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Don’t Try This At Home

The Boston Herald visits the storied Reagan Ranch, and learns that Ronald Reagan was Just Like Us, if by us you mean a god ‘n guns guy. Because after all, ‘The last U.S. president to hunt was Ronald Reagan…”

Maybe so, but try and find a picture of Reagan with a gun which isn’t a movie still.

The Reagan Ranch is now run as a conservative tourist/fundraising stop by the Young Americas Foundation, and they had beloved Boston talk radio personality Michael Graham up for a look.

He was not disappointed.

“…while roaming the Reagan Ranch just outside Santa Barbara, I saw with my own eyes the vast gulf between and the politician some believe is the Reagan of 2008, Barack Obama…It was on display in the two (count ‘em, TWO!) leather-covered Bibles in the Reagan bedroom and the well-stocked gun case nearby.”

What he saw and how they got there is unknowable given the YAF’s dubious history of artifact shuffling.

Let’s explore the land of the ever-fruitful “Reagan Jeep.”

The Spring 2006 issue of YAF’s Libertas has a blue jeep at the ranch,

but by August a visiting right wing blogger saw a red jeep, which appears to have some provenance.

The YAFers seem confused. Their publication mentions Ronald Reagan’s jeep called “Gipper.” on display at their Santa Barbara “Reagan Ranch Center.”

[note “scrambler”]

Perhaps their confusion comes from a license plate they have .

I have no idea what they have, and they may not either.
Yet another “Reagan jeep” was offered for sale at a Houston car auction in early May 2008.

I Dream of Africa

The Ghanaian army has ended our fun, denouncing independent presidential candidate Richard Nixon Tetteh as a fraud.

Tetteh claimed to be a former Warrant Officer, but the army says he was only a private, and under the name Samuel Nixon Tettey.

Weakly Readers

The mother/daughter Bush author tag team worked it almost up to Jenna’s wedding, but America’s paper of record is unimpressed.

“Whom is this book supposed to convince, and of what? Leaving aside that part of the base who will find the conjuring of ghosts and dragons deeply suspicious, kids who already understand how stories work will see that this one doesn’t, and kids who don’t like stories won’t be persuaded otherwise. … The point is laboriously made, the teachers’ names are dorky, the plot is hectic and the suspense and dialogue are artificial. What child today says “pesky”?”

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.”

”

Where It All Went Wrong?

A perennial feature every campaign season is the release of genealogies supposedly demonstrating which kings, past presidents and vaguely familiar names presidential candidates are related to.

A lot of the work is done by genealogy hobbyists, sometimes assisted by the candidate’s own wild-ass claims. John McCain was recently called out for a bogus claim of descent from Robert The Bruce.

Hunt To Kill

And now Richard Nixon is nominated for historical orphan-hood.

A long and lustrous line is shown for Nixon on Genealogy.com, but a critic hopes to chop it off in the 18th Century. Will Johnson says Genealogy.com grafted Nixon onto a family tree he has no business in.

Getting down in these weeds leads you to questions like: “The 1st and 2nd Baronet of Burton Agnes: dead-enders?”

“…the extinction of the baronetcy proves that neither Sir Henry 1st Baronet, nor Sir Henry 2nd Baronet had any surviving male- line issue. i.e. brothers, sons, nephews in the male line…[It] also disconnects Richard Nixon from this family. His ancestor, if he was indeed his ancestor at all, Samuel Griffith said-to-be “of Wigmore” who died in Maryland in 1717, does not belong to this family. “

If Nixon’s Genealogy.com ancestry held up he would be some sort of cousin to McCain and Obama . They are all supposed to be relatives of King Edward 1, famous for invading Scotland and expelling the Jews from England.

Father of Our Country