Be sure to reach for the Reagan fundie pal brand...Quotes from Paul Slansky, The Clothes Have No Emperor—
12/13 With five weeks left in office, President Reagan delivers his farewell address on domestic policy, in which he continues to deny that his defense spending increases and tax cuts were in any way responsible for the $155 billion deficit, blaming instead an "iron triangle" of congressmen, lobbyists and journalists.
12/22 President Reagan—whose tenure has coincided with a huge increase in the homeless population—uses his last interview with David Brinkley to again claim that many of these unfortunates are homeless "by their own choice," as must be many of the jobless, since he again points out that the Sunday papers are full of want ads.
...meet Mr. Meese.
12/8 Continuing his tradition of holiday season insensitivity, a well-fed Ed Meese scoffs at the notion that the administration's policies are unnecessarily cruel to the poor. "I don't know of any authoritative figures that there are hungry children," he declares. "I've heard a lot of anecdotal stuff, but I haven't heard any authoritative figures.... I think some people are going to soup kitchens voluntarily. I know we've had considerable information that people go to soup kitchens because the food is free and that that's easier than paying for it. ... I think that they have money."You almost have to feel for Ed Meese, what with his having to work so hard to spread the word. After all, this was decades before the bipartisan consensus would be that the poor are bankrupting us. Just one recent sign of the latter: scams involving food stamps—instead of chicanery by, say, Wall Street —would seem to be the only fraud worthy of prosecution by the Feds.12/15 Ed Meese tells the National Press Club that literature's classic miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, to whom he has recently been compared, suffered from "bad press in his time. If you really look at the facts, he didn't exploit Bob Cratchit." Explains Meese, "Bob Cratchit was paid 10 shillings a week, which was a very good wage at the time.... Bob, in fact, had good cause to be happy with his situation. He lived in a house, not a tenement. His wife didn't have to work.... He was able to afford the traditional Christmas dinner of roast goose and plum pudding.... So let's be fair to Scrooge. He had his faults, but he wasn't unfair to anyone."
12/16 "Did he really say that? I can't believe he said that. ... Dickens is saying that the poor deserve to live not on the margins, but with comfort and love and with freedom and medical attention. I mean, isn't that the very point about Tiny Tim? ...He desperately needs a doctor and can't get to one because his family is so poor....He's dying because he can't get medical care....Boy, I'm really getting angry now. I can't believe these people."
—University of Pennsylvania Victorian literature scholar Nina Auerbach on the Meese interpretation of A Christmas Carol
The 1980s did not completely lack detectives willing to take a close look at Reagan's unsourced anecdotes.12/12 [1983] "A B-17 coming back across the channel from a raid over Europe, badly shot up by aircraft...The young ball-turret gunner was wounded, and they couldn't get him out of the turret there while flying.By 12/16, says Slansky,
"But over the channel, the plane began to lose altitude, and the commander had to order his men to bail out. As the men started to leave the plane, the last one to leave—the boy, understandably, knowing he was being left behind to go down with the plane, cried out in terror—the last man to leave the plane saw the commander sit down on the floor. He took the boy's hand and said, 'Never mind, son, we'll ride it down together.' Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously awarded."
—President Reagan addressing the Congressional Medal of Honor Society
Columnist Lars-Erik Nelson, after examining the citations of all 434 Congressional Medals of Honor awarded during World War II—reveals that not one of them matches the story President Reagan told the other day. "It's not true," writes Nelson. "It didn't happen. It's a Reagan story....The President of the United States went before an audience of 300 real Congressional Medal of Honor winners and told them about a make-believe Congressional Medal of Honor winner."And Nelson stayed with the story—
Responds Larry Speakes, "If you tell the same story five times, it's true."
12/28 Lars-Erik Nelson reports that a reader saw a scene very similar to President Reagan's Medal of Honor story in the 1944 movie Wing and a Prayer. "Adding to the confusion," writes Nelson, "Dana Andrews at one point reprimands a glory-seeking young pilot with the words, 'This isn't Hollywood.' ...You could understand that some in the audience might confuse reality with fiction.And on to 1984—
1/11 ...Nelson suggests another source for the Medal of Honor story: an apochrypal item in the April 1944 issue of Reader's Digest, a magazine known to be a life-long Reagan favorite. "The bomber had been almost ripped apart by German cannon," it read. "The ball turret gunner was badly wounded and stuck in the blister on the underside of the fuselage. Crewmen worked frantically to extricate the youngster, but there was nothing they could do. They began to jump. The terror-stricken lad screamed in fear as he saw what was happening. The last man to jump heard the remaining crewman, a gunner, say, 'Take it easy, kid. We'll take this ride together.'"But Nelson was an honest-to-god journalist; from the New York Observer's November 2000 Nelson obit—
A friend of his noted that a rare foray into television - an appearance on Meet the Press in 1998 during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, along with Steven Brill, Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard and Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post - left Mr. Nelson so infuriated by the grandstanding of Tim Russert that he took to calling the show "Me the Press."Nelson died of a stoke on November 20— after weeks of monitoring the Florida recount shenanigans, post-presidential election. I can't remember who said it—and can't find a citation—but sometime after 2000 some writer or other called Lars-Erik Nelson "the first casualty of the Bush Administration."
