Now that a Guatemalan court has convicted General Erfrain Rios Montt of “genocide” maybe we can better come to terms with the history of the early 1980s when the Reagan Administration was determined to vanquish communism in Central America. We should recall that General Montt was an ally in what President Reagan characterized as...
So we’ve reached the 10th anniversary of President George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” spectacle, the nadir of any U.S. presidency since the time Richard Nixon made his getaway in a helicopter from the White House lawn. The aircraft carrier stunt was a Karl Rove P.R. production designed to provide images for Bush’s 2004 re-election...
As sure as the sun rises in the East we can count on seeing a host of North America’s most prominent “conservatives” and right-wingers hyperventilate in the days ahead about what a horrible “friend of Castro” Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was. There will be obituaries that refer to Chavez as a “communist” or a...
It’s a welcome step to see President Obama appoint two Vietnam veterans to serve as Secretaries of State and Defense. John Kerry and Chuck Hagel are two people who have experienced war directly and have voiced publicly their deep ambivalence about war. Too bad in 2002 neither of them were willing to risk their...
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recently submitted a “budget” to the legislature that eliminates CalWORKS, the state’s highly successful welfare-to-work program that is needed now more than ever. This move would make California the only state in the nation to dismantle its safety net. He’s even willing to throw away the federal matching funds CalWORKS...
The Reagan Centennial: Celebrating Reaganomics
The overstated celebrations and commemorations of the centennial of Ronald Reagan’s birth, with their razzle-dazzle of Super Bowl tributes and marathon deifying in Simi Valley, are fitting tributes to a president whose public relations guru, Michael Deaver, was a pioneer of this same kind of flim-flammery. But the Reagan Centennial’s flashy hagiography masks a...
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