The Burning Legacy of Ronald Reagan [View All]

Funeral Games
By CHRIS FLOYD

http://www.counterpunch.com/floyd06112004.html

Some cynics say that Heaven's newest sunbeam, Ronald Reagan, was called "The Great Communicator" because he delivered his innumerable lies in words of one syllable. But this is just a typically vicious liberal canard.

For Reagan truly was a great communicator, though not with words - or with facts, which he once called "stupid things." No, his genius lay in the manipulation of symbols to convey powerful messages that could no longer be voiced openly in polite society - messages of hate, envy, fear and violence.

Reagan officially launched his successful 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia - not the Quaker-founded "city of brotherly love" in Pennsylvania, but a small town in the piney swamps of Mississippi, where three young civil rights workers had been brutally murdered by local officials in 1964 for the heinous crime of registering black people to vote. This was the famous "Mississippi Burning" case, a stark symbol of the era of violent race-hatred and government-sanctioned oppression. The decades-long struggle to bring full constitutional liberty into this system was fiercely resisted under the rubric of "states' rights" - a codeword for the preservation of white privilege and black subjugation. Every Southerner raised in that system (such as yours truly) understood this secret language of public bigots.


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In 1980, candidate Reagan and his running mate, Bush I, committed treason by bargaining with Iran's extremist mullahs to prevent the release of American hostages before the election: a dirty deal confirmed by, among others, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, who as president of Iran in 1980 had full knowledge of the negotiations, and former Russian Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin. At the request of Congressional investigators probing the Iran-Contra conspiracy, Stepashin, then head of the Supreme Soviet's Defense and Security Committee, carried out an extensive review of Kremlin intelligence files and sent Congress a remarkably detailed report on the Reagan-Khomeini pre-election tryst. All of this evidence, along with testimony from other direct participants in the covert op, was ultimately whitewashed by the timorous - or strong-armed - Congressional investigators. Again, the indispensible Robert Parry has the full story at Consortiumnews.com.

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