Free Republic

<p>Let's get this straight. Ronnie Reagan allowed AIDS to flourish for years after it was discovered and did next to nothing to stem its virulent, lethal tide, and wouldn't even utter the word until the end of his term, when it was too late. Ronnie Reagan denied the existence of the nation's homeless problem that he largely created, and then blamed the problem on not enough people caring to get out there and get a job as he meanwhile slashed civil services and assistance for the poor.</p>

In a column set to be published on Sunday, NEW YORK TIMES Frank Rich writes: 'During the Reagan show the O.J. Simpson impact was sometimes literally acted out: the gratuitously attenuated aerial shots of the hearse streaking on California freeways to Simi Valley carried an eerie visual echo of the Bronco chase.' On Public reation to Reagan Death, Rich claims: 'The dirty little secret of the week: The outpouring didn't live up to its hype. 'There was this kind of extraordinary outpouring not by the public but by reporters who should know better,' as Morley Safer told Larry King after...

Liberals have found a new hobby: belittling the dead. They find the term “Rest in Peace” objectionable. Counterpunch.org published a piece by Phil Gasper called "Ronald Reagan, 1911-2004: Goodbye and Good Riddance." "Ronald Reagan has finally died at age 93," Gasper wrote. "Predictably, politicians from both major parties have issued gushing tributes to this venal and vicious man, who was happy to slash workers' wages, see families thrown onto the street, support sadistic death squads and bomb other countries, if this was in the interests of the American ruling class." Political cartoonist Ted Rall, when asked about a previous statement...

Last week we paid respect to Ronald Reagan, saluting his optimism, his ability to communicate and his grandfatherly affability. But Reagan was an ideological politician. He championed ideas that helped forge a conservative era. Reagan was largely on the wrong side of history and his era is exhausted, his ideas part of our problem, not part of our solution. Consider that if Reagan was right, then Martin Luther King Jr. was wrong. Reagan called King a communist. He wanted to gut the Voting Rights Act and the civil rights laws. He pushed to give tax breaks to colleges that practiced...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) - A college disc jockey who was initially fired after devoting a radio show to celebrating the death of Ronald Reagan will be reassigned to another job until he can respond to complaints about his actions, officials said Friday. Scott Hornyak, a 28-year-old undergraduate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, was told Friday that he was fired from his paid position as business manager at KSUA-FM, a student-run station. A university spokeswoman later said the firing was premature and the decision was rescinded until Hornyak had a chance to respond to complaints about the Sunday show. "The...

June 10, 2004 Alaska School DJ Off Air for Reagan Remark ASSOCIATED PRESS FAIRBANKS, Alaska (AP) - A disc jockey at a university radio station who turned a Sunday radio show into a "celebration" that Ronald Reagan "was finally dead" has been suspended. The disc jockey, a University of Alaska Fairbanks undergraduate who goes by the call name "Spider Bui," said his show was a reaction to the media's positive portrayal of Reagan after his death Saturday. Managers at KSUA-FM said the show was in poor taste and was put on without permission. Neither the student nor station staff would...

I was returning home from the farewell to Ronald Reagan and switched over to WOL(the black talk radio station here in DC)which is also carried as the X-M 169 the Power. The mid-afternoon host is a leftist named Berrie McCain and he was talking with fellow Radio Host Joe Madison and they were whining about all the coverage of the death of Ronald Reagan. Joe for his part tried to stay away from the partisan politics and basically stated "That his grandmother said you are suppose to only say good things about a person in death." Which McCain in "It...

The Associated Press 6/11/04 9:39 AM CLIFTON PARK, N.Y. (AP) -- An upstate teacher could be punished for criticizing the late President Ronald Reagan to students during a moment of silence in his honor at the high school. Shenendehowa school district spokeswoman Kelly DeFiciani said once the investigation is finished, the unidentified teacher "could be subject to disciplinary action." The district is investigating whether her comments violated the district policy against staff making political endorsements at work or on school property. The teacher, who has taught in the suburban Albany district for more than 20 years, made "negative" and "inappropriate"...

