
A fully paid up member of the vast right-wing conspiracy, Shirley has taken to cranking out Reagan bios when not busy with his pr firm Shirley & Banister.  The outfit has repped most right obsessions at some point in their birthing, including fanciful versions of Bill Clinton, John Kerry, and Barack Obama’s biographies, as well as premier Nixon apologist and renaissance man Ben Stein.  The Clinton book was authored by former FBI agent and serial fantisist Gary Aldrich, currently  “President & Founder” of the Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty.  Shirley serves on the advisory board, with the Board itself chaired by disgraced yet strangely buoyant Reagan henchman Ed Meese.
                      Kiron K. Skinner  
Skinner’s career has been dedicated  pummeling the reading public with endless Reagan mix tapes, repackaging the man’s every scribble for posterity.  But prolonged exposure to Reagan’s Own Hand, Path, Stories, and Voice tends to reinforce the negative images she hoped to overturn. Â
Casual indifference to fascists? Sure!  Reagan’s radio scripts reveal a highly relaxed view of car bomb assassination in the streets of Washington.  When Pinochet’s men killed Chile’s former foreign minister in 1976, Reagan mused over “what appeared to be the murder of a leftist by someone on the right “, but swiftly moved to pleading for bringing back the House Un-American Activities Committee.
An inevitable point in Skinner’s Reagan excuse making  comes when she coquettishly informs us that ” I happen to be black,” ergo Reagan cannot be racist. A less intimate version of the Jack “he showered with them” Kemp clowning.
We’ve been through these hijinks before, with many of the same clowns explaining away Reagan’s ties to racist former States Rights Democrats transmogrified into Republicans.    Â
Bush would sport the next seven years.