BottleOfBlog: I Guess It Just Depends What You're Looking Forward To...

Your liberal moderators ask modern Republicans, who have spent the last six years being wildly enthusiastic cheerleaders for the dismal failure that is the Bush administration:

Moderator: In the NBC-Wall Street Journal poll, just 22 percent believe this country is on the right track. Mayor Giuliani, how do we get back to Ronald Reagan's morning in America?

Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani: We get back to it with optimism…

And what we can borrow from Ronald Reagan, since we are in his library, is that great sense of optimism that he had.

Never mind the fact that the question should be: how do we get back to sunny optimism of the Clinton years? You know the ones, the ones where the incredibly, world-wide popular president delivered a 230 billion dollar surplus, a seven thousand point increase in the Dow, an unprecedented feeling of American goodwill around the globe, while keeping taxes low and the military strong?

Since there's only one answer to that--put another Democrat in the White House--it's understandable that your liberal media would, instead, pretend that Americans never felt good until and haven't felt good since the Sainted Ronald Reagan.

I mean, after all, those calculating Clinton folks literally poled the electorate, while the Reagan folks merely screwed us. Figuratively.

Never mind that the Reagan administration, which saw 30 something high ranking appointees get convicted of felony crimes, and dozens more resigned to avoid criminal investigations, making it the most corrupt administration in the history of our country. Never mind that it too, like the Bush administration, waged an illegal war, which also, like the failed Bush administration, involved American sanctioned torture and murder.

Never mind that Reagan, like this 22 percent beloved Bush administration, chose to respond to terrorists murdering Americans by attacking a country that had nothing to do with it.

Though, Reagan, unlike Bush, upped the ante by later selling those same terrorists weapons.

Never mind that Reagan, like Bush, was a "small government" Republican who, like Bush, vastly expanded the Federal government and would have been responsible for the biggest deficits since the Second World War if not for...Bush!

Never mind that many, many people were not optimistic during the Reagan years, including nearly half of Americans and the majority of Europeans, who felt there was a very real possibility that a cranky old man who felt in his heart that what he was saying was true even while he was admitting it was false might actually blow up the entire planet.

Never mind all that.

Please try to remember that, in 2004, these same jokers who are running now were enthusiastically backing Bush as Reagan's heir.

The nation's 40th president gave rise to a new generation of conservatives, reshaped the Republican Party, challenged Democrats to redefine themselves and altered the political dynamic in the nation's capital…

"The father of the modern Republican conservative movement," is how Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, put it in paying tribute to Reagan…

Reagan, it can be argued, is responsible for the two Bush presidents. The first President Bush served as Reagan's vice president before winning the White House, and many Republicans see the current President Bush as the political heir to Reagan.

Not one of them kicked. Not a single one bucked. In fact, they all loved Bush's optimism. They loved Bush's optimism the same way Bush loved Reagan's optimism. And, again, Bush saw himself as Reagan's heir.

Aside from opposing the creation of the creepy Homeland Security Department, it was the only thing I ever agreed with Bush about.

But then Bush--yes!--flip flopped on Homeland Security.

So now we only agree that he is Reagan's heir.

Illegal wars, record setting deficits, thoroughly corrupt administrations.

They both dressed up as cowboys.

The same demented criminals, like Eliot Abrams and John Negroponte, and John Poindexter, who worked feverishly to willfully undermine our democracy under Reagan are back in the federal government. Under Bush.

The only difference between the miserable failure of Bush and the Sainted Ronald Reagan is that George W. Bush had a Republican House and Senate that let him run stark raving looney tune crazy for four years.

Reagan had Tip O'Neill busting his balls.

And, after a half dozen pardons and overturned convictions, Reagan probably would have thanked Tip for not letting him and his creepy VP get altogether out of control, if Reagan could have remembered anything after 1985.

And your "liberal" media is actually asking modern Republicans how they can get back to the corruption, torture, murder, lawlessness, and fiscal irresponsibility that gave birth to the current corruption, torture, murder, lawlessness, and fiscal irresponsibity.

The answer is: Kill Grenada.

