The thoughtful press peepers at Media Matters For America [just typing it gives a tingle!] have detected a pattern in Republican affairs:  free-floating New Reagan naming, often not tied to any visible speaking skill or charisma.

Christie On A Stick! 

They run down the usual names named, your Palins, Rubios and the like, but several of the reborn seem to have escaped their view.

Lest we forget, some have imagined the mantel falling on Rubio’s leathery opponent, Charlie Crist.  Before his auditioning to become the Robert Byrd of the desert wastelands,  John McCain was considered amoung the Reagan Undead. Until he stumbled into a cracker history morass Virginia Governor Robert F. “Bob” McDonnell was seen, at least in Pat Robertson’s alternative universe, as Reaganesque. And South Korean hard man President Lee Myung-bak was Reagan walking until it was discovered voters didn’t thrill to the prospect of confrontation with the North.

But our favorite New Reagan of Today lives in South Africa:

  step forward President Zuma!

History didn’t deter them at the time, but we Americans are an optimistic people.

 The Washington Post reports another exciting example of our betters communicating with us via the Twitter, fostering new vistas of openness and communication.

The Twit in question is beloved Jordanian Queen Rania, who like Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan types from on high to her million plus  followers.

Unfortunately her husband the King has his own ideas about transparency.

The Post says magic Kingdom is implementing laws regulating Internet speech which include forced labor to punish infractions. This has not prevented the Queen from emitting on such controversial topics as education [for it!] and micro-finance [splendid idea].

Her Huffington Post column is comparatively hard edged, with the Palestinian descended monarch actually flirting with criticising Israel.

Your fascinating future of Social Media beacons!

Social Times, “Your Social Media Source,” has discovered a new internet hero, the leader of a nation who engages with his public not just at election time, but online.  Meet Goodluck Jonathan, President of Nigeria and Facebook aficionado.

Jonathan is West Africa’s Mohamed Nasheed,  a man we’ve never heard of  doing ostensibly good things in a country we don’t care about, helped by the magic of the Internet.

  The Nigerian President inherited office when his predecessor died, and his version of a listening tour includes writing and reading posts, by someone if not him.  Social Times says “Goodluck Jonathan shows The World How How Politicians Should Use Facebook,” citing his vast following and the fount of commentary unleashed by his musings.

And it’s all for the children:

“Jonathan’s Facebook account is not part of a political campaign or a marketing strategy. It is not simply there so that his government can say they “understand social media and new technology”. He is using Facebook as a tool to engage in a two-way conversation with his citizens, hearing their concerns and raising his own. This increases transparency and accountability, while showing the world that his government is active and concerned about its citizens.“

  Social Times’s example of Jonathan’s minding the little people is his reversing his own decision barring Nigeria’s soccer team from play after their poor World Cup showing, after the keyboard army mobilized. That FIFA threatened to ban any Nigerian team from any play anywhere apparently didn’t figure in.

  And all the transparency Jonathan has emitted on Facebook hasn’t kept his supporters from silencing critics the old fashioned way, by shutting down their political rallies.

It’s come to this: after being around for 20 years, the Nixon Library’s best spokesman defending the Nixon “legacy” is creationist fraudster and imaginary civil rights veteran Ben Stein.

The  celebration of 20 proud years is in the spirit of the man, with events featuring such 60s legends as Freddie “The Jew Counter” Malek.

The Library spent most of these years with no actual Nixon presidential documents. It’s been a place of song, myth, and wedding rentals,  staffed by the fervent few who still believe Nixon’s vindication will come, someday.

CultureWares.com celebrates Nixon’s Twenty Years Of Lustration.

Americans like to think of D-Day as a splendid battle which, while tough, prefigured our inevitable sweep to victory over Germany. How it came to be  that most of the German army was elsewhere, or where the slave laborers who built the Germans’ “Atlantic Wall” came from are petty distractions.

So it comes as no surprise that Joseph Stalin is becoming unwelcome at a Virginia war memorial, reminding us that we didn’t beat Hitler all by our lonesome.

   Bedford Virginia’s National D-Day Memorial is a vast crop circle of memorials,

with hideous arches,

and landing beach recreations.

And statues.  There is an Eisenhower statue in its own “Tuscon folly” , but somehow it’s not controversial that the father of Reyonlds Wrap gets to slap his name on the garden.

Among busts of famed war leaders Stalin makes the cut, and the planners have mumbled something about the Russians fighting over yonder contributing to the D-Day victory.

To the world’s outrage.

Skunk At The Picnic 

The creators are making an effort, possibly unique in American public recollection of the war, at remembering the Soviet people’s epic sacrifice in defeating fascism.  No doubt Stalin was guilty of many crimes, but he’s hardly the only problem with the proposed memorial if we are going to get fussy.

Perhaps the trouble stems from the monument’s differences to great man history

  Why is Harry Truman there?  He wasn’t even Vice President at the time of the landing

A belated salute to the Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott, who July 4th shared with readers his meditations on America and the world’s obsession with replicating homes of the great and the good, or at least George Washington.  

Mount Vernon, soon to host another superfluous “Presidential Library,” holds first place in the nation’s architectural imagination, or lack thereof.  Kennicott spotlights the many sad recreations of the Big House,  and Lydia Mattice Brandt’s research into America’s mysterious practice of making foreigners and school children troop through replicas at half a dozen World’s Fairs and exhibitions.

We Might Be Giants    
Current star practitioner of this architectural ghost walking is Alan Greenberg, whose accomplishments include a toy house Mount Vernon for future Chief Executives with excess family cash, and a “flagship” store for the always strenuously patriotic Tommy Hilfiger.

Ronald Reagan exhibited some of these morbid symptoms, enjoying work at a replica of George Washington’s desk before he was president even of the Screen Actors Guild.

It’s not only the Great House.

       Kentucky proudly hosts a fake Abraham Lincoln boyhood cabin, now replicated on coins.

And an Okinawa businessman’s strange fakery compulsions could only be satisfied with a recreation of Bill Clinton’s boyhood home.

On Okinawa.

National Resource Wonkette tries to probe the deeper meaning of the Washington Post’s probe of the unfortunate Founding Fathers impersonators revival.

In a new ad, automobile welfare queen Chrysler has George Washington scattering his enemies with a sensible sedan, and the Post thinks they may be tipping their tricorn towards the Teabaggers.

Hats off to Chrysler’s new owners, the United Auto Workers.

Weak Tea

Having already  incorporated Truman and Kennedy into the conservative pantheon, reactionaries are now critiquing Barack Obama for being just not FDR-ish enough

Portly torture enthusiast,  former Bush speech writer and stain on the Washington Post op/ed page Mark Theeson is out with an exciting new line of pretend argument: that unless Obama mans up and fully enjoys fighting both depression and war  he’ll end up a spent husk like Lyndon Johnson.

For purposes of lamenting Obama’s failure to use his oratorical powers in service of hustling the East, Thiessen assumes the guise of someone excited about expansive federal government, saddened by the stunting of LBJ’s Great Society.

A stance not often seen in the folds of the American Enterprise Institute, where the creator of wistful love notes to safely dead Democrats lies.

Rick “Re-Animator” Barber triumphantly mobilized George Washington’s ghost in the Alabama 2nd House District campaign, and now our first Republican president has been summoned to the cause. 

Plus Holocaust victims!  

Over The Top don’t begin to describe it.