This is what makes me angry over the REAGAN mini-series!

[romantico]

I hear the RNC want to view if & if they feel its inacurate they want a disclaimer to crawl at the bottom of the screen while the movie is shown.Can the DLC then put banners on all the books written by Ann Coulter & Sean Hannity & put disclaimers on the covers? FREE SPEECH PEOPLE!If you object,then don't wantch it.Its that simple!I've been hearing it all week from a freeper I work for who on Friday was literally in tears when thinking abiout Reagan being shown in a negative light!If this were a Clinton movie under the same circumstances,I'm sure they'd feel different!

[ikojo]

1. Well what about all those vidoes about

Meena, AR that Jerry Falwell and his ilk were selling during the Clinton years? They saw NOTHING wrong with that and dare I say that if Ray-gun is being presented in a less than glowing light it is then closer to the truth? I loathed that man even BEFORE he was elected and am happy someone is gutsy enough to make a movie that doesn't glorify him as some Protestant saint.

[romantico]

3. I do object to James Brolin in the role

I think he's agreat actor, but he is known to speak out against Reagan!I would be really annoyed if someone like Daryl Hammond played Bill Clinton in his life story.SO, I think they could have found someone better for the role.But IMO, I think maybe CBS wanted some contraversy.It helps in ratings & I think thats what they wanted.I think if anything, Brolin will take away from the movie & discredit it a bit.I could be wrong(I like the Freepers haven't seen the movie,so I can't make a logical comment until I do see it)

[nostamj]

9. did the wingers complain when Timothy Bottoms

(an actor who played an EXTREME negative parody of *)

got the job for that Showtime 9/11 propaganda pukefest?

[wuushew]

2. I welcome a brief disclaimer at the beginning of the movie

but not a scrolling marque. People never pay attention to intro credits and once the freepers have this small caveat they will have nothing else. The rage will build up inside and leave them even more imbittered than they were before.

[grannylib]

4. Unfortunately, sounds like they made up bad stuff when the truth....

would have shown him as the addled puppet he was/is...
They really should have stuck to the facts about this weenie - no need to make up stuff to make him look stupid -
He managed to show his genuine stupidity at every turn.

[julka]

6. you couldn't be more correct.....check this:

I posted these before.......all they had to do was make up an entire movie of him saying stuff like the following, which is all on the record:

"A tree's a tree. How many more do you need to look at?"
--Ronald Reagan (Governor of California), quoted in the Sacramento Bee, opposing expansion of Redwood National Park, March 3, 1966

"I don't believe a tree is a tree and if you've seen one you've seen them all."
--Governor Ronald Reagan, in the Sacramento Bee, September 14, 1966

"All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk."
--Ronald Reagan (Republican candidate for president), quoted in the Burlington (Vermont) Free Press, February 15, 1980. (In reality, the average nuclear reactor generates 30 tons of radioactive waste per year.)

"I have flown twice over Mount St. Helens. I'm not a scientist and I don't know the figures, but I have a suspicion that one little mountain out there, in these last several months, has probably released more sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere than has been released in the last ten years of automobile driving or things of that kind."
--Ronald Reagan, quoted in Time magazine, October 20, 1980. (According to scientists, Mount St. Helens emitted about 2,000 tons of sulfur dioxide per day at its peak activity, compared with 81,000 tons per day produced by cars.)

"Growing and decaying vegetation in this land are responsible for 93 percent of the oxides of nitrogen."
--Ronald Reagan, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, October 9, 1980. (According to Dr. Michael Oppenheimer of the Environmental Defense Fund, industrial sources are responsible for at least 65 percent and possibly as much as 90 percent of the oxides of nitrogen in the U.S.)

"Approximately 80 percent of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation. So let's not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards for man-made sources."
--Ronald Reagan, quoted in Sierra, September 10, 1980

"I've said it before and I'll say it again. The U.S. Geological Survey has told me that the proven potential for oil in Alaska alone is greater than the proven reserves in Saudi Arabia."
--Ronald Reagan, quoted in the Detroit Free Press, March 23, 1980. (According to the USGS, the Saudi reserves of 165.5 billion barrels are 17 times the proven reserves--9.2 billion barrels--in Alaska.)

"Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?"
--Ronald Reagan, campaign speech, 1980

"Trains are not any more energy efficient than the average automobile, with both getting about 48 passenger miles to the gallon."
--Ronald Reagan, quoted in the Chicago Tribune, May 10, 1980. (The U.S. Department of Transportation calculates that a 14-car train traveling at 80 miles per hour gets 400 passenger miles to the gallon. A 1980 auto carrying an average of 2.2 people gets 42.6 passenger miles to the gallon.)

