Lose One With The Gipper

Last week, the liberal stars once again aligned, as a Democratic effort to tie the increasingly irrelevant President Barack Obama to the dearly departed President Ronald Reagan was swallowed up by the black hole of liberal ignorance. The starship MSNBC, staffed as always by the crew of misfit liberal sock puppets, went down first.
Citing 1987 comments by Reagan, five of MSNBC’s primetime inmates claimed that Reagan spoke in favor of a tax hike remedy to the nation’s deficit problems. To bolster their Democratic masters’ case, each showed a video clip which seemed to support their party’s talking points: “… I am going to meet with the leaders of the Senate because it is high time to bring down the deficit and get us on a path… toward a balanced budget.” Taken by itself, that quote certainly sounds more like Obama than Reagan. But there was a teensy little issue for the Democrats’ lead cable communicators, and it involved a serious breach of journalistic ethics and… all right, you caught me… MSNBC’s tinfoil hat brigadiers wouldn’t recognize journalistic ethics if they came up and stole Ed Schultz’s Thorazine.
If your sole source of information is an entirely discredited propaganda outlet like MSNBC, you might not know they were lying to you. What the airheads in Obama crony Jeff Immelt’s cage did with that clip was a serious sin of omission. Here’s what Reagan actually said that day: “… I have not changed my opinion about ever accepting a tax that will have a deleterious effect on the economy, and most tax increases do. Taxing is not the policy, or the problem, with the deficit. The deficit is due to too much spending… every dollar of increased revenue has been matched by a dollar and a quarter of increased spending.”
Oops.
The situation for MSNBC actually gets worse. The cherry-picked Reagan pronouncement reportedly started its life in the creepy confines of the so-called Congressional Progressive Caucus, a gathering of about 80 of the most blatantly corrupt (Rep. Bernice Johnson, Rep. Charles Rangel), most unhinged (Rep. Dennis Kucinich) and most appallingly stupid (Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, Rep. Hank Johnson) members of the House. The CPC got the ball rolling, and MSNBC, followed by the usual rogue’s gallery of corporate media sideshow rejects, used it to rile ignorant charges into a righteous — albeit wrongheaded — fury.
But there’s a deeper subtext involved. It’s not exactly news that MSNBC’s prime-time lineup consists of feckless liberal sycophants who gladly carry the water for Democratic overlords. But five talking hairdos regurgitating the same misleadingly edited snippet provided gratis by the batty bloc of the Democrat Party, all in an effort to link Obama to Reagan? Liberals hate Reagan. Of course, liberals hate everyone who isn’t liberal, but Reagan? It’s the equivalent of the Personal Liberty Digest™ toasting the anniversary of the October Revolution. Surely, the Democrats’ desperation to hold onto their fading vision of a socialist utopia ushered into existence by The Savior (the one, not The One) hasn’t forced them into such dire circumstances that they’re willing to identify with the most reviled (by liberals) political figure of the past three decades.
Unless it has: TIME Magazine’s Feb. 7 issue marked the Gipper’s 100th birthday with a cover featuring a Photoshopped image of Obama together with Reagan. The Obama-as-inheritor-of-Reagan’s-mantle fable, which has been manufactured by liberals, is gathering steam as 2012 approaches.
Here’s the thing: I knew Ronald Reagan (well, I met him once — big day for me, not so much for him). Barack Obama: You, sir, are no Ronald Reagan.