Reagan Derangement Syndrome Is Alive and Well

[Leroy N. Soetoro]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449047/reagan-show-review-gipper-
still-drives-liberals-insane

A new documentary proves that our 40th president’s success still drives
liberals insane.

To believe, in the 1980s, that Ronald Reagan was going to blow up the
world may have been merely peculiar. To believe so today is a symptom of
raging Reagan Derangement Syndrome. And yet here we are, with The Reagan
Show, a new documentary rehashing the paranoid style of Reaganography, set
for limited theatrical release on June 30 and video-on-demand release
shortly thereafter.

The continuing popularity of President Reagan is a source of profound
irritation and unease to liberals. To assuage their pain, they have gone
back to their initial rationalization for how Reagan became so beloved: He
cheated. Though a lousy actor, he nonetheless fooled the common man with
his mesmeric performing skills. It’s the old false-consciousness story: If
we liked the man, trickery must have been involved.

The point was made at great and boring length throughout Reagan’s
presidency, and it is made all over again in The Reagan Show, which begins
with the man himself talking to TV journalist David Brinkley about how
being an actor informed his political career. “There have been times in
this office,” he says, “when I wondered how you could do the job if you
hadn’t been an actor.” This is meant to be taken as a damning indictment —
Aha! Reagan himself admitted he was just playing a part! — but in reality
it just indicates the historic illiteracy of the film’s directors, Sierra
Pettengill and Pacho Velez.

How many times did we hear — always in awestruck tones — about the “movie-
star charisma,” the “glamour,” and the “style” that President Kennedy’s
administration so assiduously crafted? For that matter, even before TV
existed, Franklin Roosevelt famously stage-managed his image to hide his
disability. Press photographers almost without exception colluded with
FDR’s staffers to keep unflattering images of him in his frail state out
of the newspapers. Image management is part of the job of any
administration, but it’s only a scandal when Republicans do it.

Consisting entirely of archival footage from the Reagan era and before,
the remainder of The Reagan Show is an exercise in snark that seems aimed
at Baby Boomers still pining for Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale. White
House film crews collected huge quantities of footage of Reagan in
artfully arranged settings, but the directors of this film are more
interested in the bloopers and the meta-footage — images of image-makers,
snippets from before and after the main event that show cameramen
scuttling around, White House aides getting exactly the angles they want,
Reagan ad-libbing a joke after the director yells, “Cut!” The clips tend
to be set off with either comical music (meant to build a case that Reagan
was a thoughtless, frivolous empty suit) or ominous tones (suggesting
Reagan was a creep well aware he was damaging the country). But Reagan was
always performing, so there aren’t a lot of gotcha moments. About the best
the filmmakers can do is show him forced to reshoot a commercial endorsing
John Sununu for governor of New Hampshire because he initially placed the
accent on the wrong syllable.

Intended to be a document of Reagan’s shallowness, the film instead
unintentionally reveals the hostility of such anchormen as Tom Brokaw,
Peter Jennings, and Dan Rather, shown in news clips. It should surprise no
one that breathless media hysteria about Republican presidents long
predates the political career of Donald Trump. The newscasters are seen
blatantly editorializing about Reagan’s alleged weaknesses: Sam Donaldson
says Reagan is locked in a fantasy that’s “not the real world today” and
avers that “imprecision of language for Ronald Reagan is nothing new.” At
a press conference, Donaldson yells out, “Your credibility has been
severely damaged — can you repair it?” Comically, as Reagan inches closer
to an arms-reduction deal with Mikhail Gorbachev, an unseen TV reporter —
it sounds like Andrea Mitchell — makes a bid to outflank him on the right:
“Veterans of past summits worry that President Reagan may be too taken
with Mikhail Gorbachev the man and not guarded enough against Gorbachev
the dedicated Communist,” she tells us solemnly, making an improbable
effort to sound like the Curtis LeMay of NBC News.

Reagan had exactly the right approach to all of this: pointed mockery.
After his initial Geneva summit with Gorbachev, he told Congress, “There
were over 3,000 reporters in Geneva, so it’s possible there will be 3,000
different opinions of what happened. Maybe it’s the old broadcaster in me,
but I decided to file my own report directly to you.” Big laughs. America
trusted him.

And it drove the media crazy. At a moment in which the cultural mandarins
eagerly participated in hyping the threat Reagan supposedly posed — the
1983 TV movie The Day After, about life after a nuclear strike, was seen
by 100 million Americans — newscasters gravely promoted pseudo-events such
as a move by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to push the hands of
the Doomsday Clock a minute closer to midnight. Meanwhile they ridiculed
Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative as “Star Wars,” the dangerous
fantasy of a bellicose cowboy.

It’s almost as if the directors of The Reagan Show are, like the
characters in The Americans, still mired in the mid 1980s, unaware how all
of this turned out. Reagan not only didn’t start a nuclear war, he
achieved victory against the Soviets without firing a shot, and his SDI
idea turned out not to be a pipe dream. Late in the film, the directors
make one more feeble effort to tarnish the Reagan legacy by invoking the
Iran-Contra affair of 1986, which despite a monumental effort by the media
to whip up another Watergate did not permanently damage Reagan and now
stands mostly forgotten. In February, according to a Harris Poll,
Americans declared Reagan the greatest president since World War II, as
they did in similar polls taken in 2008, 2010, and 2012. The media lost.
The Gipper won.


--
Donald J. Trump, 304 electoral votes to 227, defeated compulsive liar in
denial Hillary Rodham Clinton on December 19th, 2016. The clown car
parade of the democrat party has run out of gas.

Congratulations President Trump. Thank you for ending the disaster of the
Obama presidency.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp.

ObamaCare is a total 100% failure and no lie that can be put forth by its
supporters can dispute that.

Obama jobs, the result of ObamaCare. 12-15 working hours a week at minimum
wage, no benefits and the primary revenue stream for ObamaCare. It can't
be funded with money people don't have, yet liberals lie about how great
it is.

Obama increased total debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion in the eight
years he was in office, and sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood queer
liberal democrat donors.