Praise for the late President Ronald Reagan's sunny resonance with the common man has been rasping all week on the ears of many activists and social workers who watched in vain as homelessness exploded under his watch -- and they hope the history books remember one thing: Before Reagan, people sleeping in the street were so rare that, outside of skid rows, they were almost a curiosity. After eight years of Reaganomics - - and the slashes in low-income housing and social welfare programs that went along with it -- they were seemingly everywhere. And America had a new household...

The free rag spews forth on thursdays and I happened upon this sour grapes article on the occasion of former President reagan's death. The author went to Simi valley and slagged people there and Reagan and then claims to have met and talked to Free Republic people. Here's the tripe: Lying in StateThis bier’s for you, Gipperby Steven Mikulan The handmade banners began appearing on freeway overpasses long before the turnoff for Moorpark College. “God Bless You, Nancy and Ron,” said one. I was heading to view the late president’s casket at the Ronald Reagan Library and, like everyone else,...

This will not be popular, on this day before the state funeral in Washington for Ronald Reagan. But the fact is, he was not my favorite president, and I mean to say why. I will grant that he was charismatic, was a wonderful public speaker, that he had a healing effect at a time the nation was psychologically hurting, that he seemed to be an all-around nice guy. He also deserves applause, and thanks, for helping to end the Cold War — although I think Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin may have had more to do with it. As did...

Weepy Reagan Tribute-Free Zone June 9, 2004 BY NEIL STEINBERG SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST "That's it. While I'm sorry Reagan is dead -- though at 93, we saw that coming, didn't we? -- I'm going nuts with the tributes. It's as if he was a 16-year-old couple who drove into a tree, with the candles and the floral tributes and such. We've become a culture of babies, where every death is Princess Diana's. It's enough to sour you on the departed. Over the years, I nudged closer to a grudging respect for Reagan, but this overkill is sending me back toward being...

WASHINGTON Sometimes I feel as if I'm watching a nation mourn. And sometimes I feel as if I'm watching a paternity suit.At every opportunity, as the extraordinary procession solemnly wended its way from California to the Capitol, W. was peeping out from behind the majestic Reagan mantle, trying to claim the Gipper as his true political father.Finally, there is a flag-draped coffin and military funeral that President Bush wants to be associated with, and wants the rest of us to see."His heart belongs to Reagan," Ken Duberstein declared about Mr. Bush on CNN, in a riff on the old Cole...

You can count me among those who find the Week-Long Death Festival more appropriate for the expiration of a North Korean dictator than an American president. But as long as we're all still talking about Reagan, can I pipe up and say I never was one of those people who found his speeches "inspiring"? If the best thing Reagan ever did was to pardon Merle Haggard, the worst was to saddle us with Peggy Noonan. Yes, I'm getting grumpy. At least I'm not as grumpy as Col. Qaddafy, who had this reaction to Reagan's death: "I express my deep regret...

DERRICK Z. JACKSON Reagan's heart of darkness By Derrick Z. Jackson | June 9, 2004 PRESIDENT Bush proclaimed: "Ronald Reagan believed that God takes the side of justice and that America has a special calling to oppose tyranny and defend freedom." In the first three days of news reports on the death of the former president, not a single major American newspaper, television station, or politician has dared to exhume this counterpoint to the Reagan's legacy: "Immoral, evil, and totally un-Christian." These were the words of Bishop Desmond Tutu, spoken on Capitol Hill at a House hearing in late 1984....

"Ray Lamb had been on the streets since 1981.....Reagan would have left out the rest of Lamb's story, the part about how he had been working and functioning up until 1981, when Reagan fired all of the country's air traffic controllers because they had launched an illegal strike. Lamb had been a controller for 17 years.......Almost since the day he left office, those who were captivated by his idea that the selfish life could be a morally upstanding one have sought to turn Reagan into an icon....

