It’s kind of fascinating to watch Bill O’Reilly butt heads with George Will and other Reagan loyalists over the plain fact that the Gipper was suffering from rather debilitating loss of function late in his second term in office.
Casual Observation
Discussion
It is too bad that REAGAN did not have this happen to him sooner like in his first term of office.
It did, but was more successfully covered up in the early years.
He’d taken his notes from a Reader’s Digest article.
wow
Yep. But he wasn’t the brightest bulb in the box at the outset. He had the gift of glibness combined with being tall and handsome in his youth – which means that people will automatically give a lot more credibility to your statements than otherwise. But even with all that he bragged that he never got a grade of above C in high school, and it appears that was the case. Quite amazing. Good looks, winning personality, ability to memorize anything without understanding it, and ability to figure out which memorized catch phrases are popular. That’s what passes… Read more »
After the meeting that as a clinician had disturbed Caldicott, she checked around with people who had known Reagan for years and they told her he’d always been intellectually somewhat dim and boring. That led her to conclude that she’d met the regular Reagan and not a man in the early stages of dementia.
Rubio is in training to capture what Reagan had. Even if he’s too short and his ears are too big. And like Reagan, he has staff to do the figuring out part for him.
I’m struggling to understand if Rubio is a sly dog, just implausibly shallow and banal or a genuine nincompoop. His enthusiastic delivery of indefensible bafflegab leaves me dumbfounded. Does he just practice in front of the mirror?
I can only imagine he would be handed his ass in any debate in which reality was permitted to intrude.
He’s a nincompoop. Practicing in front of a mirror is so 19th century. Rubio has a team of coaches and practices on camera. The coaches then dissect the recorded performance and adjust, modify, tweak, etc. Rubio’s body and facial moves, voice, delivery, and memorized “facts” as he performs again and again on-camera. Jeb? is undergoing the same process, but appears to have started later than Rubio because he’s still at the stage of appearing less instead of more fluid in his movements/facial expressions and rehearsed lines — IOW at the more conscious stage of the modification process. Or maybe Rubio… Read more »
Trump and Carson are leading in the polls at least partly because there’s an uncanny valley between the electorate and these over engineered, expensive animatrons?
Nah. Just different programming teams and who they used to test market the models with before rolling out the latest version. The GOP beltway pro-teams are definitely losing the battle as if Mitt v. 8.9 would sell better than v. 4.3 and they could skip the test market step.
during his SOTU response was . . . er . . . ‘ad-libbed’, then?
No – it was written and somewhat memorized, but too early in his federal career for the PR media types to recognize that his TV iq and presentation skills were that of a hick.
hey oaguabonita, what do you think of the new Montana dem candidate for Congress, Denise Juneau?
http://denisejuneau.com/
I like her. She’s about to term-limit out as state-level equivalent to Secretary of Education (Director or whatever the title is of Office of Public Instruction, OPI), so it’s not surprising she’d run now. She’s Native-American. That’s not an unalloyed strength in MT. We certainly have at least our full ration of racism/-ists here, and in a state with a relatively minuscule African-American population, NAs bear the brunt of it. Also, she was one of the Dem-Establishment potential replacements on the Senate ballot for Walsh after his plagiarism debacle, but declined. Hard to say what her chances are. Zinke’s horrible… Read more »
Thanks. can she bring up the public lands issue? and connect Zinke to the carpetbagger from NJ?] candidate for gov?
I was/ am a big fan of Amanda Curtis, hope she runs again eventually
you mean the push to have the state take over management (at a minimum) or ownership of fed public lands (which here means mainly BLM and FS). That went nowhere last legislature. It came out (to those of us who pay attention to such matters anyway — with our small minority status being a big part of the problem generally) that that was being driven by some secretive, out-of-state, extreme-rightwing-‘privatization’-dogma-espousing outfit; iirc, there was even an ethics complaint/lawsuit, unsuccessful I think, against some state legislator from NV or somewhere who came here pushing it). Fortunately, I think a substantial majority… Read more »
Would you think that HRC is undergoing a comparable treatment? Her demeanor has markedly changed since 2008. Or is she taking some kind of tranquillizer. I remember reading that she took elocution lessons to make her speech conform more to NYC/northeastern norms. After all she was nothing more than a carpetbagger as NY senator. Who pushed her? Schemer?
Take most of this article with a grain of salt. However, the description of the nuts and bolts seem accurate enough to me because it’s standard SOP for those that can afford it: She hired an assistant to run a video camera in the den of Whitehaven, her home in the fashionable Observatory Circle neighborhood of northwest Washington, DC. … Later, after the recording session was over, she watched herself on the TV set. She sat in the dark, dressed in a blue muumuu that she’d recently purchased online at Amazon.com, and scrutinized her facial expressions, her hand gestures, the… Read more »
I’d guess she’s gone in to some kind of meditation, mindfulness or whatever. She’s so much more self-confident. Did here job as SoS make the difference? Only guessing.
Reagan was a seasoned actor and he brought those skills to politics. Rubio has none of that going for him. I get the impression that he hasn’t spent a whole lot of time developing himself. Handlers can’t do that for you.
Not even a very good actor b/c other actors had no difficulty seeing the tricks that Reagan used. Once feared how far a really talented and skilled rightwing actor could take this country. Relaxed when I realized that the conservative mind is incapable of achieving better than B actor skills.
The GOP will never put out anyone as cool as George Clooney.
Reagan’s success was pre YouTube. Today, any candidate will get blitzed trying to replicate RayGun.
Although it was still pretty hard to believe when it was actually happening. Really disturbing to watch in real time.
