Aside from being the day of the Super Bowl, last Sunday was the 100th birthday of Ronald Reagan, apparently the patron saint of NPR, which ran seemingly countless stories about the “Gipper” all that week. (I hope they don’t think that will help convince the G.O.P. House to keep their already meager CPB funds in the budget. That won’t save you!) Missing from the many remembrances of RR were those who might not remember him so fondly- the Guatemalans, the Salvadorans, the Angolans, the Timorese, the Argentineans… the list goes on. I’ve long felt that Reagan had a profound impact on the American presidency and, consequently, U.S. society, though not in a positive way. Thanks to his presidency, for instance, we can never consider raising federal taxes on anyone under any circumstances. He heralded the arrival of the new jingoism that ultimately put us into Grenada, then Panama, then Kuwait, then Somalia, then the former Yugoslavia… and of course Afghanistan and Iraq.
Granted, they were not all his ideas. He was, like many presidents, something of an empty vessel into which various policy mavens and ideologues were able to pour their nasty ideas. Reagan’s son Ron has written of how his father showed the beginning signs of Alzheimer’s while still in office. I have known two people who had occasion to observe him for fairly long periods of time during his term, both of whom told of a man so cloudy minded he needed to be briefed on the basics every fifteen minutes by an extremely protective Secret Service. In that respect, his administration was run by the people around him, just as George W. Bush’s foreign policy was shaped by Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and others. (If we get a president Palin, that job will be taken up by the likes of Randy Scheunemann. War with Russia, here we come!)
These people represent, in large part, the lasting legacy of any administration. I just heard Elliot Abrams – one of Reagan’s creatures – on NPR the other day. There’s a guy who should be languishing in a Nicaraguan jail right rather than commenting on the uprising in Egypt. They never go away. And likewise, the policies seem etched in stone. Taxes can never be raised on upper income people, even though they’ve been making out like bandits since Reagan time, while the rest of us have flat-lined. We will cut essential benefits for the poor, the elderly, and the ill before asking them to part with some of their ill-gotten gains. Does that irritate you? Thank Reagan.
Money hole. Hey, Hosni Mubarak has amassed something like a $45 to 70 billion fortune since Reagan’s first year in office. That’s about equal to the amount we’ve sent Egypt in aid. Not hard to see what our money has been buying. But at least the old bastard has been persuaded to retire. Good for you, Egypt. Welcome news in these difficult days.
luv u,
jp
Of course, the United States – despite our late-to-the-party expressions of sympathy for the Egyptian people – is squarely on the wrong side of this divide, as is practically every government in the region, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Yemen, and Israel. As a key component of U.S. foreign policy in the middle east, we have been sluicing billions of dollars into the Egyptian regime since the Camp David Accords were signed more than thirty years ago, 29+ of which have been presided over by Mubarak. Much of this has been military aid, the principal purpose of which is to ensure continued non-interference and tacit complicity in Israel’s policy of occupation and assimilation of the West Bank and its denial of national rights for the Palestinians. This aid has given Mubarak the space to run his country with no hint of opposition, in a constant state of emergency. Unsurprising that he would argue for his continued rule by suggesting some dire fate may prove the only alternative.