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Democrats paid tepid homage to Ronald Reagan (news - web sites), the man most political observers credit for the steady rise of the rival Republican party during the past two decades. Since Reagan's death Saturday at age 93, Democrats have been in a quandary, needing to pay at least token tribute to the late president, praised by his admirers as one of their country's greatest leaders ever. But Democrats see in Reagan the figure whose social policies contributed to an epidemic of homelessness and the decline in prowess of labor unions, and whose economic policies led to...

Some congressional Democrats will not return to Washington this week to participate in the pageantry of a state funeral for a president they bitterly opposed. It was unclear how many rank-and-file Democrats in both the House and Senate would opt to stay at home and miss the largely procedural and symbolic votes to honor the 40th president’s life. But roughly half of the House Progressive Caucus was contemplating not trekking back to Washington for a legislatively inert week, filled only with tributes to a president they often clashed with, spokesmen for the lawmakers said. But despite the indifferent responses of...

Back in Washington, staffers at the Democratic National Committee stopped a couple of interns who were lowering the flags to half mast outside their headquarters. "The interns were just doing what they thought was right," says a DNC staffer, who heard about the incident. "But somebody a bit more senior told them not to lower the flags until they absolutely had to, I guess when President Bush announced that all flags should be lowered. There was only an hour's difference. It was pretty petty, but that's how bad things have gotten around here."

Monday, June 7, 2004 NOVEMBER 9, 1989 Do you remember November 9,1989? Do you remember thousands of West Berliners waiting on their side of the wall with bottles of champagne while East Germans were breaking through? Just wondering ... but did any Democratic president ever ask the Soviet Union to tear down the wall in Berlin. The truth is that Ronald Reagan was the president who won the Cold War. Within just a few days the Democrats and their media myrmidons are going to be working full-bore to deny him that legacy. The Cold War, you see, was really World...

While some long-time critics of President Ronald Reagan stifled their inclination to criticize the dead, others launched the kind of venomous attacks that marked his long career in politics. Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy said yesterday he regretted Reagan died without ever standing trial for 1986 air strikes he ordered that killed the Libyan president's adopted daughter and 36 other people. Ronald Reagan ordered the April 15, 1986, air raid in response to a discotheque bombing in Berlin allegedly ordered by Khadafy that killed two U.S. soldiers and a Turkish woman and injured 229 people. "I express my deep regret because...

Amid all the reports of international reaction to the death of Ronald Reagan, I found the following from two of the usual suspects: "We all know Reagan's legacy, from the Iran-Contra affair to the funding of the Nicaraguan military in which over 200,000 people died. The groundwork for the move steadily to the right happened with the Reagan administration. People want to elevate him to some mythic level; they have their own reason for doing that." -Danny Glover "I express my deep regret because Reagan died before facing justice for his ugly crime that he committed in 1986 against the...

I never cared much for Ronald Reagan, the president. But I must tip my hat to Reagan, the myth.It is Reagan the myth the nation now eulogizes - that political colossus who, his supporters claim, vanquished both the Soviet Union and the liberal welfare state with the certainty of his optimism and the jaunty cock of his head. . .As for the other towering pillar of the Reagan myth - that he single-handedly slew the Soviet bear - there is little, if any, historical support. The Soviet empire was weak and its economy imploding. The scholarly consensus is that Reagan's...

In California, according to a Democratic House leadership staffer, Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi's office refused until late in the day West Coast time to prepare any remarks by the leader on the passing of the president.'A call went out mid day on the East Coast that Reagan might be in serious condition, and that party leaders should be ready. But Pelosi's people basically said that they couldn't be bothered.'Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer had to get them in line. We got the impression that they just didn't want to say anything that would be construed as supportive of a Republican.Pelosi's...

In a feigned and futile attempt to demonstrate class, John Kerry has “suspended” his campaign for president in honor of the passing of President Ronald Reagan. But that didn’t stop him from allowing hateful Leftists to post their venom on his personal blog. For the record, the comments on Kerry’s site are far less offensive than the comments on the Democrat Underground. But the fact that John Kerry is the Democrat nominee, has offered to suspend his campaign in honor of President Reagan and yet allows haters to post disgusting comments on his site is enough to make any conservative’s...

