Current Republicans, for some reason, have deified Ronald Reagan. This is curious, for certain, because Reagan was way more liberal than any current GOP candidate would dare to admit. Today Reagan would never make it past the Iowa caucuses.

All of that is a discussion for another day. On that day, we will touch on the many ways he differed from every current ‘viable’ GOP candidate for president.

The point here is, in spite of his charming nature, I never supported Reagan. I felt his opponents were more likely to aid the downtrodden.

At the time I also felt he was a simpleton, but I have since altered my view on this. Compared to George W. Bush, Reagan was Einstein. I can now see that Reagan used his impeccable acting skills and personal skills to come across as folksy, which disguised a more calculating side. (Please note that ‘calculating’ is not an insult, it requires brainpower.)

But back to my point (if I ever had one)….

John Hinckley Jr., who shot President Ronald Reagan and three others in March 1981, is now asking to be released from prison. His lawyers are making the case that he is no longer a threat to society.

Opposing lawyers are making counter arguments that Hinckley is still dangerous, as evidenced by the fact that he has recently looked at books about Reagan and other presidential assassins.

Whether he is still dangerous or not, I am against his release.

‘Life’ should be the minimum sentence for any attempt to assassinate a president or presidential candidate.

No matter what the motivation of the assassin, be it political (Sirhan Sirhan) or insanity (Hinckley), the end result is the same: The will of the American voter is being undermined.

I did not vote for Reagan, but America did. No one should have the right to violently void an election.

No parole. Ever.

Do you care about government waste? Republicans do. Or they say they do. Are they screaming about $31 billion to $60 billion disappearing?

The bipartisan Wartime Contraction Commission is asking Congress to quickly enact recommendations to overhaul the contracting process and increase accountability.

Why? According to the commission, the Iraq / Afghanistan wars are rife with…

• Lax oversight of contractors
• Poor planning
• Inadequate competition
• Corruption

The total cost of the wars now approaches $1 trillion. In waste alone, the U.S. has lost between $31 billion and $60 billion.

The GOP will scream about a $100,000 research grant. They will rail that a $45,000 teacher is grossly overpaid. Anything that goes to public broadcasting or to protect the environment or student loans – all waste, all killing America.

But when $31 billion to $60 billion disappears? Do you hear the crickets?

Remember, sometimes what one man sees as ‘government waste’ is really just luxurious retirement packages for hundreds of corporate execs.

I bet Halliburton knows where a good chunk of that went.

Does the name “Halliburton’ mean anything to you? That is where Dick Cheney worked before he became Vice President.

It was Cheney who orchestrated us getting into a war in Iraq. It was Cheney who orchestrated Halliburton getting no-bid, name-your-price contracts to provide services in Iraq.

‘No-bid, name-your-price’ is an invitation to insane pricing, and a good way to throw away $31 billion and $60 billion in taxpayer money.

Now you know why Dick Cheney has that big, albeit crooked, smile on his face. Surely Halliburton is rewarding him handsomely for his fealty.

(I still don’t understand why he likes torturing people so much, since there is no money in it. Maybe the idea of torture just humors him.)

Not too long ago (February 14 to be exact) we at Winkest Link expressed our displeasure about how often opponents just make up s*** to trash the president.

In the political arena we don’t mind a little hyperbole. Politics, after all, is hardball, so….

1. GOP: Feel free to say Democrats spend tax dollars like drunken sailors.
2. Dems: Go ahead and say the GOP are heartless bastards who only care about their rich friends.

It is okay to say both of these things because they have just enough truth to qualify as hyperbole. They are not outright lies.

‘Hyperbole’ is not how you would describe the statements by Michelle Bachmann in the attached article. These are lies. She is making up s***.

Ignore the John Wayne comments. She was in Iowa, John Wayne was born in Iowa. Close enough. (Okay, it is a LITTLE bit humorous that Waterloo, the town she was bragging up, was once the home of John Wayne Gacy).

But the rest of it is typical Bachmann, and comes from the GOP playbook.

Just make s*** up, repeat it and repeat it.

