After he'd been President for a few years, I did notice a difference in how
he spoke. I had the feeling that he was reciting lines, that often, he was
on the verge of forgetting what to say next. Of course, at the time, I
didn't know that his brain was acdtually deteriorating, but I felt like
there was something wrong with him.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, March 21, 2016 11:06 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] A clearer picture of the fuzzy mind of Ronald
Reagan
When the expression, "Plastic People" came into being, describing those
people who had no real depth to them, I always had a mental picture of the
great "B" actor, Ronald Reagan in mind.
While I must admit, I had no idea the Gippers Brain had deteriorated to the
point of being challenged by basic information, I still knew that he was all
front with nothing behind that familiar face. I will have to admit that
Ronald Reagan did his Handlers good, playing the part of President of the
United States of America with more ability
than he ever showed in his "also ran" movies. He gained popularity
by hosting the Death Valley Days, a popular TV show of the day. "At General
Electric, Progress is Our Most Important Product", became his most often
spoken line. And he had it down pat, proving to the Ruling Class that he
could be a very manageable shill.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/20/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Obama has cited Reagan's greatness. Hillary praised Nancy the otherwills it so.
day, apparently telling an untruth which she had to walk back.
Miriam
Excerpt: "The press flattered him endlessly and vastly exaggerated his
popularity and his achievements, starting with the nonsense that he
'ended the Cold War'. He did nothing of the sort, the Soviet Union's
sclerotic economy having doomed it long before Reagan became president."
Ronald and Nancy Reagan. (photo: unknown)
The Cult of the Reagans
By Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn, CounterPunch 20 March 16
The queen of head is dead. At 94, the life of Nancy Reagan, the pin-up
girl for the genocidal War on Drugs, finally blinked out. Rat Pack
actor Peter Lawford, who frequently appeared on Ronald Reagans
General Electric Theatre, wrote in his memoir that Nancy gave the best
blowjobs in Hollywood.
Its one of the most benign things you could say about the woman who
saw herself as a kind of Catherine the Great for the American Imperium.
Already the airwaves are throbbing with misty tributes to the Reagan
years, an age than never really was. Here then is a corrective to the
manufactured history of Ron and Nancy and their court that Alexander
Cockburn and I wrote on the centenary of Reagans birth. JSC he
script of the recurring homages to the Reagans remains unchanging:
with the Gippers straightforward, sunny disposition and aw-shucks
can-do style the manly Reagan gave America back its confidence. In
less flattering terms, Reagan and his PR crew catered expertly to the
demands of the American national fantasy: that homely common sense
could return America to the vigor of its youth and the economy of the
1950s.
When Reagan took over the Oval Office at the age of 66 whatever powers
of concentration he might have once had were failing. The Joint Chiefs
of Staff mounted their traditional show-and-tell briefings for him,
replete with simple charts and a senior general explicating them in
simple terms. Reagan found these briefings much too complicated and
dozed off.
The Joint Chiefs then set up a secret unit, staffed by cartoonists.
The balance of forces were set forth in easily accessible caricature,
with Soviet missiles the size of upended Zeppelins, pulsing on their
launch-pads, with the miniscule US ICBMs shriveled in their bunkers.
Little cartoon bubbles would contain the points the joint chiefs
wanted to hammer into Reagans brain, most of them to the effect that
we need more money. The president really enjoyed the shows and
sometimes even asked for repeats.
Reagan had abolished any tiresome division of the world into fact or
fiction in the early 1940s when his studios PR department turned him
into a war hero, courtesy of his labors in Fort Wacky in Culver
City, where they made training films. The fanzines disclosed the
loneliness of R.R.s first wife, Jane Wyman, her absent man (a few
miles away in Fort Wacky, home by
suppertime) and her knowledge of R.R.s hatred of the foe.
