Bringing Sexy Back 
A discredited president had sapped the Nation’s spirits, as a seemingly endless war ground on with no resolution in site.
A hero arose to lift the people’s spirits. Never-mind that he was dead, and that the stories which inspired us were a tissue of lies – America loves a happy ending.
Can Ronald Reagan do for the Oughts what Harry Truman did for the Seventies? One Hollywood dream-weaver is determined to find out.
Republican hack of legend Lionel Chetwynd is launching a one man Ronald Reagan play, touring the provinces before filming the stage show for wide screen fun.
Dodgy, Yet Beloved 
The Truman industry launched in the wake Richard Nixon’s demise on the strength of Merle Miller’s Plain Speaking, the source of a thousand Harry Tales that can’t quite be verified.
Feist never fails. New Truman material is constantly arising to meet the Nation’s insatiable demand, and such is the legend’s strength that even discoveries of his mutterings about the Jews can’t tarnish the legend.
Education Abroad 
Richard Nixon son-in-law and New York McCain campaign chair Ed Cox sees haunting parallels between Veep-To-Be Sarah Palin and Tricky Dick*. 
The secret of Nixon’s success? Near death experiences at the hands of foreign mobs!
“Eisenhower in 1952 was also old for a person to be elected president …He had this young senator from California named Richard Nixon. He sent him on an around-the-world trip. Because of his intellectual interest in it, and because of what he was, he was able to learn the way of the world very quickly.”
And it weren’t no book learnin.
*Somehow she’s also Fighting Harry.
Telling Tales 
Having done his part to continue the Clinton era celebration of Harry Truman’s muscular liberalism, Peter Beinart is casting his eyes back further, to the glories of Wilsonian foreign policy.
It’s somehow to be different from George W. Bush Wilsonism. 
Beinart presents a highly selective version of Wilson, what he might call “coherent.” It’s heavy on Wilson’s doomed world vision for after that messy war he joined. Wilson without tears – no unhappy interventions in Russia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nicaragua [inherited], no teaching the Mexicans to elect good men.
It’s gonna be great.
“McCain’s singular focus may be more easily grasped; Obama’s broader catalogue could end up sounding less like a vision than a list. Collective security offers a way of linking these disparate concerns and telling a coherent story about today’s problems and how to solve them…In 1916, Woodrow Wilson talked of “a common order, a common justice and a common peace.” In the 2007 Foreign Affairs article in which he set out his foreign policy views, Barack Obama wrote about “common threats,” “common security,” and a “common humanity.” America’s fate and the world’s fate, both men were trying to say, are ultimately indivisible. We rise together or fall together. Never has the world so badly needed to hear these words from an American president, and never have the American people been so prepared to embrace them. Wilson’s dream has been too long deferred. The time to revive it is now.”
Invisible Man 
The timeless aura of Plain Speakin’ & Brisk Walking Harry Truman claims another victim.
The 2008 campaign has already featured John Mccain wistfully recalling halcyon days when Truman strolled the capitol, accompanied by a single Secret Service agent.
Barack Obama has topped that on a visit to the Independence shrine, imagining Truman did it with no security.
“The thing that I envy most about Truman was that when he was in the White House, he could go out and take a walk. He could put on that fedora and take a stroll, without someone following him”
Obama had better watch his back. While he hit the Truman Memorial Building, and Truman’s home, Obama skipped the Truman Library, making the Library Board Chairman all huffy.
Trumanesque or Trumanish? 
Get Me Central 
Thrilling new tapes from the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library are released, showing his intense identification with Israel.
All well and good, but tales of American presidents and the plucky Jewish State are beginning to get mushy. We’ve had Harry Truman’s recognition of Israel commemorated, a hideous Kennedy memorial defaces the Jerusalem 
landscape, and Johnson’s Jewish ties are being extended back to his first term in Congress.
With some unfortunate photo placement.
The effect of all this is to extend the current US role as Israeli’s godfather back in time, burying the whole period when France provided nuclear technology and most of their conventional weapons, and of Czechoslovakia’s arms during the War of Independence.
The anachronistic centrality we are seeing starts is beginning to resemble the hemp cultists 
counting past presidents who grew the crop.
