The Day The Amnesia Attack Began

(Posting will probably be sporadic early next week, by the way.)

In addition to the eve of the 41st anniversary of the death of Robert F. Kennedy, today is the fifth anniversary of the passing of a certain R. Reagan who once inhabited the White House.

As noted in “Tear Down This Myth” by Will Bunch (here), the code phrase for the Reagan sendoff was “Operation Serenade,” and the moment that phrase was spoken via phone to a member of the team designated to assist with the funeral arrangements, that person knew it was their duty to drop everything and head towards to Bel-Air, California Reagan home and do his or her part in the “last rites.”

I would like to leave it at that, saying only that the “Reaganalia” that started with the death of our 40th president was a masterpiece of ceremony and the most meticulous planning imaginable. However, the wretched excess of the historical revisionism that followed was often too much for your humble narrator to take (I was nearing the point of taking a ball peen hammer to the TV if I heard one more time about Reagan’s “optimism” – hell, I’d be an optimist too if I were a fracking millionaire!).

I thought of this as I read this “sour grapes” post from Victor Davis Hanson today at National Review Online, who apparently is lamenting the end of empty-headed American triumphalism (I would say that President Obama’s speech yesterday put an exclamation point on that, so to speak). And I realized how funny it was for him to be criticizing what he thinks is the mindless acceptance of everything associated with Number 44, when that was definitely the mood of the country towards Mr. “Morning In America” in 2004 as our corporate media acquiesced in zombie-like compliance in the memory of a president who, after claiming a victory in his 1981 tax cut, then raised taxes like no other throughout the rest of his presidency.

Also, in Bunch’s book, he makes the case that Reagan’s passing was fortunate for Dubya, coming right in the middle of his re-election campaign and thus throwing the Kerry campaign off kilter once more (which is something they definitely didn’t need, as we know, having had to right themselves a few times over missteps and RNC/media-manufactured controversies).

And in a related story as they say, this survey tells us that conservatives are more easily disgusted than liberals, even though a similar survey from a few years back (here, when Dubya and his cronies were in charge) tells us that conservatives were happier than liberals.

What a difference an election makes.