*Excerpt*"...only saw him once up close, which happened to be when he got a question he didn't like. Was it true that his staff in the 1980 debates had stolen President Carter's briefing book? (They had.) The famously genial grin turned into a rictus of senile fury: I was looking at a cruel and stupid lizard..."

Los Angeles, CA (June 5, 2004) – Screen Actors Guild (SAG) President Melissa Gilbert issued the following statement on the death of former President Ronald Reagan, who served as president of SAG from 1947 to 1952 and again from 1959 to 1960: "Ronald Reagan presided over Screen Actors Guild at one of the most challenging moments in our union's history, as the rise of television significantly impacted the compensation and working conditions for the nation's screen actors. Under his tenure, SAG grew significantly in size and influence as the Guild tackled issues ranging from runaway production, to fair compensation, to...

I've been looking through the John Kerry web log to see how Reagan's death has moved his followers. I thought that Reagan Democrats would come out of the woodwork. While there were some respectful notes, I was horrified by some of these disturbing comments: -- Reagan was a handled President. totally dependent on his aides most of whom lied to him ... He was not a great President please I lived through it -- Record unemployment, record homeless, heartless domestic policies, govt ordered farm foreclosures, factories moving to Mexico, James Watt, Iran-Contra, illegal wars and mass murder in Central America...

Any list of the great TV characters of the 1980s would have to include Bill Cosby as Dr. Cliff Huxtable on ''The Cosby Show'' (which ran from 1984-1992), Ted Danson as Sam Malone on ''Cheers'' (1982-1993), Michael J. Fox as Alex P. Keaton in ''Family Ties'' (1982-1989) -- and Ronald Reagan as the president of the United States in ''The Reagan Years'' (1981-1988). He was not only the president, he played one on TV. In politics, Reagan achieved something he never managed in show business: He became an A-list star. Forget about all those years playing second fiddle in the...

Mayor Daley scolded Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry Tuesday for making a wisecrack about the bicycle accident that scraped the face, hands and knees of President Bush. According to the Drudge Report, Kerry was having a conversation with reporters that he apparently believed was off the record when he reportedly asked, "Did the training wheels fall off?" Daley, who ripped the skin off his kneecap during a bicycle accident a few years ago, said the joke was disrespectful. "When someone falls . . . you should not wish ill upon anyone. It's not right. . . . You just don't...

<p>Democrat John Kerry joked about President Bush's weekend bicycle accident by comparing the president to a child, Internet newshound Matt Drudge reported yesterday.</p> <p>"Kerry told reporters in front of cameras, 'Did the training wheels fall off?' " Mr. Drudge reported on his Web site, www.drudgereport.com. Interviewed by The Washington Times yesterday, Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter would say only that the words Mr. Drudge reported were "off the record." Mr. Drudge said the debate among reporters over the on-camera "training wheels" remark has been "whether to treat it as on or off the record." In comments reported by the Associated Press, Mr. Kerry said, "I hope he's OK. I didn't know the president rode a bike." Mr. Bush, who is widely ridiculed by liberals and Democrats as dumb and incompetent, suffered "minor abrasions and scratches" in the accident, which came near the end of a 17-mile mountain bike ride on his Texas ranch Saturday. Mr. Kerry had his own bicycling mishap earlier this month, taking a spill while riding with Secret Service agents through Concord, Mass. Mr. Kerry fell when his bike hit a patch of sand. He was not injured.</p>

President fell off bike today... Kerry told reporters in front of cameras, 'Did the training wheels fall off?'... Reporters are debating whether to treat it is as on or off the record... Developing...

