Today, January 25th, 2011 President Barack Obama will make his second State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress and many a political pundit is giddy with excitement guessing which topic will be the primary focus of the speech. In these trying times it is hard to imagine that it would be anything other than jobs, jobs, jobs, but in light of the recent tragic events in Arizona, it is fair to speculate that he will reiterate his call to extend tolerance and civility into political discourse. Back here on planet Earth this is known as 'casting pearls before the swine', but the Prez has never been one to readily accept the reality that the right-wing despise him and everything he represents regardless of how bi-partisan he is. And that is what makes his OpEd piece, published yesterday in USA Today, so totally and completely baffling. In it he praised Ronald Reagan (whose 100th birthday would be coming up soon if he wasn't you know, dead) and said that "he was a patroit that always put his fellow citizens' welfare above all else", and that "we remain forever grateful for the gift that was his view that it was always 'morning in America'."
I'm sorry, what? Are you kidding me?
That's just wrong on so many levels. For a start it's total bullshit. And I mean completely and utterly, pure, unadulterated bullshit. I know, I was there. I became politically aware during Raygun's Reign of Error, and the one thing I know for sure was that he didn't gave a tinkers' damn about his fellow citizens unless they were a) rich, b) white, and c) male...if you were a woman, gay, or a minority you were screwed...He was quite possibly the single most destructive occupant of the Oval Office ever. His disdain for the environment was breathtaking in its' audacity ("when you've seen one Redwood you've seen them all", "trees cause more pollution than automobiles" - yes - he actually said that), his disregard for the mentally ill and those suffering from AIDS was horrifying, and his defense spending was so reckless we are still paying for it now.
Whether he was mentally competent or not during the whole Iran-Contra debacle can be argued ad nauseam (and his son Ron Jr, has said that he was almost literally out of his mind for at least part of his presidency), but the fact remains he still broke the law, and his support of vicious right-wing regimes in Central America was directly responsible for hideous acts of torture and the deaths of many innocent people.
I don't think he was stupid, and I don't think he was (entirely) evil - you know, like Dick Cheney is - I just think he was ill. Seriously ill. A British comedian at the time questioned the sanity of having such an aged old geezer in the Oval Office with his finger hovering over the nuclear trigger when his own grandad was the same age as Reagun, and they wouldn't even let him have control of the t.v remote! Thankfully we never found out, even though the clueless bastard did joke once about launching nukes at Russia as he was warming up for his weekly radio address.
But here's what drives me nuts. I am beyond sick of the constant re-imagining of this senile old bastard from weepy-eyed snake-oil salesmen on the right, but I feel almost physically ill when one of the sycophantic revisionists is allegedly 'one of us' on the left. Having lived through that time I can honestly say that the only thing I am truly grateful for about Raygun was that his gibbering idiocy was term-limited to only eight years...and even that was eight years too many..
And as for Obama? He should bloody well know better..
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