Remembering history the way they wished it had been
A Very Special Agent 
The Washington Post reports new material on Gerry Ford’s proud past as one of our FBI Informant/Presidents.
Ford’s leaking on the Warren Commission to troglodytious J.Edgar Hoover has surfaced before, but the Post FOIA’d Ford’s FBI file, and has new detail.
Friend To All
Ford’s fellow Friend of the Bureau was of course Ronald Reagan.
Never To Be Forgotten  
Odessa Texas’s Presidential Museum is getting out while they can, trying to unload one of their inventory of former Midland-Odessa Bush homes.
This slice of rustic splendor and site of early Bush political disappointment 
 can be yours for the low, low price of $239,900!
Rocky Mountains, High  
Further up the food chain is this fab Ford property for sale in Beaver Creek Colorado. Only $15 million separates you from skiing like Gerry Fancypants. 
Sadly, the Bush property has knocked out one of the Ford home’s unique selling propositions,
“…. the even rarer distinction of being the only former president’s home for sale in the country.”
Your Bucks Could Stop Here! Â 
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.
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.
Up Where We Belong 
Gerald Ford’s former Colorado home is for sale, and the frenzy is unrestrained!
“To our knowledge, it has been generations since the home of a former President has been offered to the open marketplace…and this is the only one in history to have such a prized location.“
Well.
Ford’s own home in Alexandria Virginia has languished on the market lately. To our knowledge there have recently been two Nixons and a Kennedy sold, a Harding changed hands in 2004, a Reagan in 2000, and Eleanor Roosevelt’s former home is for rent.
No word if the Colorado Ford property includes his home x-ray machine.
