The point of the post is that Ron Reagan Jr. (which Moe repeatedly refers to as "the boy," in a deliberate attempt to put Ron in his place, in accordance with Moe's juvenile understanding of the universe), has written a book about his father in which he claims that Reagan had Alzheimer's as early as 1984 and would have resigned in 1987, had it been diagnosed at the time.
Oh, 1987, you say? That can only mean one thing, right? I mean, 1987? Eh, eh? We all know why The Boy might have picked that year, right? Right?
Oh, wait. You don't know? It's not obvious to you, because you're not stuck using Moe Lane's delusional mind? Well then, I'll just have to clue you in: That was the year Reagan gave his now famous "Tear Down This Wall" speech which led to the immediate destruction of the Soviet Union, a mere four and a half years later.
Picking 1987 Because We Hate Reagan
Now you're seeing it, right? It's perfectly obvious why The Boy picked that year, right? Right? What? You're still not getting it? Well maybe you're the one with Alzheimer's, then. Ok, fine. I'll let Moe connect the dots for you.
Before they hated Sarah Palin, or Dick Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld, or Condoleeza Rice, or George W Bush, the Left hated Ronald Wilson Reagan. They hated and feared him - and not least for the way that he destroyed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in eight short years. It’s not even that he did it; it’s that he did it so apparently effortlessly.And yes, one of the big reasons liberals hated Reagan while he was in office was because he destroyed Mother Russia almost three years after he left office. Because yeah, we all know how much us liberals pine for the glory days of the Soviet Union, and gnash our teeth that we lost.
And Reagan's work was so effortless that it didn't seem like he did a god damn thing and even our best intel completely failed to predict it. It was only in hindsight that anyone suggested that Reagan could beat the Soviets, as he never said that was his plan at all. That's what good presidenting is all about.
Reverse-Engineered Smears
But it looks like Moe figured out our trick. We told The Boy to use that year because we hated Reagan so much. And so, uhm, err...hold on. I lost the thought train on this one. We picked 1987 because we knew people think of that speech when they think of 1987 and want them to think he was senile when he made it because...it would erase the speech from our memories if we thought he had memory issues when he made it?
Wait, huh? That can't be right. Ok, sorry. I blew it. I thought I understood Moe's point, but realize he lost me completely.
And was the pick of 1987 a smear on Reagan, or on the significance of that speech? I fail to see how it works on either count. And, well, screw it. I can't figure this out. Even with my famed biobrain, I can't quite grasp the logic Moe was working with here.
My best guess is that he reverse-engineered the smear. He saw the year 1987 and searched for some significant event that happened that year; assuming that Ron was up to some trick. And seeing as how 1987 really wasn't that great of a year for Reagan, with his approval ratings at a four-year low, half the country considering him "out of touch with what is going on in the government," and Iran-Contra looming large, I guess it makes sense that Moe had to settle on a non-event that could only look impressive in hindsight...assuming the hindsight was by a childlike partisan trying desperately to link a single speech to an event that happened four years later. Particularly as the rest of Reagan's 1987 sounds kind of like a mildly senile guy having a hard time at an extremely difficult job.
And so yeah, sure, maybe someone might see some connection between the overall cluelessness Reagan exhibited during the Iran-Contra blow-up and the mental issues which supposedly appeared out of nowhere after he left office. But dammit, Reagan sure sounded good when he was reading a speech written by someone else. So it's gotta be the speech that The Boy was referring to, and not any actual events which might support his case.
Oh, and in case you were wondering. No, the book hasn't come out yet and Moe hasn't read it. He merely read a quote from the book, in which Ron wrote:
Had the diagnosis been made in, say 1987, would he have stepped down? I believe he would have.From that, he concluded that Ron Reagan is trying to erase "Tear Down the Wall;" whatever that means. And that's pretty much SOP for conservatives. They're great at telling you about liberal conspiracies to destroy their legacy, but not so great at explaining how the conspiracy is supposed to work.
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2 comments:
To be fair to conservatives, there was one poster on that board, out of eighteen comments, which mentioned that Alzheimer's takes a long time to be seen and that The Boy never claimed Reagan was in the later stages while in office.
Besides that, no one even bothered questioning Moe's absurd logic on why 1987 must inherently be about the Wall speech. It's obvious these people have developed a new level of non sequitur that rhetoricians have only begun to understand.
I would think that Ron Reagan would know more about what was going on with his dad's health than Moe or anyone else. I've read of several conservatives who have tried to tell Ron what his own dad thought. None of these people were insiders like a member of Reagan's family was. They're projecting onto Reagan the qualities that they would have liked for him to have. I'll take Ron's word over that of others.
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