Do it ever twenty years. It's close. It's temperate. Nobody gives a shit.

Every twenty years, we should elect a Republican as president and just beat the living fuck out of Grenada.

And that will show the world that America is very optimistic about how optimistic America's journalists are about the optimism of Americans.

As for Reagan?

He was fucking loon, for one thing.

Reagan's staff kept most of the wigginess from spilling over into the public arena. "Here come the little green men again," Powell used to tell his staff whenever the subject arose of Reagan's preoccupation with how an alien invasion would unify the earth. Powell, Cannon writes dryly, "struggled diligently to keep interplanetary references out of Reagan's speeches." They couldn't be kept out of informal conversations, though--much to the bafflement of Mikhail Gorbachev, who, when Reagan started in about invasions from outer space at the 1985 summit in Geneva, politely changed the subject.

And, ready for the optimism?

The wildest aspect of Reagan's premature New Agery was his obsession with the Battle of Armageddon. The closest anyone ever came to flushing out this particular bit of Reaganuttiness came during the second televised campaign debate in 1984, when Marvin Kalb asked Reagan if the matter of Armageddon had had any effect on American nuclear planning. Reagan just made it though his answer safely, saying that while he had engaged in "philosophical discussions" on the subject, "no one knows" whether "Armageddon is a thousand years away or the day after tomorrow," and therefore he had never "said we must plan according to Armageddon…"

Cannon has conducted his own archaeological dig into the matter and unearthed enough shards to warrant the conclusion that "Reagan is hooked on Armageddon." In 1968 Billy Graham visits Reagan and they talk about portents of the end of day. In 1970 Pat Boone brings a couple of radio evangelists to see Reagan in Sacramento, and one of them, seized by a supposed visitation of the Holy Spirit, prophesies rapturously that Reagan will be president and tells him about the approaching mother of battles, and then listens as Reagan ticks off modern events, such as the founding of the State of Israel, that seem to fulfill the biblical preconditions of the big one. In 1971 Reagan tells his dinner partner, the president pro tem of California Senate, that the end is nigh and that one of the portents is that Libya has gone Communist. In 1980 Reagan announces on Jim Bakker's TV show that "we may be the generation that sees Armageddon."

That's kind of an important detail, isn't it? I mean, aside from the fact that the guy was losing his mind while he was in the White House. Don't you think that the fact that this rather unintelligent, extremely old man, who was campaigning for a job wherein he would control about ninety percent of the nuclear weapons in the world was hooked on Armageddon??? So much so that he was talking about it on Tee Vee??? While he was running for President???

Yep. That's the kind of optimism that really gets people excited--a really old guy, who's in the process of losing his mind, who obsessively talks about Armageddon. In our lifetime.

Wait! It get's better!

Events in the Middle East concerned him so much that Mr Reagan wrote on May 15, 1981, "Sometimes I wonder if we are destined to witness Armageddon."

Then on June 7: "Got word of Israel bombing of Iraq - nuclear reactor. I swear I believe Armageddon is near."

Later on, on television, again, Reagan would deny he ever said any of that. That stuff he said on television. That people watched. And that he wrote in his diaries. Which you can read today. Even though Reagan never said any of that stuff.

What optimism! What greatness! What endless potential for the Shining City on the Hill! To be exploded! In Armageddon!

I know I was inspired.

But, luckily, we have a "liberal" media ready to point out that a return to the grotesque "optimism" of Reagan is really nothing more than a continuation of the horrendous failures of Bush with maybe a happier face.

A generation after Ronald Reagan, the face of the Republican Party has turned from a smile into a grimace.

Reagan was a sharply polarizing politician during his presidency, a fact sometimes obscured in the commemorations that marked his death three years ago. But even old adversaries saluted Reagan's signature political trait: optimism…

In 1980, Reagan emphasized how poorly the country was doing under incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter, but he did so always in the context of how things were about to get better…

There it is. Your liberal media. Letting you know that Ronald Reagan was always optimistic about how the country would move from recession to Armageddon.

And your "liberal" media would like to know how we can get back to that.

That optimism.