Shed seen Ronnies sick face, Modern Screen reported in 1942, bent
over a picture of the small, swollen bodies of children starved to
death in Poland. This, said the war-hating Reagan between set lips,
would make it a pleasure to kill. A photographer for Modern Screen
recalled later that, unlike some stars who were reluctant to offer
themselves to his lens in heros garb, Reagan insisted on being
photographed on his front step in full uniform, kissing his wife goodbye.
Years later Reagan boasted (that is: lied) about liberating the Nazi
death camps, even as he was forced to defend his deranged decision to
bestow presidential honors on the dead at the cemetery in Bitburg,
Germany, final resting place for the blood-drenched butchers of the
Waffen SS. Reagan possessed a special talent for the suspension of
disbelief when it came to the facts of his own life. Perhaps, if the
earth in Simi Valley ever decides to disgorge his corpse, the
custodians of Bitburg could erect a cenotaph for Reagan on those
chilly grounds.
The problem for the press was that Reagan didnt really care that hed
been caught out with another set of phony statistics or a bogus
anecdote. Truth, for him, was what he happened to be saying at the
time. When the Iran/contra scandal broke, he held a press conference
in which he said to Helen Thomas of UPI, I want to get to the bottom
of this and find out all that has happened. And so far, Ive told you
all that I know and, you know, the truth of the matter is, for quite
some time, all that you knew was what Id told you. He went one
better than George Washington in that he couldnt tell a lie and he
couldnt tell the truth, since he couldnt tell the difference between
the two.
His mind was a wastebasket of old clippings from Popular Science, SF
magazines (the origin of Star Wars, aka the Strategic Defense
Initiative) lines from movies and homely saws from the Readers Digest
and the Sunday supplements.
Like his wife Nancy, Ronnie had a stout belief in astrology, the stars
being the twinkling penumbra of his incandescent belief in the free
market,
with
whose motions it was blasphemous to tamper. He believed Armageddon was
right around the corner. He also believed tomato ketchup could be
classified as a school meal, striking back at the nose-candy crowd
who, as Stevie Earle once said, spent the Seventies trying to get
cocaine classified as a vegetable.
Reagans view of Nature was strictly utilitarian. When Reagan was
governor of California, David Brower, the great arch-Druid, goaded him
into making his infamous declaration: Once youve seen one redwood,
youve seen them all. That Zen koan-like pronouncement pretty much
summed up Reagans philosophy of environmental tokenism. Later, Reagan
propounded the thesis that trees generated more air pollution than
coal-fired power plants. For Reagan, the only excuse for Nature was to
serve as a backdrop for photo-ops, just like in his intros for Death
Valley Days, the popular western TV series that served as a catwalk
for the rollout of the B-movie actor as a national politician.
To execute his rapine environmental policies, Reagan turned to his
Interior Secretary James Watt, whose approach to the plunder of the
planet seethed with an evangelical fervor. He brought with him to
Washington a gang of libertarian missionaries, mostly veterans of the
Adolf Coors-funded Mountain States Legal Foundation, who referred to
themselves as The Colorado Crazies. Their mission: privatize the
public estate. Many of them were transparent crooks who ended up
facing indictment and doing time in federal prison for self-dealing
and public corruption. They gave away billions in public timber, coal,
and oil to favored corporations, leaving behind toxic scars where
there used to be wild forests, trout streams, and deserts.
These
thieves were part of the same claque of race-baiting zealots who
demonized welfare mothers as swindlers of the public treasury.
Watt, who was himself charged with twenty-five felony counts of lying
and obstruction of justice, never hid his rapacious agenda behind
soft, made-for-primetime rhetoric. He never preached about win-win
solutions, ecological forestry, or sustainable development. From the
beginning, James Watts message was clear: grab it all, grab it now. God
Hearing all the cosy talk about the Gipper, young people spared thehe left Washington DC.
experience of his awful sojourn in office, probably imagine him as a
kindly, avuncular figure. Not so. He was a callous man, with a breezy
indifference to suffering and the consequences of his decisions. This
indifference was so profound that Dante would surely have consigned
him to one of the lowest circles of hell, to roast for all eternity in
front of a TV set on the blink and a dinner tray swinging out of reach
like the elusive fruits that tormented Tantalus.