"He did not have any appetite for those yelling shows, or what he called the 'theater criticism' mode of analyzing politics," Mr. Dwyer said. "I don't know why people called him old-school, because the old school is the only school-everything else is fake."
Simply put, Mr. Dwyer said, "he was a no-bullshit guy."
The sponsors—and their Spokesman—reached new frontiers for pushing product.11/30 [1981]One of the innovations of Reagan's PR forces was to introduce to a mass audience the spurious rumor and unattributed anecdote so beloved by the ultra-Right. "Welfare queen" registered with those for whom it was intended, even as it was absurd to anyone the least connected to real American life.
President Reagan tells a $2,500-per-ticket GOP fundraiser in Cincinnati about a letter from a blind supporter. "He wrote in Braille… to tell me that if cutting his pension would help get this country back on its feet, he'd like to have me cut his pension." The altruistic soul's identity is never revealed.
1/14 [1982] President Reagan tells a business luncheon in New York about a Massachusetts resident in his 80s who supposedly sent in his Social Security check "to be used for reducing the national debt." As usual, no proof is offered.
6/27 [1984] "Your policies are not in the least anti-black or anti-poor. As a matter of fact, it's my opinion that your fight against inflation, your war on the drug traffic, your tough stand against street crime, you effort in revitalizing the nation's economy, are all of great importance to us poor people and us black people in America."
—Letter allegedly received by President Reagan from a 39-year old black man whose identity, as is so often the case with these epistles of unsolicited support, goes unrevealed
Mark Fowler, Reagan's first chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, was the spiritual father of broadcast deregulation. He came into office with a profound disdain for the notion that television and radio airwaves were owned by the public, a concept that had been the cornerstone of communications law since 1934. He felt the airwaves should be the province of corporations, whose competition in the free market would be enough to serve the public interest. "It's time to move away from thinking of broadcasters as trustees and time to treat them the way that everyone else in this society does, that is, as a business," he said. "Television is just another appliance. It's a toaster with pictures." Fowler said he took it as an "article of faith that any successful businessman is meeting a public need." He was fond of cloaking himself in the mantle of Ronald Reagan, once boasting that he was "not the captive of any industry or industry in general. I am a captive of a philosophy of government we call Reaganism."Fowler's "most important contribution to the homogenization of news and entertainment," notes Kleinknecht, was in loosening limits to company ownership of multiple media outlets.
These were not just idle words. In Fowler's six-year tenure as chairman, the FCC reviewed or abolished 89 percent of the regulations governing broadcasting. By 1987, the commission had done away with the fairness doctrine, which required broadcast outlets to cover both sides of public issues; the provision that required broadcasters to allow public figures equal time to respond to attacks; the requirement that politicians be given airtime around elections; and the rule that stations keep a file of all their complaints from the public. Fowler also dropped the FCC's enforcement of misconduct on the part of broadcasting license holders.
enough to set off a round of mergers in the broadcasting industry, including Capital Cities' acquisition of the American Broadcasting Corporation, the first sale of a major television network. Radio and television stations were soon being traded like any other commodity, making a mockery of their status as trustees of the nation's airwaves.Subsequent money poured into lobbying of (and "donations" to) Congress members would set the stage for passing the Telecommunications Act of 1996—
The result was that a bill profoundly skewed toward powerful interests was passd with hardly any public debate...Need the author add? "Higher telephone and cable TV rates, vastly increased concentration of the media, the death of local radio, the homogenization and dumbing down of programming, less broadcast coverage of news—all these emerged from the movement begun by Ronald Reagan, the man they called the Great Communicator."
Sponsors of the law estimated that deregulation of the cable and telephone industries would save consumers $550 billion over a decade-$333 billion in lower long-distance rates, $32 billion in lower local phone rates, and $78 billion in lower cable bills. Instead, cable rates went up by about 50 percent and local phone rates by more than 20 percent, according to a 2005 study by Common Cause.
Even more devastating for our culture and national discourse was the further evisceration of limits on multiple ownership of broadcast stations. Companies had been limited to owning forty radio stations; the law removed any limits, enabling a company like Clear Channel Communications to own twelve hundred stations around the country. The Common Cause study found that $700 million worth of buying and selling of radio stations occurred the first week after the act became law.
This week's done deals:The Democratic party certainly has gone to great lengths... They have made great preparation. They have cooked the goose (their own, naturellement, and ours) and placed it on the table in the traditional manner, with a knife stuck in its back... They have filled the wassail bowl to overflowing with the customary holiday libation, Hot Mulled Blood of Constituent. And later, we will all gather around the fire while our party elders read the famous story. I particularly like the part at the end when Scrooge realizes that reformation has its limits and sells the Cratchit children into indentured servitude so that the other men of the Exchange won't think him weak, or mired in the past.Pierce also says it: what Americans really want are only the most basic protections—items Not On The Table, much less under the tree—
The American people are not angry at government because people yell at each other and nothing ever gets done. The American people are angry because people yell at each other and nothing the American people really want ever gets done. They want higher taxes on billionnaires. They want Medicare kept out of the hands of the vandals. If they think about it a little, they even like their jurisprudence with a little habeas corpus sprinkled on top. Instead, they get endless platitudes, and the steady, futile placating of an insatiable political opposition.
