WWW.PRESIDENTS"R"US.COM

Communism Point & Click

So little is left of the Berlin Wall that Reuters reports authorities have resorted to handing tourists a GPS powered device if they want to recreate that closed in feeling.

We know where the Wall went: vast chunks carried off to America for victory displays. Prime offenders are Presidential Libraries, which are cluttered with the stuff.

Let’s review:

George H.W. Bush has a cheesy salute to Berlin and all things Texan outside his museum, and indoors Wall as well. And Bush Secretary of State James Baker got a chunk for his Rice University Institute.

Ford has a piece, although the Wall rested undisturbed throughout his presidency.

Nixon too.

Kennedy saw it built on his watch.

The Hoover Library has a Wall piece, although he barely lived long enough to see it built, three decades after his presidency.

Truman hosted Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech at Westminister College in Fulton Missouri, and the campus now hosts both a plain chunk and a Wall “sculpture” – a piece with holes punched in it by Churchill’s granddaughter. She also sold one of these horrors to the Roosevelt library.

The greater glory of Ronald Reagan requires the most concrete, with Wall samples at his Dixon Illinois birthplace, alma mater Eureka College, at the federal Reagan office building in Washington, aboard the USS Ronald Reagan, at the Reagan Ranch Center, and at the Reagan Library indoors & out.

And they used to sell bags of chips.

Oh, How They Laughed!

Intrepid rakers of muck at Consortium News are still on the case of Iran-Contra, long after most of us have blurred Ollie North and Gordon Liddy in the Leather-Jacketed-Poseur-Infamous-For-Something category.

Who Did Which President Know…

…And When Did They Know Them?

Their latest nugget is a draft report from the Congressional Iran-Contra investigation, exploring the domestic propaganda fallout of the scandal. The CIA was turned on the American people, Army Psy-Ops men were brought to Washington from Fort Bragg for the plot.

Kicking that Vietnam Syndrome, The Early Years

All in service of the Reagan Administration’s scheme to fund Nicaraguan terrorists by selling weapons to Iran, defending itself from Iraq’s invasion. Which we were abetting, sending Donald Rumsfeld to wink at Saddam Hussein’s “terrorizing his own people“.

Reagan went into the plan fearing he’d be hung by his thumbs if word leaked. But he walked when Congress caved, confronted by Dick Cheney and other Iran-Contra Deniers, burying it’s report in the interests of reaching across the aisles to get things done in a bi-partisan fashion.

Too much can be made of the report, and is, but it’s worth reading as an early example of White House media manipulation which is now commonplace.

“…one of the CIA’s most senior covert action operators, was sent to the NSC in 1983 by CIA Director Casey where he participated in the creation of an inter-agency public diplomacy mechanism that included the use of seasoned intelligence specialists… This public/private network set out to accomplish what a covert CIA operation in a foreign country might attempt to sway the media, the Congress, and American public opinion in the direction of the Reagan Administration’s policies.“

As Cheney demonstrated recently with Gerald Ford, he’ll use any stick to beat the dog. Kind words on the death of Ford became a consensus that Nixon got what he deserved, so Bush will be vindicated in the fullness of time too.

The Democrats never seem to learn to kick ’em when they’re down.

Winsome, Lose Some

It’s one step forward, one step back for gigantic representations of Ronald Reagan. An immense Reagan statue has been dedicated in Covington Louisiana, with a head oddly swollen compared to the original noggin.

Maybe It’s The Hair?

Elsewhere, setbacks for the cause. A young Bill Clinton led anti-war demonstrations at the London Grosvenor Square American embassy. A Reagan statue was proposed for the square, but has just been turned down by the Westminster Public Art Advisory Committee.

It was double dipping by Chaz Fagen, who’s already making the Reagan statue to go in the US Capitol. He’s already done Bush Sr., and a Reagan relief bust for the USS Ronald Reagan.

Purdum Pulls The Trigger

The latest on Bill “my office is in Harlem” Clinton’s adventures is served up in Vanity Fair‘s July issue by the magazine’s own star map of Washington, Todd Purdum.

It’s a delightful medley of old scandal and new.

Reviewing Clinton pants-down matters, Purdum reports on “… recent high-end Hollywood dinner-party gossip that Clinton has been seen visiting with the actress Gina Gershon in California,” but Gawker had this almost six months ago.

Purdum does better provoking post presidential spokesman Jay Carson on Clinton pal and billionaire boys club headmaster Ron Burkle. Carson reveals a longing for the opposition’s Fuhrer Principle:

“The ills of the Democratic Party can be seen perfectly in the willingness of fellow Democrats to say bad things about President Clinton. If you ask any Republican about Reagan they will say he still makes the sun rise in the morning, but if you ask Democrats about their only two-term president in 80 years, a man who took the party from the wilderness of loserdom to the White House and created the strongest economy in American history, they’d rather be quoted saying what a reporter wants to hear than protect a strong brand for the party. Republicans look at this behavior and laugh at us.”

A thorough reading of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal leads Purdum to conclude Clinton is asking for bad press.

“But it is also beyond dispute that Clinton has blended the altruistic efforts of his philanthropy with the private business interests of some of his biggest donors in ways that are surpassingly sloppy, if not unseemly, for any former president.”

Purdum’s catchall excuse for differentiating Clinton from the cash which flowed to former president’s Reagan, Bush, and Ford is that “their wives never ran for president,” as though Clinton coverage only started with Hillary’s run. The current White House occupant goes unmentioned, along with Barbara Bush using the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund as a pass-through to troubled son Neil.

Mama Tried

Signal Intelligence

Your War President wants you to know: he cares about sending wrong signals.

Getting his story straight is another thing.

President Bush let it be known in an interview with The Politico that he too feels families pain over Iraq [but not enough to attend soldier’s funerals], and he’s given up golf for the duration.

“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

But apparently not biking,

fishing,

segwaying,

or near religious

attendence

at baseball’s opening day.

When did the light go on?

“Bush said he made that decision after the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top U.N. official in Iraq and the organization’s high commissioner for human rights…”I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man’s life,” he said. “I was playing golf — I think I was in central Texas — and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, ‘It’s just not worth it anymore to do.’”

But as AFP reports, he kept playing for two more months.

He’d been under the spotlight before things went south in Iraq, most famously while denouncing suicide bombers in 2002.

” “I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers.”

His business out of the way, Bush barely paused for breath before saying, “Thank you. Now watch this drive.”

”