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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 2/5/11

Reagan Celebration Hides Brutal History

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WILKERSON: Yeah. Yeah.

PARRY: The Tower report was what was done by the White House investigating itself. And then there was a congressional investigation where Dick Cheney was the ranking minority member who handled the --. And his position was, in that minority report to the --

WILKERSON: President's all-powerful.

PARRY: --was that the president could do what he wanted, and therefore nothing illegal had happened, because the president has all power.

JAY: So if we bring this up to today, where President Reagan in the official narrative is one of the great presidents -- and I say, this is quite a bipartisan affair, the talking and eulogizing President Reagan. How much has that got to do with the defense of the imperial presidency?

WILKERSON: I'm not sure "imperial presidency" is a phrase that even registers with anybody but the national security elite and other elites that deal with this sort of thing. It doesn't register with the American people. If I go out and speak at Charlotte or Houston or someplace, they wouldn't even know what I was talking about unless I took a few minutes to explain it to them. So I don't -- other than with the elite, I don't see it.

JAY: But I'm more or less talking the elite. I'm talking whether they use the words --.

WILKERSON: Well, there are a lot of people in this country who think Reagan was a great president, a lot of people. I'd say, probably, if you polled and you did it well, you'd get half, maybe a little more.

JAY: And if you ask young people who weren't there, they'd probably -- I would think a majority think he's a great president, 'cause that's the narrative.

WILKERSON: Yeah. I won't dispute that.

JAY: So what I'm getting at is part of the reason for that is that various presidents, including the current one, don't mind the kind of power that was accumulated in the presidency the way Bob's talking about.

WILKERSON: I don't -- I think it would be very difficult to find a human being, especially one who could make it through the electoral process that we have today -- you may have read Joseph Ellis in The Washington Post saying our first six presidents wouldn't even think about running for president today -- that takes you all the way through John Quincy Adams, by the way. I can't imagine that they wouldn't like it. That's the reason I said -- when Obama was elected I said one of the things I'm going to lament here is that he will not surrender an iota of what George W. Bush re-accumulated for the presidency of the United States in terms of power. Once you've got it, you won't let it go, 'cause you like it.

PARRY: Well, listen, that's all true. I do agree with that. But I also think that the situation with some of the Democrats is a bit different, in that there's also the political cowardice that is factored in here. And we saw this in early 2008 when president -- when then-senator Obama makes this statement to a newspaper about how much he admired Ronald Reagan for having changed the narrative and so forth. And he -- you sense that, oh, wow, he's really just acknowledging that he had this tremendous impact on the history of the country. But if you actually read his statement, he's praising Reagan for having brought some kind of accountability to the excesses of the '60s and '70s, that --. So he's doing more than simply acknowledging that Reagan changed the direction of the country; he's -- in many ways was praising what Reagan did. So you have -- but I think the reason for that was his desire to sort of position himself as someone who was a different kind of Democrat. And this has been a common factor not just with Democrats but with members of the press, this idea that if we praise Reagan, that'll show we're kind of -- how centrist we are, how reasonable we are, how bipartisan we are, and it's become an easy way to sort of punch that ticket. But it's -- I think journalistically and historically it's a mistake. It allows a false narrative to be established and become part of what people then operate based on. People start making judgments based on what is not a real narrative. The real narrative was that Reagan caused a great deal of harm for this country. And -- but I know it's an easy way to sort of say, well, he was a nice old man, he was very genial, let's all embrace that. But that's not the reality. Certainly, I covered Central America a lot, and all the bloodshed that went on not just in Nicaragua but El Salvador and Honduras and Guatemala, where a truth commission -- a truth commission in Guatemala, based on US government documents, reported by the late '90s that during the '80s there had been a genocide, a genocide against the highland Indians in Guatemala, and that that genocide was not something done a long time ago, that was done under Ronald Reagan, when Reagan was defending people like Rios Montt and other dictators in Guatemala. So this was a very brutal period. And whether Reagan was a genial man and told nice stories is almost beside the point. The reality was quite different.

WILKERSON: And a lot of this--

JAY: Final word?

WILKERSON: --I mean, a lot of this, I have to say, is based on US corporate interests, too. You can't go into Latin America without encountering US corporate interests -- at least -- I don't -- put a percentage on it, 10, 15, 20 percent of their problem for the last half-century in terms of resurrecting themselves. And God hope they might be on the brink of another attempt to do that right now. They seem to be moving pretty fast. I hope it sticks. But it's been us, it's been our corporate interests that have essentially said, whether the president knew about it or not in terms of the specifics, hey, our banana plantation is going to win, our telecommunications in Cuba are going to win, we're going to win, we're going to beat you back. And it's been that way. I'm sorry to say, but America, the hegemon in the Western Hemisphere, has been very unkind to its neighbors.

JAY: Thanks very much for joining us, both of you. And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

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