A relative who is a professional journalist interviewed him when he was Governor of California and said he was the stupidest person he had ever interviewed in his entire careeer.
O’Reilly’s theory is pretty plausible, at the least. We found out, years after the event, that Reagan very nearly died from the assassination attempt, and that he’d had very low blood pressure and pulse for a while, which could easily cause brain damage. Mild strokes and multiple ministrokes are often precipitating event for frank Alzheimer’s – it seems in the early stages the brain loses the ability to learn new information before the old stuff starts getting lost. So damage that a younger, healthier person could have recovered from produces Alzheimer’s. It’s certainly plausible that brain damage from a shooting… Read more »
Don’t mess with St Ronnie! He was the Best President Ever, and no one dares tarnish his perfect image. The Republicans will never admit he was anything less, even modern Conservatives who ignore his stance on immigration and taxes. I remember an interview with Jimmy Carter where he described a meeting in the Oval Office with President-elect Reagan. Carter said he offered a thick folder filled with notes he’d taken during his term in office, thinking it would give Reagan a great source of information and help. He said he was astonished and dismayed when Reagan rebuffed him and declined… Read more »
to see O’Reilly occupying the role of reasonable insistence on (at least a selection of) the facts that comprise Reality.
May we expect the sun to rise in the west tomorrow . . . or assume one could find snowballs in hell today?
I made sorta the same comment here at another post the other day. How, imo, I came down on the side of O’Reilly in that verbal fisticuffs, particularly when Will told him that he (O’Reilly) was aiding and abetting the “leftists” in their efforts to undermine the legacy of Reagan. First time I’ve ever felt sympatico with Bill O.
He was already suffering from pre-Alzheimer’s.
It’s been suggested by Fox-watcher Gabriel Sherman that we are seeing the outlines of a struggle to succeed Ailes: Inside Fox, the O’Reilly-Will feud is being closely studied by executives because it is part of a larger power struggle that’s taking place at the highest reaches of the organization. On opposing sides of the fault line are Clemente, who oversees news (where Will works), and executive vice-president Bill Shine, who oversees prime-time shows (where O’Reilly works). Clemente and Shine are vying to replace Ailes and are such bitter rivals that they barely speak, numerous Fox employees say. Gabriel Sherman –… Read more »
Reagan’s legacy seems merely a theatrical prop.
Has been since Reagan began using it.
Mann tweet (have no idea who he is)
Note of caution: GOP operations have used the “we’re pulling out” ploy for various GOP candidates before when the money spigots have not in fact been turned off.
Rylee Ahnen tweet
Billmon
I beleive the correct quote is “dead girl or live boy”
Yes, but extrapolating from that, a “live girl” was okay or would be given a pass. Hence, Vitter may have pushed too far on the “live girl” pass.
For me, the diaper was a bridge too far. Wilbur Mills and Fanne Fox, that was understandable. I also can’t find any reference to him being married.
The diaper thing – Yukkk!
P.S. Looking at his wikipedia page, Wilbur wasn’t a bad guy. He did some very good things. Back then he was called a conservative Democrat. Today he would be called a socialist.
ot:Because, of course, the only people who suffer racism in America are ghetto-dwelling, welfare-taking Black people. And, if you have some success, you no longer have the right to voice the injustice and racism that you see occurring DAILY in your life? GET.DA.PHUQ.OUTTA.HERE with the bullshyt. I bet this young man’s father could tell stories that would make your head shake in disgust. And, I also bet his father couldn’t be more proud of his son today if he tried. ………………………………. Mizzou hunger-strike figure from Omaha, son of top railroad exec Jonathan Butler, a central figure in the protests at… Read more »
all good for Jonathan and his family!!!
The Hill In new shock poll, Sanders has landslides over both Trump and Bush
(But only Clinton is ‘electible.’)
And this was before Americans heard Trump and Carson say that they don’t back an increase in the minimum wage. (To be fair, Carson seemed to say that the minimum wage is already too high.)
Unfortunately, he has to win the Democratic primary before those numbers are half way revealing.
DEM primary voters have to make the same calculation in this election cycle that they did in 2008. Then the floor for both of them was about the same (and at or near a winning margin); so, the question was which candidate had a potentially larger upside and the larger the more likely it would trickle down to Senate and House races.
That was Trump. I can’t believe he said that bit it’s all over the news. I believe that he thinks it but I thought he was too savvy to say it.
Carson did as well and went further. None of the other candidates objected to what Trump and Carson said.
And the non-union white blue collar workers eat this up. Dumb as rocks.
Well, perhaps the younger, white blue-collar, union workers won’t be so gullible seeing as how they got the shaft from the older guys.
??? Maybe you are referring to two-tier systems? If so, I agree about the shaft. The unions are forgetting that solidarity is what gave them power.
I find that they usually come out with something like “I have my job and benefits because I’m so valuable that my grateful employer rewards me, but those other guys are loafers that don’t deserve it”.
Like I said, dumb as rocks!
” the Gipper was suffering from rather debilitating loss of function late in his second term in office”
If you ask me, I’d say it was a LOT earlier …
(Not quite enough information to warrant a new diary, but …) WNYC Bridgegate Defendants: Christie’s Team Hiding Thousands of Documents, Including Christie Emails (Recall recently Christie’s lawyers denied having any work papers.) … Christie’s legal team is inappropriately hiding thousands of documents related to the Bridgegate scandal, the two defense lawyers argued in briefs filed late Tuesday. Among the hidden documents, the lawyers say, are emails to and from the governor’s personal and work email accounts and a calendar entry from the week when an order was delivered to close lanes at the George Washington Bridge in 2013. Unfortunate timing… Read more »