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Yesterday Once More

The cutting edge of Ronald Reagan cultism just got a whole lot hipper, with the unveiling of a spankin’ new Reagan IPhone app.

Your Reagan Library [still Iran-Contra free!]  can’t keep track of its holdings or recall our love affair with Pakistan’s      loathsome General Zia, but they are going for techno-bloat with an app bringing you all Reagan’s greatest hits – now you need never be without the wry asides and soft chuckles that killed communism.

Trunk Line   

Diet Deficit Delight

Sarah Palin continues rummaging around the Reagan legend cupboard, searching for a usable past.

She fished up a gem in her Thanksgiving day ramblings, quoting the voice from beyond that

“all great change in America begins at the dinner table.”

What change did the master of folksy smarm propose back in those halcyon days?

His salute to domestic furniture’s decisive role immediately preceded a speech section where Reagan sought to mobilize today’s youth, calling on them to fink out their parents if insufficiently “American.”

“…If your parents haven’t been teaching you what it means to be an American, let ’em know and nail ’em on it“

What one American did to the American diet is clear: Reagan helped further degrade our already tenuous relation of food to nutrition.

The legend is true: Reagan’s administration tried to pass off delicious corn syrupy ketchup as a vegetable until laughed out of town. But they also killed studies of American’s diets, and abolished the office issuing diet and nutrition guidelines.

And Reagan was of course the Father of Frozen Food Day.

Hallowed Be Thy Name

Having already made Ronald Reagan the equivalent of  Roman emperor, Republicans may go the next logical step and proclaim him a god.

A resolution proposed for the Republican National Committee Winter Meeting attempts to tie Republican candidates to a series of  ten conditions.  Reagan’s name is evoked five times in his role as prophet, role-model and seer, with pols instructed to agree or be gone.

Parties have a long history of demarcating the in and the out, with mixed outcomes.

Lenin laid down the law in the Communist International with “The Twenty One Conditions.”

  Results were mixed.  

        Grave Importance   

Fancy color sketches and models of the George W. Bush Presidential Library have been loosed upon an anxious world, and must be mined for clues.

Like, where will they bury him?

Assuming Bush follows the pharaoh-ic path of FDR, Truman, Ike, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and his father’s plan at College Station, he’ll have to be buried on site. If the “Texas Rose Garden” above is a little too outdoorsy, there is the Freedom Tractor Beam inside.

 

The careful viewer will note a presidential quote on the wall behind the generic assembled white folks.

It’s a line from Bush’s 2004 Republican Convention acceptance speech, in which he claimed we are summoned by a “calling from beyond the stars.“  Here on Earth Bush had begun the year attempting a call to greatness with a vague drumbeat for Mars exploration, then buried the exciting initiative by the time of his State of The Union address.

The convention speech itself was delivered with a spaceport motif. 

The Library grounds are touted as a Bush gift to the nation, or at least SMU, providing “numerous spaces for events and gatherings,” but don’t plan your protest rally just yet.

“… unlike the formal, tree-lined landscape of the main campus, this garden contains hills and draws and winding paths that conceal surveillance cameras and other security equipment.“

      

To Equatorial Guinea, where the Dark Continent meets the Deep Blue Sea, and oil floats the ruling family to a higher realm.

A spectacularly corrupt kleptocracy has evolved this West African island and some coast into a tropical gangster parody.

Think Of It As A Name Tag  

President-Till-The-Cows-Come-Home Obiang Nguema Mbasogo has presided for three decades since killing his uncle, the previous dictator, and now the New York Times reports that a swanky bit of Malibu may be forever E.G.

Strongman scion and heir apparent Teodoro Nguema Obiang spends much of his time in a multimillion dollar mansion in this suburb of the stars, despite US laws that nominally bar corrupt foreigners from our shores. 

Equatorial Guinea has been in an expansive mood lately.   The regime recently sprang a mercenary jailed in a murky coup attempt, freeing an unhappy Simon Mann to pursue his claim that Son Of The Iron Lady Mark Thatcher helped the plot.

President Obiang, shown here gathering strength from the martyred Che Guevara,    has friends throughout the world. 

The regime’s website practices a level of delicious shamelessness, posting headlines like  “DEMOCRACY AT ITS PEAK IN EQUATORIAL GUINEA” and leaving them up despite mockery.

  A vast presidential mansion is being built, and even better,  a presidential library! 

Where did this big idea come from?

Equatorial Guinea has had a storied relationship with one American who has promiscuously spread himself over our nation’s Presidential Library universe.

World Beater

Joe L. Allbritton is a cartoonish exaggeration of Washington incestuousness, serving on boards for the Kennedy Center, the Lyndon Johnson, Reagan and George H.W. Bush Presidential Libraries, and a failed effort to bring George W. Bush’s to Baylor University.

Alblbritton financed his service to former greats’ memories through his ownership of Washington’s Riggs Bank, a daisy chain of power ensnaring Russian spies,  Saudi princes, a Bush uncle, General Pinochet and the Obiang family.

For hiding Obiang and Pinochet millions Allbritton lost the bank.  Riggs paid $39 million in US civil and criminal penalties, $8 million in Spain.  Allbritton and his son personally paid one million dollars to Pinochet torture victims.