"It's silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas."
--Ronald Reagan (candidate for Governor of California), interviewed in the Fresno Bee, October 10, 1965

"I have a feeling that we are doing better in the war than the people have been told."
--Ronald Reagan, in the Los Angeles Times, October 16, 1967

"...the moral equal of our Founding Fathers."
--President Reagan, describing the Nicaraguan contras, March 1, 1985

"Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal."
--Ronald Reagan, quoted in Time, May 17, 1976

"I know all the bad things that happened in that war. I was in uniform four years myself."
--President Reagan, in an interview with foreign journalists, April 19, 1985. ("In costume" is more like it. Reagan spent World War II making Army training films at Hal Roach Studios in Hollywood.)

[julka]

5. what's even more insidious is the POWER displayed by the RWNs

this has become a huge story, and the fact that it has is all the proof anyone needs of the complete RW skew in the media.

I saw on TV that there are three things happening WRT this movie:

1) CBS executives are re-editing the moview themselves, to excise objectionable scenes

2) it won't be shown at all

3) CBS is shopping it around to cable, specifically Showtime, which showed that execrable Bush/911 hagiography

that said, think of the almost complete lack of reaction to that movie when it came out; one with only the participants' word as to what happened--no possibility of independent corroboration.

and just think of what they COULD have shown in the Reagan movie: Regan/Meese, etal, ordering the shredding at the beginning of IranContra, the entire October Surprise fiasco, arming Saddam, the Reagans' complete disdain for the Bushes.

course, one could go on endlessly with the depredations of that criminal enterprise: Office of Public Diplomacy, Guatemala, Nicaragua, guns for drugs for guns, Poindexter, North, Abrams, Negroponte, Armitage, Reich (say, aren't all those guys, save North IN the current administration.....well, Poindexter's out now, I guess)

[grannylib]

7. Flood CBS with calls, e-mails and letters

I have contacted them twice by e-mail and once by phone, and have been calling all my like-minded friends and asking them to do the same.

[julka]

8. problee to late, but got addresses, numbers?

I'll be happy to call, email, write, etc

funny though, if the movie plays, how many more people will watch it than would have.

also ironic that the apotheosis of his presidency was admitted by Mike Deaver to Mark Hertsgaard in his ground-breaking "On Bended Knee"

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Ronald_Reagan/On_Bended_Knee.html

this is as definitive an account, IN HIS HANDLERS', and supplicants' OWN words, as exists on just how cynically Reagan the commodity was marketed, and how COMPLETELY the press abrogated its responsibility:

wow...I just read part of the bit below, and they mentioned product/commodity (didn't see that til after I wrote the above, but it IS pretty obvious)

Tom Brokaw, anchor and managing editor of the NBC Nightly News, also felt that Reagan got "a more positive press than he deserves," a feat for which Brokaw credited the White House staff as well as the President. "In part it goes back to who he is," said Brokaw, "and his strong belief in who he is. He's not trying to reinvent himself every day as Jimmy Carter was.... Ronald Reagan reminds me of a lot of CEOs I know who run big companies and spend most of their time on their favorite charitable events or lunch with their pals and kind of have a broad-based philosophy of how they want their companies run. Reagan's got that kind of broad-based philosophy about how he wants the government run, and he's got all these killers who are willing and able to do that for him."

The "killers" primarily responsible for generating positive press coverage of Reagan were Michael Deaver and David Gergen, and if they did not exactly get away with murder, they came pretty close. Deaver, Gergen and their colleagues effectively rewrote the rules of presidential image-making. On the basis of a sophisticated analysis of the American news media-how it worked, which buttons to push when, what techniques had and had not worked for previous administrations-they introduced a new model for packaging the nation's top politician and using the press to sell him to the American public. Their objective was not simply to tame the press but to transform it into an unwitting mouthpiece of the government; it was one of Gergen's guiding assumptions that the administration simply could not govern effectively unless it could "get the right story out" through the "filter" of the press.

The extensive public relations apparatus assembled within the Reagan White House did most of its work out of sight-in private White House meetings each morning to set the "line of the day" that would later be fed to the press; in regular phone calls to the television networks intended to influence coverage of Reagan on the evening news; in quiet executive orders imposing extraordinary new government secrecy measures, including granting the FBI and CIA permission to infiltrate the press. It was Mike Deaver's special responsibility to provide a constant supply of visually attractive, prepackaged news stories-the kind that network television journalists in particular found irresistible. Of course, it helped enormously that the man being sold was an ex-Hollywood actor. As James Lake, press secretary of the Reagan-Bush campaign, acknowledged, Ronald Reagan was "the ultimate presidential commodity . . . the right product."

The Reagan public relations model was based on a simple observation, articulated to me by longtime Reagan pollster Richard Wirthlin: "There's no question that how the press reports the President influences how people feel about the President. People make up their minds on the basis of what they see and hear about him, and the press is the conduit through which they get a lot of their information." Because the news media were the unavoidable intermediary between the President and the public, Wirthlin, Deaver, Gergen, Baker and their colleagues focused their talents on controlling to the maximum extent possible what news reports said about the President and his policies. The more influence they could exercise over how Reagan's policies were portrayed in the press; the greater were the White House's chances of implementing those policies without triggering widespread disaffection or endangering Mr. Reagan's re-election chances.