Singing a partisan song By Boston Herald editorial staff Friday, March 26, 2004 A ``p´´ word does describe the reason Boston firefighters weren´t allowed to perform at a fund-raiser for President Bush [related, bio] last evening, but the word is ``petty´´ not ``political.´´      Surely there is no more political an event around these parts than the St. Patrick's Day breakfast in South Boston and there wasn't a peep of concern about the Boston Fire Department Acappella Quartet singing there. (Yes, the breakfast is a bipartisan event, though Republicans are usually served up right along with the corned beef and cabbage.)...

<p>On February 3, by a vote of 394 to 0, the House overwhelmingly approved a resolution (H.J. Res. 84) congratulating Ronald Reagan on his 93rd birthday.</p> <p>Not surprisingly, a group of five angry liberal congressmen refused to pay Reagan even this small courtesy and instead voted "present." A handful of Democrat congressmen did the same last year.</p>

It's not quite Soviet-style airbrushing, but the Bush administration has been using cyberspace to make some of its own cosmetic touch-ups to history.

Ok, he looks like Saddam Hussein. He sounds like Saddam Hussein. And, yes, he has the same DNA. But can we be sure that it is, in fact, the former Iraqi leader? And not just some poor turkey? Another of his hapless body doubles? Or even a clone? Turkey. Consider the word and its significance in the region, not simply because Turkey is a nation in the neighbourhood. In all its other forms, the word turkey refers to the giant North American chook and is a case of mistaken identity if not deceptive packaging. You see, the Pilgrim Fathers exporting...

Several weeks ago, Time magazine ran a cover story about how split the country is in its opinion of President Bush. The theme of the story was that with this president, there appears to be little or no middle ground in the electorate. You either love him or hate him. The reaction to the discussion within this space last week about the newspaper's coverage of the president's surprise Thanksgiving Day trip to visit the troops in Baghdad was typical of the bipolar feelings Time found going into the 2004 election year. Of the three or four dozen e-mails I received...

A Baghdad Thanksgiving's Lingering Aftertaste By Dana Milbank Friday, December 12, 2003; Page A35 Stars and Stripes, the Pentagon-authorized newspaper of the U.S. military, is bucking for a court-martial. When last we checked in on Stripes, it was reporting on a survey it did of troops in Iraq, finding that half of those questioned described their units' moral as low and their training as insufficient and said they did not plan to reenlist. With the Pentagon just recovering from that, Stars and Stripes is blowing the whistle on President Bush's Thanksgiving visit to Baghdad, saying the cheering soldiers who met...

washingtonpost.com Was This Turkey a Story? By Michael Getler Sunday, December 7, 2003; Page B06 The Thanksgiving turkey is long gone, but some Post readers think the paper is still sticking a fork in the White House and President Bush. At issue is a story in Thursday's paper by White House reporter Mike Allen, who accompanied the president on his holiday visit to the troops at Baghdad airport and who provided first-rate coverage of the event. The most widely published image of that visit was an Associated Press photo of a beaming president wearing an Army workout jacket, surrounded by...

The Thanksgiving turkey is long gone, but some Post readers think the paper is still sticking a fork in the White House and President Bush.At issue is a story in Thursday's paper by White House reporter Mike Allen, who accompanied the president on his holiday visit to the troops at Baghdad airport and who provided first-rate coverage of the event. The most widely published image of that visit was an Associated Press photo of a beaming president wearing an Army workout jacket, surrounded by soldiers and carrying a picture-perfect, golden-brown turkey on a platter.But in the Thursday article Allen reveals...

Bush's gesture politics suggest a man seriously worried about his career The 1980s movie The Ploughman's Lunch took its title from an early example of what we have now come to know as spin. Ian McEwan's script took its central image from the fact that the bread-and-cheese snack that claimed to link yuppies in pubs to their ancestors who toiled on the soil was an invention of the contemporary advertising and catering trades. In Richard Eyre's film, this fraudulent food became a metaphor for political lying and pretence at the time of the Falklands war. If anyone makes a similar...