It was startling, back in 2004 when he died, to see the lines of
people sweating under a hot sun waiting to see Reagans casket. How
could any of them take the dreadful old faker seriously? The nearest
thing to it was the hysteria over Princess Di.
The explosion of the Challenger space shuttle of January 28, 1986, a
disaster that prompted one of the peak kitsch moments in a presidency
that was kitsch from start to finish. Reagan ended his address to the
nation
thus: We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this
morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and
slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.
In fact it was the White House that had doomed Christa McAuliffe and
her companions to be burned alive in the plummeting Challenger. The
news event required the Challenger to go into orbit and be flying over
Congress while Reagan was delivering his state of the union address.
He was to tilt his head upward and, presumably gazing through the
long-distance half of his spectacles, (one lens was close-up, for
speech reading,) send a presidential greeting to the astronauts. But
this schedule required an early morning launch from chill January
Canaveral. Servile NASA officials ordered the Challenger aloft, with
the frozen O-ring fatally compromised.
Reagan dozed through much of his second term, his day easing forward
through a forgiving schedule of morning nap, afternoon snooze, TV
supper and early bed. He couldnt recall the names of many of his
aides, even of his dog.
Stories occasionally swirled around Washington that his aides pondered
from time to time whether to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment.
Reagans sons, Michael and Ronnie, disagreed whether or not his
Alzheimers began when he was president. Normalcy and senile
dementia were hard to distinguish. The official onset was six years after
As an orator or communicator Reagan was terrible, with one turgidthe Cold War.
cliché following another, delivered in a folksy drone. His range of
rhetorical artifice was terribly limited.
The press flattered him endlessly and vastly exaggerated his
popularity and his achievements, starting with the nonsense that he ended
He did nothing of the sort, the Soviet Unions sclerotic economyposition.
having doomed it long before Reagan became president.
He lavished money on the rich and the Pentagon. The tendencies he
presided over were probably inevitable, given the balance of political
forces after the postwar boom hit the ceiling in the late 1960s. Then
it was a matter of triage, as the rich made haste to consolidate their
It was a straight line from Reagans crude attacks on welfare queenswills it so.
to Clintons compassionate chewings of the lip (same head wag as RRs)
as he swore to end welfare as we know it. As a PR man, it was
Reagans role, to reassure the wealthy and the privileged that not
only might but right was on their side, and that government, in
whatever professed role, was utterly malign.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
valid.
Ronald and Nancy Reagan. (photo: unknown)
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/07/the-cult-of-the-reagans/http://
www.co unterpunch.org/2016/03/07/the-cult-of-the-reagans/
The Cult of the Reagans
By Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn, CounterPunch 20 March 16
The queen of head is dead. At 94, the life of Nancy Reagan, the pin-up
girl for the genocidal War on Drugs, finally blinked out. Rat Pack
actor Peter Lawford, who frequently appeared on Ronald Reagans
General Electric Theatre, wrote in his memoir that Nancy gave the best
blowjobs in Hollywood.
Its one of the most benign things you could say about the woman who
saw herself as a kind of Catherine the Great for the American Imperium.
Already the airwaves are throbbing with misty tributes to the Reagan
years, an age than never really was. Here then is a corrective to the
manufactured history of Ron and Nancy and their court that Alexander
Cockburn and I wrote on the centenary of Reagans birth. JSC he
script of the recurring homages to the Reagans remains unchanging:
with the Gippers straightforward, sunny disposition and aw-shucks
can-do style the manly Reagan gave America back its confidence. In
less flattering terms, Reagan and his PR crew catered expertly to the
demands of the American national fantasy: that homely common sense
could return America to the vigor of its youth and the economy of the
1950s.
