It is my first instinct to treat this report of Ronald Reagan Jr’s… commentary… by simply letting it pass by without a response.  For those not wishing to click through, the boy (use of term deliberate) is indulging elderly liberal fetishists everywhere by making the claim that his father was suffering from Alzheimer’s as far back as the 1984 debates*, as well as ‘details’ regarding a supposed operation in 1989 that had even the US News & World Report doing some fancy footwork in order to avoid having to declare it a lie.  It’s the Left; it’s pornography; it’s Left-porn.  Outside of that particular niche market, its utility is… low.

So why even bother addressing it?  Simple: because Ron Reagan Jr picked his dates carefully.  1984 and 1986 are before 1987, which the boy made a point of explicitly referencing as being the year that his father should have resigned.  1987 is the year that the boy wants people to decide was a year where his father’s illness was clearly and obviously advanced.  1987 is the year where the boy wants his father to be dead inside.

The only problem is, 1987 is the year of the Brandenburg Speech.  You know: ‘tear down this wall.’

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjWDrTXMgF8[/youtube]

Decide for yourself whether or not that is a man with Alzheimer’s – but never forget this.  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.  Reagan made his opponents look like chumps – which they were; I was on the other side during that decade, so I have some familiarity with the type – and he will not be forgiven for that until after his last opponent is dead in his bed of old age.

So keep that in mind when you decide what books you want to read this month.  If you must buy a political book, try Known and Unknown: A Memoir.  I have it on excellent authority that the author doesn’t need to defecate on the memory of his father in order to feel less of a failure.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Which is a charge that should have Walter Mondale contemplating a lawsuit for libel, but never mind that right now.