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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (502957)	12/3/2003 2:13:04 PM
From: calgal	Respond to of 769670

Linda Chavez Show-time in parallel universes newsandopinion.com \| "The Reagans," the controversial made-for-TV movie finally made its way into American homes this week — but not nearly as many homes as originally planned after CBS moved it to its smaller, premium cable channel Showtime. I watched the entire three-hour melodrama in order to participate in a special Showtime panel discussion, aired after the movie, along with five other people who were invited to comment. The other guests included Reagan biographer and former Washington Post reporter Lou Cannon; veteran newsman Marvin Kalb; longtime Reagan advisor Martin Anderson, who is also the editor of three published collections of Ronald Reagan's letters, speeches and radio commentaries; as well as two Reagan critics, AIDS activist Hillary Rosen and the film's co-producer Carl Anthony. Anyone who tuned into the discussion, however, might have thought the panelists had seen two entirely different movies, so little could we agree on what we'd seen. Cannon, Kalb, Anderson and I agreed that the movie was not only factually flawed but bore the unmistakable mark of deep animus toward President Reagan. I thought the president came off as more or less a dolt, a man easily manipulated by others, indifferent to the suffering not only of AIDS victims but his own children. It's almost impossible to believe that the director, producers and writers of "The Reagans" didn't intend to portray Ronald Reagan in this way. Indeed, the movie's two most prominent themes were that Reagan was somehow responsible for the AIDS crisis that killed thousands of mostly gay men during his presidency, and that he was so out-to-lunch during his time in the White House that he was nearly impeached over the Iran-Contra scandal. The movie opens and closes on the Iran-Contra theme. The opening shot is of a stricken Reagan — looking as if he is already in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's, a cruel and vindictive touch — as Nancy and presidential aide Mike Deaver inform him he faces impeachment for selling arms for hostages. "The evidence is overwhelming," Deaver tells a tearful Nancy. I could hardly believe my eyes and ears. Ronald Reagan never faced any threat of impeachment. Indeed, when I searched a database of articles from major newspapers from November 1986, when the Iran-Contra arms deal story first broke, to January 1989, when President Reagan left office, there were only a handful of mentions of impeachment related to Iran-Contra, and most of these were from columnist Mary McGrory, a famously left-wing partisan. While Rep. Lee Hamilton, the Democrat who chaired the Iran-Contra hearings in the House, made passing reference in a television interview to the possibility of impeachment if it turned out President Reagan knew funds were being diverted to fund the Contras, but it was an offhand remark from which he quickly pulled back. In fact, Hamilton told veteran reporter David Broder that he would not join those Democrats who say, ''a president should not conduct a covert action without approval of Congress. I think a president has to have authority to conduct secret operations, so long as Congress is notified.'' Reagan was never in danger of being impeached, and Iran-Contra did not define his presidency. An ABC/Washington Post poll taken in July 1987, during the height of the controversy and following the televised hearings into the matter, showed that only 40 percent of Americans believed Reagan had made "major mistakes" in the affair, and nearly two-thirds believed that the president should use his pardon authority to prevent prosecution of Ollie North, the White House aide who was at the center of the scandal. As for President Reagan's putative indifference to the AIDS crisis, it's hard to know exactly what the film's creators believe the president could have done to stop the spread of AIDS. Could he have allocated more money to research? Sure, but we've spent billions in research in the intervening years, with no cure yet in sight. What's more, President Reagan's insistence on faster approval for AIDS drugs from the Food and Drug Administration helped usher in a new era of treatment that has kept many HIV sufferers alive and relatively healthy for years. Could the president have argued from his bully pulpit for "safe sex"? Yes, but nearly 20 years of constant hammering away on this theme still goes ignored by many gay men. The Center for Disease Control reported this week that new HIV infections among gay men were up 17 percent between 1999 and 2002. Perhaps the makers of "The Reagans" will figure out a way to blame this on President Bush in some future made-for-TV fantasy.