When Reagan took over the Oval Office at the age of 66 whatever powers
of concentration he might have once had were failing. The Joint Chiefs
of Staff mounted their traditional show-and-tell briefings for him,
replete with simple charts and a senior general explicating them in
simple terms. Reagan found these briefings much too complicated and
dozed off.
The Joint Chiefs then set up a secret unit, staffed by cartoonists.
The balance of forces were set forth in easily accessible caricature,
with Soviet missiles the size of upended Zeppelins, pulsing on their
launch-pads, with the miniscule US ICBMs shriveled in their bunkers.
Little cartoon bubbles would contain the points the joint chiefs
wanted to hammer into Reagans brain, most of them to the effect that
we need more money. The president really enjoyed the shows and
sometimes even asked for repeats.
Reagan had abolished any tiresome division of the world into fact or
fiction in the early 1940s when his studios PR department turned him
into a war hero, courtesy of his labors in Fort Wacky in Culver
City, where they made training films. The fanzines disclosed the
loneliness of R.R.s first wife, Jane Wyman, her absent man (a few
miles away in Fort Wacky, home by
suppertime) and her knowledge of R.R.s hatred of the foe.
Shed seen Ronnies sick face, Modern Screen reported in 1942, bent
over a picture of the small, swollen bodies of children starved to
death in Poland. This, said the war-hating Reagan between set lips,
would make it a pleasure to kill. A photographer for Modern Screen
recalled later that, unlike some stars who were reluctant to offer
themselves to his lens in heros garb, Reagan insisted on being
photographed on his front step in full uniform, kissing his wife goodbye.
Years later Reagan boasted (that is: lied) about liberating the Nazi
death camps, even as he was forced to defend his deranged decision to
bestow presidential honors on the dead at the cemetery in Bitburg,
Germany, final resting place for the blood-drenched butchers of the
Waffen SS. Reagan possessed a special talent for the suspension of
disbelief when it came to the facts of his own life. Perhaps, if the
earth in Simi Valley ever decides to disgorge his corpse, the
custodians of Bitburg could erect a cenotaph for Reagan on those
chilly grounds.
The problem for the press was that Reagan didnt really care that hed
been caught out with another set of phony statistics or a bogus
anecdote. Truth, for him, was what he happened to be saying at the
time. When the Iran/contra scandal broke, he held a press conference
in which he said to Helen Thomas of UPI, I want to get to the bottom
of this and find out all that has happened. And so far, Ive told you
all that I know and, you know, the truth of the matter is, for quite
some time, all that you knew was what Id told you. He went one
better than George Washington in that he couldnt tell a lie and he
couldnt tell the truth, since he couldnt tell the difference between
the two.
His mind was a wastebasket of old clippings from Popular Science, SF
magazines (the origin of Star Wars, aka the Strategic Defense
Initiative) lines from movies and homely saws from the Readers Digest
and the Sunday supplements.
Like his wife Nancy, Ronnie had a stout belief in astrology, the stars
being the twinkling penumbra of his incandescent belief in the free
market,
with
whose motions it was blasphemous to tamper. He believed Armageddon was
right around the corner. He also believed tomato ketchup could be
classified as a school meal, striking back at the nose-candy crowd
who, as Stevie Earle once said, spent the Seventies trying to get
cocaine classified as a vegetable.
Reagans view of Nature was strictly utilitarian. When Reagan was
governor of California, David Brower, the great arch-Druid, goaded him
into making his infamous declaration: Once youve seen one redwood,
youve seen them all. That Zen koan-like pronouncement pretty much
summed up Reagans philosophy of environmental tokenism. Later, Reagan
propounded the thesis that trees generated more air pollution than
coal-fired power plants. For Reagan, the only excuse for Nature was to
serve as a backdrop for photo-ops, just like in his intros for Death
Valley Days, the popular western TV series that served as a catwalk
for the rollout of the B-movie actor as a national politician.
