America’s Widow® In Myth & Legend    

What can’t we recall about Eternal Former First Lady Nancy Reagan?

A chronicle of her death foretold!

Barack Obama’s shocking reference to Nancy’s astrology interests.

How Nancy pioneered fashion grifting, clearing the path for Sarah Palin.

With the Reagan Library running out of things to say, Nancy came to the rescue with a show about the many fancy dresses she somehow acquired during her Washington years.

Nancy’s Sacramento Legacy: California’s homeless Governors.

How the Reagan Library, Nancy Reagan Impresario, managed to bring cult religion to a 9/11 memorial.

When Nancy paused from Reagan monument unveiling to pile up more cash for the Reagan Library, the most grotesquely overstuffed of our nation’s presidential mausoleums.

That time Nancy teamed up with a noted Congressional whorehound to get Ronnie’s statue into the Capitol building on the double.

When she worked to squeeze out naysayers, or anyone independent, from the Reagan centennial Commission.

How the Reagan Library found room for Nancy’s dresses, notes from Ronnie and a god damn Boeing 707, but somehow can’t cover Iran-Contra because it lacks “freshness.”

Her Saudi diamond trove.

How love of her life Ronald Reagan was bonking Doris Day in the runup to marrying a pregnant Nancy.

That time “Just Say No” nostalgia failed to put John McCain over the top.

When they photo shopped Nancy’s head  into the dedication of the Reagan aircraft carrier. 

When the Reagan Library lost all that stuff.

                  What’s your favorite #NancyMemory?

Liberty Triumphant Over A Dead Cow?  Treasures From The Yeltsin Center  

The New York Times reports another outbreak of American style presidentialish-ness, this time in the wilds of Russia.

The Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center looms over Yekaterinburg, where young Boris began his climb of the greasy Communist pole.  His previous boosts to local history  include destroying  the building where the Bolsheviks killed the Russian royal family.

Boris is going to get the full American cheese plate, with stirring versions of his “compelling personal story” and a reproduction of his tank-standing posture in the events leading up to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Tanks for the Memories  

Tank-adjacent events apparently not to be marked include his killing hundreds while shelling the Parliament which had impeached him.   Americans still basking in the afterglow of Saint Ronnie’s miracle victory over Communism may not recall that in the aftermath of  Parliament’s defeat Yeltsin rewrote the constitution removing any limits on Presidential power, enjoyed two genocidal wars in Chechnya and elevated the obscure Vladimir Putin to greatness.  While looting the economy.

Visitors will thrill to a recreation [“not a replica” the Times stresses] of his presidential office, featuring the actual furniture.

Instead, we can focus on how come all the fancy Decision Points® Theatre interactivity doesn’t give us a “choice” on the real question: stopping the Florida recount.

 

 Like a very fancy high school.

 Fashion Statement 

Not resting on his laurels from making the Associated Press a Washington punchline, Ron Fournier seems committed to dragging the National Journal down too. Sensing the change in the seasons, Fournier felt compelled to mark Bush Library Week with a thoughtful wad of pap entitled ‘Go Ahead, Admit It: George W. Bush Is a Good Man’

For proof, look no further than the Dignity of the Office dress code Bush strictly enforced:

“The same sense of dignity compelled Bush to forbid his staff to wear blue jeans in the White House. Male aides were required to wear jackets and ties in the Oval Office.

This is a very tired old lie, exploded moments after former Bush Chief of Staff Andy Card made the claim in 2009 as part of an attack on those lax Obama staffers.  It has had a vigorous half life among idiots, but Fournier seems determined to strike at the National Journal’s reputation too.

He is everything awful about Washington:

“Fournier wants you people to remember that politeness is always measured by the thank you notes that a person sends, not the people that one indiscriminately bombs without provocation.”

He’s an old hand at this, having offered Karl Rove solace and advice in his difficult work faking up the Pat Tillman death narrative.

 It’s Like They Never Left  

It’s almost Bush Library Eve, and the witches are emerging to cast their spells, trying to persuade a reluctant public that it really wasn’t as bad as all that.  Part of the coven is Stephen F. Knott,  author of “Rush to Judgment: George W. Bush, the War on Terror and His Critics.”

Knott is a long time fan of executive action, weeping for presidential powers lost when the Supreme Court pointed out that Bush couldn’t just wing it at Guantanamo. He dismisses criticism of Bush era torture by pointing [pg 125] to the Truman administration’s wholesale mobilization of ex-Nazis to fight the Commies, so Hitler!

He whines about pundits ganging up on poor George in the pages of the Washington Post, whose editorial page is adorned with not one but two former Bush speech writers – Michael Gerson, the nice one, and the unspeakable Mark Theeson, portly torture enthusiast.

Knott goes after  historians sullying themselves as pundits, calling for careful archival research in the long twilight of power. He’s a professor at the U.S. Naval War College,  but he’s more then just an intellectual adornment of the Navy’s White Walkers. Among Knott’s achievements is a stint co-directing the University of Virginia’s Reagan administration oral history project, where the grizzled veterans whiled away the hours not answering toothless questions.  [see bottom graphs]

Knott quotes Sean Wilentz’s claim for Bush’s uniqueness:

“No other U.S. president “failed to embrace the opposing political party” in wartime, Wilentz claimed, despite numerous examples to the contrary, such as when Franklin D. Roosevelt compared his Republican opponents to fascists in 1944.”

Roosevelt had Republican Secretaries of the Navy and of War, and Knott doesn’t specify where FDR made these shameful claims, but I have an idea where he’s coming from.

Not Roosevelt, but his supporters, engaged in a lot of war and election melding, with domestic enemies denouncing “Roosevelt’s War” morphing into Hitler,  and cartoon workingmen called on to ” sidetrack defeatist limited.”

 

The ’44 Dewey campaign made an early run at what would soon become a Republican perennial, charging that the Democrats were but a front for the Reds.  Dewey elaborated on  the theme in a Boston speech, with the added frisson of Jew baiting in the form of that year’s “You Didn’t Build That.”  Much of the GOP campaign was built around a Roosevelt quote from the smoke filled rooms birthing Harry Truman.  FDR had his minions feel out CIO union leader Sidney Hillman about dumping Vice President Henry Wallace for James F. Brynes,  Hillman wouldn’t go along, and somehow Harry Truman emerged, along with the immortal phrase “Clear It With Sidney” 

Republicans had great fun with “Sidney”, a clear marker for Jews. The comment sections of World Net Daily were sadly not yet available, so their mouth breathing followers entertained themselves  scribbling laughtastic limerick suggestions:

“Political pots have a lid,

Beneath which the cooking is hid.

But it’s easy to tell

From the Bolsehvik smell

Which stew was concocted by Sid.”

Dewey was called out by Roosevelt’s Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, accusing the Governor of toying with red baiting, fascism and  “desperate, contemptible fanning of the flames of religious hatred.“

One president did flat out Nazi bait Dewey, that nice Harry Truman in a 1948 episode of “feistiness.”