To: calgal who wrote (502957)	12/3/2003 2:13:17 PM
From: calgal	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 769670

Jonah Goldberg Scrap the U.N., create League of Democracies newsandopinion.com \| This is a time for big ideas and I've got one: Let's scrap the United Nations. Wait, don't go away. I'm not dusting off the standard "U.S. out of the U.N.; U.N. out of the U.S." right-wing screed. But I am serious. Let's start from the top. Whether you agree with President Bush or not, it's hard to dispute that in terms of foreign policy he is the most radically pro-democracy president of the 20th century. Through both his walk and his talk, he's made it clear that spreading democracy is the central strategic imperative of U.S. foreign policy. In a series of speeches - in England, at the National Endowment for Democracy and the American Enterprise Institute - he has made it clear that courting corrupt and tyrannical regimes, a staple of Cold War thinking, is in the long run counterproductive because such regimes end up fostering the very threat - terrorism - America is now dedicated to thwarting. This is less idealistic than it sounds. Sure, it's nice that other nations be free and prosperous. But the strategic imperative here isn't altruism, it's self-defense. Democratic, developed nations do not declare war on other democracies, and they do not churn out murderous terrorists. This isn't a new idea nor a new argument, but for a president to take it to heart is a huge turning point in American history. Unfortunately, because so many in the media watch President Bush's speeches for the same reason they watch car races - just to see a crash - the enormity of this change has gone underreported. Well, here's an idea that will get everyone's attention: Let's create a League of Democracies. The strongest argument in favor of the United Nations is that, much like the Department of Motor Vehicles, there's no alternative to it. The U.N. has been declared "irrelevant" or "obsolete" more times than Betamax or eight-track tapes, and yet, like herpes, it just won't go away. People want a goody-goody multinational organization that does nice things and solves bad problems. So, since the U.N. is the only outfit in that business, we keep dusting it off and patting it on the back after each of its innumerable and monumental failures. One of the reasons it fails is that it's pretty much designed to. There is no vision, no set of shared values that truly unites the United Nations. You can't have a civil rights organization where Klansmen are welcomed as members; you can't have a softball team where half the players want to play basketball, and you can't have a global organization dedicated to the spread of human rights and democracy with nearly half the members representing barbaric, corrupt regimes. And because the U.N. feels it must be "fair" to everybody, the worst abusers get to take turns determining policies on human rights and weapons proliferation. Right before the war, Iraq was set to co-chair the U.N. Commission on Disarmament - with Iran! And even now the U.N. Commission on Human Rights is chock-a-block with representatives of nations that treat their own citizens like piñatas. My solution: Competition. Why not create a new multinational organization that has members who share common ideals and that isn't based on the antiquated assumptions of 50 years ago. In this League of Democracies, membership would be restricted to countries with democratic values and the rule of law. This wouldn't be the "West versus the rest" either. Japan, India, South Korea, South Africa and others could be members. Right now the U.N. bureaucracy, led by Kofi Annan, wants its own army to do social work around the world. The problem is few oppressed people trust the "blue helmets" to be effective, and few Western nations are willing to tolerate their own troops fighting under Annan's flag. At the same time NATO, which is already the military wing of the world's leading democracies, is desperately in search of a new mission, particularly at this moment when the European Union is pondering developing a separate military force. A League of Democracies could solve both problems. It could speak with moral authority, and it would have the military might to back it up. Being a member of LD would have obvious advantages in terms of trade and mutual defense. And since it just so happens that the richest countries in the world tend to be the freest, we might be able to augment the sort of virtuous cycle that already causes nations like Turkey to institute reform so they can join the European Union. Now, bviously this couldn't happen overnight. But it wouldn't need to. Just talking about it would shake up the United Nations and remind the world of that institution's shortcomings. But, if we actually did it, we might finally be able to get the U.N. out of the U.S. and the U.S. out of the U.N. jewishworldreview.com