To execute his rapine environmental policies, Reagan turned to his
Interior Secretary James Watt, whose approach to the plunder of the
planet seethed with an evangelical fervor. He brought with him to
Washington a gang of libertarian missionaries, mostly veterans of the
Adolf Coors-funded Mountain States Legal Foundation, who referred to
themselves as The Colorado Crazies. Their mission: privatize the
public estate. Many of them were transparent crooks who ended up
facing indictment and doing time in federal prison for self-dealing
and public corruption. They gave away billions in public timber, coal,
and oil to favored corporations, leaving behind toxic scars where
there used to be wild forests, trout streams, and deserts.
These
thieves were part of the same claque of race-baiting zealots who
demonized welfare mothers as swindlers of the public treasury.
Watt, who was himself charged with twenty-five felony counts of lying
and obstruction of justice, never hid his rapacious agenda behind
soft, made-for-primetime rhetoric. He never preached about win-win
solutions, ecological forestry, or sustainable development. From the
beginning, James Watts message was clear: grab it all, grab it now. God
Hearing all the cosy talk about the Gipper, young people spared thehe left Washington DC.
experience of his awful sojourn in office, probably imagine him as a
kindly, avuncular figure. Not so. He was a callous man, with a breezy
indifference to suffering and the consequences of his decisions. This
indifference was so profound that Dante would surely have consigned
him to one of the lowest circles of hell, to roast for all eternity in
front of a TV set on the blink and a dinner tray swinging out of reach
like the elusive fruits that tormented Tantalus.
It was startling, back in 2004 when he died, to see the lines of
people sweating under a hot sun waiting to see Reagans casket. How
could any of them take the dreadful old faker seriously? The nearest
thing to it was the hysteria over Princess Di.
The explosion of the Challenger space shuttle of January 28, 1986, a
disaster that prompted one of the peak kitsch moments in a presidency
that was kitsch from start to finish. Reagan ended his address to the
nation
thus: We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this
morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and
slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.
In fact it was the White House that had doomed Christa McAuliffe and
her companions to be burned alive in the plummeting Challenger. The
news event required the Challenger to go into orbit and be flying over
Congress while Reagan was delivering his state of the union address.
He was to tilt his head upward and, presumably gazing through the
long-distance half of his spectacles, (one lens was close-up, for
speech reading,) send a presidential greeting to the astronauts. But
this schedule required an early morning launch from chill January
Canaveral. Servile NASA officials ordered the Challenger aloft, with
the frozen O-ring fatally compromised.
Reagan dozed through much of his second term, his day easing forward
through a forgiving schedule of morning nap, afternoon snooze, TV
supper and early bed. He couldnt recall the names of many of his
aides, even of his dog.
Stories occasionally swirled around Washington that his aides pondered
from time to time whether to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment.
Reagans sons, Michael and Ronnie, disagreed whether or not his
Alzheimers began when he was president. Normalcy and senile
dementia were hard to distinguish. The official onset was six years after
As an orator or communicator Reagan was terrible, with one turgidthe Cold War.
cliché following another, delivered in a folksy drone. His range of
rhetorical artifice was terribly limited.
The press flattered him endlessly and vastly exaggerated his
popularity and his achievements, starting with the nonsense that he ended
He did nothing of the sort, the Soviet Unions sclerotic economyposition.
having doomed it long before Reagan became president.
He lavished money on the rich and the Pentagon. The tendencies he
presided over were probably inevitable, given the balance of political
forces after the postwar boom hit the ceiling in the late 1960s. Then
it was a matter of triage, as the rich made haste to consolidate their
It was a straight line from Reagans crude attacks on welfare queens
to Clintons compassionate chewings of the lip (same head wag as RRs)
as he swore to end welfare as we know it. As a PR man, it was
Reagans role, to reassure the wealthy and the privileged that not
only might but right was on their side, and that government, in
whatever professed role, was utterly malign.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