The GOP plays to an important axiom: A microphone in your face gives you the appearance of credibility. People will believe whatever you say as long as they would otherwise agree with you.

And never apologize. Apologizing is NOT in the playbook.

Democrats are not clean on this issue either. They too get snagged for specious statements.

But this is not a rare occurrence for Republicans. It is not a slip-up, it is a tactic. This is a scorched-earth strategy that makes people hate all politicians. They will even use it against fellow Republicans if they have to.

Let us examine a Carl Rove example, since he pretty much wrote the playbook on how to trash your opponent.

Early in the 2000 Republican primaries John McCain was gaining some momentum against George W. Bush. Rove, for Bush, “push-polled” South Carolina, auto-dialing thousands of people, telling them John McCain had a biracial child out of wedlock. (Yes, McCain has a ‘biracial’ child, an adopted daughter from Bangladesh.)

It worked. Bush beat war-veteran McCain in South Carolina, which eventually led to Bush taking the GOP nomination, etc.

The ‘biracial child out of wedlock’ story wasn’t hyperbole, it was a crass attempt to stir up racist sentiment in South Carolina.

Make up s***, scorched earth.

Nowadays there are outlets to double-check these statements, most notably politifact.com, but it doesn’t matter too much. People believe what they want to believe, in spite of documented evidence to the contrary. How else can you explain the high percent of Iowa Republicans who STILL believe Barack Obama was not born in the U.S.?

Make up s***. It sticks.

“Liberals” have pretty much been on the right side of every major issue in the history of this country.

Ending slavery. Medicare. Social Security. Voting rights. Every one fiercely opposed by conservatives.

Those soft-hearted liberals were against going to war in Vietnam and Iraq. Those ventures both went well, didn’t they?

Now liberals want to make sure everyone has health care benefits.

Is there any hope this will pass, or did Obama just stick his foot in the biggest bear trap?

And if he doesn’t succeed in this, what will his presidency even be about??

“W” had a presidency with a purpose: He wanted to go to war, specifically with Iraq. It took some creativity* to convince the American public that there was a REASON to go to war with Iraq, but he succeeded, and got us into that war. Yeah!

Reagan had two goals, giving tax cuts to the wealthy and spending more on the military. He succeeded on both counts.

Obama did have one goal foisted on him, to bring the U.S. out of the economic chaos of a recession. It is way too early to determine his success on this.

Oops, almost forgot, getting us out of Iraq was another pressing goal. While the end in Iraq (to some extent) appears to be in sight, we may be in Afghanistan a long-long time.

Those are not Obama’s programs though, they are just pre-existing issues that needed fixing. Health care for all Americans is really his baby. His legacy.

Will he succeed? The verbal fighting is fierce, with lots of insane red herrings being tossed about (death panels??).

Regardless, SOME DAY there will be national health care in America.

Republicans are now staunch defenders of Social Security and Medicare. To NOT do so is political suicide. When these programs were proposed, however, they used the same scare tactics they are using now …too expensive, socialist, communist.

They have a great new scary word though…. Nazi. Yep, apparently the scariest thing about the Nazi’s was a plan to provide health care for all their citizens. JUST LIKE OBAMA !!!

The Nazi’s also had BMW provide many/most of their vehicles and other war equipment. Wouldn’t that make any American who buys a BMW a Nazi? It works for me!

If and when it is passed, you can put large amounts of money on this: Republicans will eventually say that national health care is one of the things that makes America great, and they would never dream of dismantling it.

*Creativity = Huge lies repeated endlessly so that morons believe them to this day.
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The May 18 Winkest link article was obviously written several days before it was printed.

In it we wrote that the Defense Department, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, was going to release photos showing alleged abuse of prisoners in detention facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This did not happen. The Obama Administration has had a change of heart and, for now at least, will not release the photos.

This appears to be an attempt by Obama to maintain goodwill with the political center. He will need them (moderates) later to tackle bigger issues, such as health care. He probably feels he can’t spend the political capital right now.

Winkest Link is against this decision, because we ALWAYS support transparency in our government. We pay for it, we should know what we are getting.

Plus, we want to know if our paid officials are breaking the law.

