"Don the Con" Is a Hostage to 1979
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/11/opinion/sunday/trump-iran.html<snip>
If you’re Donald Trump, it’s always 1979. Your tan is lurid, last night’s glitter sticks to your shoe, and, still a young man, you thrill to the promise of future divorces. At the first hint of trouble, Roy Cohn is at your fingertips — and you at his. New York City, at least the parts you deserve to own (The Plaza, Studio 54, 21 Club), is a bachelor’s playpen. The rest of it? Ungovernable hellscape. The climate is doing just fine, thank you. And the president of the United States? Weak; pathetically weak.
As 1979 turned into an “annus horribilis,” President Jimmy Carter became a scapegoat for all the failures of a decade. The fall of Saigon, Watergate, stagflation, gas lines — a miserable era was already reaching its orgiastic summa when, in early November, a group of Iranian college students occupied the American embassy in Tehran, taking 52 Americans hostage. Over the course of their 444-day captivity, a set of images and phrases penetrated America’s conscience — burning flags, chants of “Death to America” — and sunk deep into the country’s collective psyche. The indelible images of ’79 were surely on Mr. Trump’s mind when he flabbergasted his generals and decided to eliminate Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the commander of Iran’s clandestine operations, by a drone strike.
Only a few days before General Suleimani’s assassination, an angry mob breached Baghdad’s Green Zone and surrounded the American embassy, an act for which Mr. Trump held Iran, and by implication General Suleimani, responsible. The event seems to have triggered an episode of déjà vu in the commander in chief: The 52 Iranian sites Mr. Trump subsequently threatened to destroy represented, he said, “the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago.” A hostage crisis would be intolerable for any holder of the office, but for President Trump, it bears an extra, profound significance.
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He had a lot in common with Trump.
I saw Reagan at a public appearance during his second term. It was alarming. He was a confused old man who didn't know where the hell he was or what he was doing there. But they put him on his marks, lights, camera action, and a few functioning neurons left over from his work as an actor fired up and he managed to get off a few sound bites for the cameras with trademark Reagan "sincerity." Then they took him away. He might as well been selling hand soap in a thirty second commercial.
I was in the back rows thinking 
And then the press reported this as if everything was normal, the television news showing just the sound bites, the newspapers reporting the story almost line for line of whatever Reagan's handlers were telling them.
I've seen only one show that was worse, a popular singer who was so drunk, drinking Jack Daniels on stage, that the show was cut short when they simply wandered away back stage and never returned. House lights came on, show over.
Reagan and all the Republican Presidents since have been meat puppets. I think it's a job requirement for that party. Trump could drop dead tonight and we'd still have a meat puppet president.