There are those whose only purpose is to tear down. Unfortunately, they dominate our news media. And their condescending, arrogant tone of condemnation is often far louder than the story they are supposed to be telling. Like this visit by the president. The trip to Baghdad to spend Thanksgiving with the troops. It turned a new corner yesterday with the scoop on the turkey. With the nation at war, reporters peppered the White House spokesman with questions about the Thanksgiving turkey. The one President Bush picked up and moved to another table. It was ornamental, and not meant to be...

The photograph was ubiquitous in the days following Thanksgiving. President Bush, all smiles and sporting an Army windbreaker, appears to be serving turkey to surprised American troops in BaghdadBUSH’S BIRD is big and luscious, golden brown and generously garnished. But, The Washington Post reported on Thursday, the bird was just a prop. Soldiers were actually served from steam trays; the White House said the turkey in the photograph was simply on hand to prettify the chow line. The revelation is the latest in a series of stagecrafted moments designed to shine an impossibly perfect light on the president. Turkeygate unfolded...

Troops Demoralized by Bush Turkeygate Scandal (2003-12-04) -- American military morale hit an all-time low this week in the wake of revelations that President George Bush didn't serve a display turkey to hungry troops during his surprise visit to Baghdad last week. Political experts have already dubbed the episode 'turkeygate', and predict that the effect of this latest Bush administration scandal will be even more devastating than the outing of Valerie Plame. "When I went home after dinner that night, I wrote a letter to my wife about how proud I was to fight for liberty," said an unnamed Army...

President Bush's Baghdad turkey was for looking, not for eating. In the most widely published image from his Thanksgiving Day trip to Baghdaqd, the beaming president is wearing an Army workout jacket and surrounded by soldiers as he cradles a huge plater laden with a golden-brown turkey. The bird is so perfect it looks as if it came from a food magazine, with bunches of grapes and other trimmings completing a Normal Rockwell image that evokes bounty and security in one of the most dangerous parts of the world. But as a small sign of the many ways the White...

I couldn't possibly make a theory like this up. Now, Mike Allen reports in the Washington Post this morning that the turkey Bush held in his photo-op with troops was a prop that was never served to the soldiers. White House officials defend such stage-managing by insisting that their fiction is "designed to accurately dramatize his policies and to convey qualities about him that are real." They're right, and pictures are worth a thousand words. From the man who lied about why we went into war, nothing could be a more accurate image. P.S. The turkey prop itself was, in...

President Bush's Baghdad turkey was for looking, not for eating. In the most widely published image from his Thanksgiving day trip to Baghdad, the beaming president is wearing an Army workout jacket and surrounded by soldiers as he cradles a huge platter laden with a golden-brown turkey. The bird is so perfect it looks as if it came from a food magazine, with bunches of grapes and other trimmings completing a Norman Rockwell image that evokes bounty and security in one of the most dangerous parts of the world. But as a small sign of the many ways the White...

President Bush's Baghdad turkey was for looking, not for eating.In the most widely published image from his Thanksgiving day trip to Baghdad, the beaming president is wearing an Army workout jacket and surrounded by soldiers as he cradles a huge platter laden with a golden-brown turkey.

Administration officials tell Thursday's WASH POST that Bush picked up a decoration, not a serving plate for photo op... MORE... 'Officials said they did not know the turkey would be there or that Bush would pick it up. A contractor had roasted and primped the turkey to adorn the buffet line, while the 600 soldiers were served from cafeteria-style steam trays,' Mike Allen at POST to report. White House officials do not deny that they craft elaborate events to showcase Bush, but they maintain that these events are designed to accurately dramatize his policies and to convey qualities about him...

The exceptional nastiness of Paul Begala on yesterday's "Crossfire" is yet another example of petty, bitter Democrats who are incapable of accepting defeat with any grace or dignity: BEGALA: No party has gained seats in an off year since the last midterm. Look, you guys, you pick up, what, three seats in the House and two seats in the Senate and you get your panties in a wad. And you all have a celebration. You need a party, go out and have one, but this is a little... BEGALA: Bob Walker, I want to second what Tony said, congratulations to...