Conservatives can own Ronald Reagan and be welcome to him, but you don’t get Nelson Mandela.

[Playinghardball]

It is possible, if we all think really hard, we can use the days between Nelson Mandela’s death and his journey to his final resting place deep in the hills of his boyhood to make quite plain to young people who may have joined us late what a thoroughgoing moral disaster was the Reagan Administration (1980-88)….

… now, of course, with the death of Mandela, there are a lot of proper retrospectives concerning how enthusiastically the Reagan Administration supported the white-supremacist government of South Africa, and how morally obtuse (at best) that administration was to the reality of apartheid….

It’s too late now to seek absolution at the bier of Nelson Mandela, who is dead and can’t speak for himself … You opposed Mandela when it really counted for the same reason you cheered on murderers in this hemisphere. Ronald Reagan was a dim hack who did horrible damage to almost everything he touched. You can own him and be welcome to him, but you don’t get Nelson Mandela.

Full post here: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/History_Needs_To_Be_Honest

Discovered on: http://theobamadiary.com/2013/12/07/rise-and-shine-690/

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. Kick - sorry I didn't read this while it was in the 24 rec period

It's classic Pierce. Since you've only quoted 3 paragrpahs, I get to add a 4th:

Between the vainglory and the historical amnesia, it's a wonder Murdock doesn't walk the wrong way into traffic, pounding his chest and demanding the finest mead in the land. (As a point of historical fact, Murdock's fight against Marxism-Leninism took place mainly on the battlefields of some cafeteria or another.) On the actual battlefields, of course, Grenada was a joke, and was an obvious attempt to distract the fact that Reagan and his people had left 241 Marines to die in Beirut. Nicaragua was the place where we helped finance our terrorists by selling weaponry to the people who sponsored the killing of said Marines. And the "battlefields" of El Salvador, where Murdock did such proud (if largely vicarious) service included a roadblock where four American nuns were murdered, a university where six Jesuit priests and the members of their domestic staff were slaughtered, and a hospital chapel where Archibishop Oscar Romero was gunned down while saying Mass. The "guiding light" was a burst of swamp gas in the middle of an incalculable moral morass. Ah, as our old friend, Mr. Dooley, sez, thim was the days.