Opaque government is what we had, for eight years, during the Bush years. Information was only parceled out on a ‘need to know’ basis, and Bush/Cheney thought the public NEVER had a need to know.

The more a government lies, the more they need to hide, thus “opaque government.”

The signs are strong that the current administration will be much more forthcoming than the previous one. They couldn’t possibly be less forthcoming.

By the way, what good is the “Freedom of Information Act” if we can’t ‘free’ the information?

Many recent presidents have gotten very wealthy on speaking engagements. I don’t really begrudge them that.

It is nice that Jimmy Carter has raised awareness of Habitat for Humanity, and promoted democracy by monitoring elections in many countries.

George Bush (the elder) and Bill Clinton have raised a LOT of money for disaster victims of Hurricane Katrina and other causes around the world.

Jerry Ford skied and played a lot of golf.

Let’s hope ‘W’ can find something useful to do rather than just try to defend the abysmal record he accumulated while in office.

Ex-presidents carry a wealth of actual experience, and have dealt exhaustively with issues that really matter to U.S. citizens. On the national and international level they all tried things that worked, and tried things that failed miserably. Learning experiences all.

They no longer have to grovel for votes, or donor money (to get votes). This freedom should be liberating.

Lets put them to good use. Doing what? I don’t know.

• Make each one a congressperson? Nah. Being just one of 400+ votes is not influential enough, considering they used to have veto-power.
• Ambassador? Too limited, unless the ex-president no longer wants to be part of the rat-race. Then they can just select a choice country and hobnob with dignitaries while on permanent vacation.
• Supreme Court appointment? This is not unprecedented, but a current justice would have to die or resign for this to happen. We are NOT about to change the required total of nine.
• Lifetime member of the Senate? Well, this one could hold more appeal. I’ll bet we could persuade a few ‘ex’s’ to do this.

For ‘W’? How about Chair of the Rose Bowl Parade?

“President Obama is sure popular. I suppose some of that is because he is new. I was fairly popular when I was new. And he’s got that ‘black thing’ going. It’s always cool to be black. He keeps doing cool things, and everything he does seems right, like talking face-to-face with the minority party Republicans and being interviewed by an Arab TV network. People around the world seem to like him.”

“Why him? Why not me?”

Because you, Mr. Bush, had no vision. You just wanted to be president. You had no idea what you wanted to do once you became president, so you just went along with whatever Dick Cheney suggested.

No vision. It would never have occurred to you to talk to, or listen to, the minority party Democrats.

Cheney is a demagogue who was more interested in his personal agenda than in competent governance. He sold you a big vision of ‘making the world a better place’ by attacking the evil bad man Saddam Hussein.

When things went bad he convinced you that people who disagreed with you were bad people. The conservative radio henchmen (and Fox News) neatly divided the country into two parts, (1) those who agreed with you and (2) those who hate America.

This tends to alienate people who honestly disagree with you. Alienated people will not stand by you when the chips are down.

To you, the Democrats had zero value, especially when they were the minority party. You chose to ignore them. Worse, when they questioned your policies, especially your war policies, you demonized them too. You never imagined they would ever take over the House & Senate and eventually you would need them.

This demonization pleased the hard-core conservatives, many of whom simply think the democrats are evil anyway. You always got big applause at all your ‘Republican-only’ pep rallies.

In times of war a president should win reelection in a landslide. You were reelected by the slimmest of margins in 2004 and said “I have political capital and I am going to spend it”.

This is not a ‘team’ attitude, this is “I will do what I damned well please”. After a long while you even started to alienate Republicans. Your interesting combination of ‘smug and stupid’ reflected poorly on them, and many lost re-election in 2006.

You were so naïve you thought it didn’t matter. You were (and still are) always in ‘excuse’ mode. Nothing is ever your fault.

Later, way later, you figured out what everyone else knew all along. That Cheney cares only about Cheney, not about you, not about America. Trust me, now that he is out of office he will be richly rewarded by Halliburton and other war-factories.

Yep, you finally figured out Cheney, but you still have no vision. You still blame all your ills on bad timing or bad luck.

