Christopher Hitchens Nails Dutch's Teflon Presidency

Now I know why I hate W and I didn't hate Dutch. I didn't like Dutch's politics and he was a phony (in the parlance of the I-Man) about family values and religion and whatever. W is a phony, too, but he isn't teflon. Dutch was able to cut and run when the Marines were killed by the truck bomb in Beirut. W can't cut and run in Iraq because he lacks Dutch's self-confidence. W is advised by wackos, but Dutch had his William Caseys and Ollie Norths. If this is (fair & balanced) libel, so be it.

[x The Daily Mirror]
IMPOSSIBLE TO HATE LYING CROOK REAGAN
By Christopher Hitchens

FOR the past decade, Ronald Reagan couldn't remember the American people.

But there was no chance of their forgetting him.

His critics wrote him off as a ham actor and a repeater of other people's lines. And long before he left office there were rumours about his mental capacity.

But it was the left-leaning professor Walter Dean Burnham who analysed Reagan's secret.

He was impossible to hate. Liberals and intellectuals had hated Richard Nixon, who was politically more to the centre.

But they couldn't hate Reagan. And Reagan didn't attract hatred because he didn't radiate it.

He appeared to be at peace with the world, and with himself.

At points, Reagan appeared to be worryingly unworried about things like nuclear war, and gave the impression he was in personal touch with the Almighty.

But he met Napoleon's great criterion for success. He was lucky. Many American presidents had made ringing denunciations of the Berlin Wall, starting with John Kennedy.

But Reagan made his appeal to Mikhail Gorbachev, who was probably already half-convinced.

The Wall didn't fall until Reagan had gone back to California but by then the Cold War had been wound up.

Reagan was wrong about a lot of things, and dishonest, too.

He took years to change his mind about South Africa.

He claimed to have fought in the Second World War and even to have taken part in the liberation of the Nazi death camps.

His best lines were stolen from Hollywood movies. He owned more horses than books.

He allowed a loopy Marine named Oliver North to run a secret government and an illegal operation out of the White House basement.

He traded arms for hostages with the mullahs in Tehran, and then lied about it.

He diverted the profits of that operation to an illegal war in Nicaragua, and then lied about that, too.

He wondered aloud about Biblical prophecies of the end of the world, and Armageddon.

But his legacy was to have postponed Armageddon, almost without meaning to.

-Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.

Copyright © 2004 The Daily Mirror