The Whole Truth

I wasn’t going to wade into this swamp, but then I heard an Obama commercial¹ that starts out “…after college and law school…” and then talks about his activism in Chicago.

Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. graduated from Columbia University in 1983 and started the Harvard law school in 1988. I get suspicious when people don’t acknowledge a five-year chunk of their lives.

“…Barack Obama’s first job after graduating from Columbia University was with the company [Business International Corporation]. He held a position as editor in its international financial information division.”

There’s nothing illegal or immoral about working for a corporation in New York’s financial district during the Reagan years, but it might color your perception of the period.

He then went to work for the New York Public Interest Research Group, then a local advocacy group, and them moved to Chicago. He went to law school from Chicago.

Obviously, unlike a lot of people, Mr. Obama wasn’t having a problem finding a job under Reagan.

If you didn’t live under the reign of Ronnie you really don’t understand why so many people hate his guts with a passion. The media continues to protect him in death, just as they did in life. The Reagan years were a train wreck for the nation. The Hedgemony is the true child of the Reagan revolution, taking those policies to their logical conclusion.

Paul Krugman covers Reagan in his column, Debunking the Reagan Myth, and his posts, Entrepreneurship and Reaganomics.

Oh, yes, Reagan’s people had ideas, ideas that made the US a debtor nation instead of the largest creditor nation; that took the deficit from $700 billion to $3 trillion; that moved the US away from pollution reduction and energy independence. Ronnie knew how to read a script, and the media protected him from any consequences – the Teflon President.

The current mortgage meltdown is caused by the same lack of oversight that lead to the Resolution Trust Corporation being created to pick up the pieces when Reagan decided there was no need to check up on savings and loans.

Let’s look at his foreign policy ideas.

The Reagan administration endorsed the views of Judith Miller’s sometime co-author and the sweetheart of the neocons, Dr. Laurie Mylroie, who decided that Saddam Hussein was a leader the US needed, and we should back him in his war with Iran, so the US provided Saddam everything he needed to start programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction, which were used against the Iranians and the Kurds.

Of course, after he invaded Kuwait, Dr. Mylroie decided Saddam was the anti-Christ and responsible for every attack ever made on the US. Is it really necessary to note she works for the American Enterprise Institute?

Jimmy Carter boycotted the Moscow Olympics because of the invasion of Afghanistan, but Reagan put in place a program to arm and train Muslims to combat the Soviets, which resulted in groups with names like al Qaeda, and the Taliban, who were supplied through the Pakistani intelligence services.

You can’t have a good guerrilla war without a financial conduit, so the BCCI gets involved in this and other nefarious schemes.

Reagan decided the US needed to get involved in the Lebanese civil war because Israel had invaded Lebanon. This resulted in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing by Shi’ia militias in Lebanon, probably in solidarity with the Iranians who had died as a result of the US backing Saddam Hussein.

While most should remember the Iran-Contra Affair, they probably haven’t noticed the Iran-Contra alumni in the Hedgemony. There’s no need to train new people when the old people can be brought back to continue the march to disaster.

The Republicans and the media have been fanatical over the years building a cult of personality around Ronald Reagan. They have named everything they could think of for him and attack any suggestion that he and his administration were anything less than the greatest thing since sliced bread.

What Obama endorses in his comments about Reagan and ideas is lying to people. It was a façade, an eight-year publicity campaign. You can fool some of the people all of the time, and the Republicans are still doing it.

1. It turns out that because the television set on which this commercial was heard is, in point of fact, located within the borders of the state of Florida which the Democratic National Committee has ruled is outlawed by the rules protecting the primary elections business of the states of Iowa and New Hampshire, according to a McClatchy report, the Clinton campaign is complaining that the Obama campaign has violated the boycott. There are no delegates at stake because, like Michigan, Florida is being shunned. The whole thing is stupid and petty, from the DNC on down.