Mr. Bush, the job of president, YOUR JOB, was to be prepared for bad timing and bad luck.

For eight years you hoped for the best and blamed others when things went wrong. This is not leadership.

Co-worker 1: They are recording our business calls?

Me: No, they were recording ALL calls, yours, and yours, and yours (pointing to various coworkers). And recording all of your e-mails too.

Co-worker 2: Why would they do that?

Me: I presume this has been under the guise of stopping terrorism.

(You know what is coming next, don’t you??)

Co-worker 3: I don’t care, I have nothing to hide.

Co-worker 4: If it makes us safer, it is worth it.

Eleven people were in the room with me, and not one felt it was problematic that the government has been recording all of our phone calls and e-mails.

People in the Bush administration used this power to spy on journalists. Not foreign journalists, American journalists. Local calls, not even the dangerous ‘overseas’ calls. Nixon revisited! But no one cares.
How much of this attitude can we attribute to natural stupidity, and how much credit does the Bush administration get for years of intentionally scaring the crap out of us? I can’t tell. I never want to downplay the level of natural stupidity.

Stupid is a pretty harsh word. I could be kind, and call this ignorance or naiveté, but I am too old. A lifetime of observation tells me there is no ‘learning curve’ to indicate our society is getting smarter regarding civic issues. So, “stupid” it is.

We can stroll along clueless and hope all works out for the best.
All societies go through good and bad times. Sometimes very bad (sort of like now). If we elected a charismatic who also happens to be a megalomaniac, this type of leader (think Putin) will insist on suspending our civil liberties. Like always, it will be to “protect” us from some evil. And we will follow like sheep. We need our great leader to protect us!

He will need to suspend congressional powers because Congress moves too slow (and asks too many questions). We need action now!

Listen people, it starts with listening to our phone calls, which is BAD enough, and leads to monitoring everything we do. Why would it stop at the phone? Why wouldn’t the government reach in to our bedroom activities? What is stopping them now?

Then they suspend habeas corpus, meaning people can be imprisoned without cause. Why do you think this wouldn’t happen? It is happening now. Or don’t ‘foreigners’ count?

Some people will dare to stand up to that megalomaniac President and say “what you are doing is unconstitutional”.

These people will be called traitors, terrorist-lovers and un-American. Does any of this sound familiar?

So we all know by now the story of Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the man that threw his shoes and shouted at President Bush at his news conference in Iraq. What some of us may not know is al-Zeidi’s treatment once he left the room. Bush said that the shoes being thrown at him were a sign that they are exercising free speech. True, but the Iraqi government did not like it. After al-Zeidi left the room, he was severely beaten. Multiple sources, including his brother, state that he suffered several broken bones, included a busted rib.

If we want Iraqis to feel safe, maybe we should start with that: making sure the police don’t abuse people.

What was our purpose there again? Feel free to ignore the imaginary ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and ‘poison gas factories’ that Bush & Cheney used to drag us into an unprovoked war.   Let’s pretend that the real reason, all along, was simply to depose a ruthless dictator and to introduce democracy to the region, with the hope of it spreading. 

That is how the rationale morphed, so what is the prognosis?

Here is a terribly easy prediction:  At some time in the near future whoever governs Iraq will declare a crisis, stop holding elections and invalidate all or part of the constitution.

They will never let the minority parties have a legitimate voice in government decisions.

Crackdowns, imprisonment of dissidents and martial law will follow naturally. To placate international interest they may eventually hold sham elections.

Iraq will then look precisely like it did before we deposed Saddam. Instead of a ruthless Sunni President-for-life, we will have a ruthless Shiite President-for-life. This will easily morph into an America-hating theocracy.

Who will be blamed for that?  Bill Clinton, I suppose. Hannity & Rush will confirm this for you.

When our involvement finally ends, what will the total cost have been, in lives lost, lives ruined due to disabling injuries, and in dollars?  Our hearts go out to the families of the soldiers, and for our children who will be paying taxes for this war for generations to come.

Isn’t war fun?  Maybe not, but at least a few select corporations profited enormously from it. Bush & Cheney can look forward to some handsome payoffs after they leave office.