Once again, nowhere was heard an echo of Tennessee Senator Howard Baker’s Watergate query, “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” In the stead was the silence of “let’s all just be nice.”
For the sake of disclosure, I was not a big fan of Bill Clinton’s, nor am I one of Hillary’s. Doesn’t matter, though. This isn’t about Bill or Hill, it’s about us being wimps. The GOP knew they could get away with it, and so they spent somewhere between $50 and 60 million in TAXPAYER MONEY, turning over every rock along the White River, then settling for a stain on a blue dress. All to hopefully force a president from office, bring down the government, whatever it might take to place them firmly in power. If the country and the world were devastated in the process was of zero matter. All that mattered was power.
And like bit players following the script, the Democratic Party and progressives just shrugged their shoulders. Not even brought into the conversation were issues over Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker, how impeachment was the constitutionally appropriate process for the panoply of “high crimes and misdemeanors” perpetrated in those administrations, but that had never been considered because the health of the country was deemed of higher import.
All the while, the GOP task was in a full-court press to raise Ronald Reagan to near sainthood, or higher, to near godlike status. But the Dems and progressives were dumb to all of it, the savvy rationale behind the charade: Doing so would erase the slate of GOP endorsed deprecations, leaving only the Democratic Party with wet stains that could then be used to paint them to whatever image might be most useful to Republicans. Once more, for by now it had become habit, Democrats, by their silence and acquiescence, became partners in the ploy.
It worked so well. Today, when Republicans employ that sanitized icon — Ronald Reagan — in any speech, no network or print media reporter or Democrat calls them on it. They didn’t make of us unwitting fools! We made of us unwitting fools. Whenever we grant them that clear passage, we ought to be ashamed.
While in Paris, Natalie Maines remarked that George Bush was an embarrassment to Texas. For that, Clear Channel Broadcasting sought to destroy the Dixie Chicks. In response, Maines composed “Not Ready to Make Nice.”
Well, neither am I. Like Howard Beale, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more!”
So, if someone wants to cast me from the site for remonstrating against a contributor who claimed Ronald Reagan was “our most beloved president,” . . . excommunication is not a high price; especially for what I’m being paid. Regardless, what I will not do is to apologize, not when I believe in the core of my soul that everyone who ever said that RR was something more than a calamity owes the world a deep and genuine request for forgiveness.
I might, or might not, forgive. I will never forget.
— Ed Tubbs
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