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That would explain a lot.
Reagan embarrassed himself in news conferences, Cabinet meetings. Recalling how GOP cringed at his lack of interest
Frequently, he knew nothing about events that had been headlined in the morning newspaper. In 1984, when asked a question he should have fielded easily, Reagan looked befuddled, and his wife had to step in to rescue him. “Doing everything we can,” she whispered. “Doing everything we can,” the president echoed.
“You could walk through Ronald Reagan’s deepest thoughts,” a California legislator said, “and not get your ankles wet.”
In all fields of public affairs—from diplomacy to the economy—the president stunned Washington policymakers by how little basic information he commanded. His mind, said the well-disposed Peggy Noonan, was “barren terrain.” Speaking of one far-ranging discussion on the MX missile, the Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton, an authority on national defense, reported, “Reagan’s only contribution throughout the entire hour and a half was to interrupt somewhere at midpoint to tell us he’d watched a movie the night before, and he gave us the plot from War Games.”
“But he never knew frijoles from pralines about the substantive facts of issues.” Some thought him to be not only ignorant but, in the word of a former CIA director, “stupid.” Clark Clifford called the president an “amiable dunce,” and the usually restrained columnist David Broder wrote, “The task of watering the arid desert between Reagan’s ears is a challenging one for his aides.”
“Every moment of every public appearance was scheduled, every word scripted, every place where Reagan was expected to stand was chalked with toe marks.” Those manipulations, he added, seemed customary to Reagan, for “he had been learning his lines, composing his facial expressions, hitting his toe marks for half a century.” Each night, before turning in, he took comfort in a shooting schedule for the next day’s television- focused events that was laid out for him at his bedside, just as it had been in Hollywood.
When he was expected to read briefing papers, he lazed on a couch watching old movies. On the day before a summit meeting with world leaders about the future of the economy, he was given a briefing book. The next morning, his chief of staff asked him why he had not even opened it. “Well, Jim,” the president explained, “The Sound of Music was on last night.”
“Reagan,” his principal biographer, Lou Cannon, has written, “may have been the one president in the history of the republic who saw his election as a chance to get some rest.”
Dolly Parton’s “Workin’ 9 to 5” into “Workin’ 9 to 10,” and TV’s Johnny Carson quipped, “There are only two reasons you wake President Reagan: World War III and if cats of the Navy is on the Late Show.”
“I am concerned about what is happening in government—and it’s caused me many a sleepless afternoon,” and he jested that posterity would place a marker on his chair in the Cabinet Room: “Reagan Slept Here.”
“Trying to forge policy,” said George Shultz, his longest- serving secretary of state, was “like walking through a swamp.” Donald Regan recalled: “In the four years that I served as secretary of the treasury, I never saw President Reagan alone and never discussed economic philosophy….I had to figure these things out like any other American, by studying his speeches and reading the newspapers. . . . After I accepted the job, he simply hung up and vanished.
Reagan’s staff found especially exasperating the need to clear the president’s schedule with a first lady who placed so much reliance upon a West Coast astrologer, Joan Quigley. That had been true since the beginning in Sacramento when Reagan was inaugurated as governor at midnight because, it was reported, that was the hour this woman set after perusing the zodiac.
On a number of occasions, Deaver would spend days working out an intricate itinerary for the president’s travels down to the last detail only to be told that he had to scrap everything because the astrologer had determined that the stars were not properly aligned. Horoscopes fixed the day and hour of such major events as presidential debates and summit meetings with Soviet leaders. The president’s most important aide said, “We were paralyzed by this craziness.”
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http://www.salon.com/2015/12/27/behi..._ill_informed/
St Ronnie the Diseased! Thanks, Repugs!
I can't find it now, but I read where in the last 2 years of his make-believe charade of a "presidency", St Ronnie's staff considered declaring him mentally incompetent and having the VEEP promoted to President.
Hilarious that current Repugs venerate the superficial, disengaged mental midget. St Ronnie, like dubya, was an ignorant, incompetent Useful Idiot for the Repug powers behind the throne.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 12-28-2015 at 10:13 AM.
That would explain a lot.
But he made good speeches
He single handedly brought down the Soviet Union, you ungrateful bas .
you ignorant s try so hard to out do each other in sucking down without question the Repug propaganda.
you ignorant try so hard in sucking down without question the Democrat propaganda.
He even said "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" and Mr. Gorbachev had no chance but to. You can't argue with that.
you ignorant s try so hard to out do each other in sucking down without question the Repug propaganda.
Holy !
I was being sarcastic... how could you not tell?
Ronny was clueless but had great command of the stage.
Then he did Reagan Smash, then he took a nap.
Best president in my lifetime. Much better than these liberal hacks.
Lol, leftist rag Salon
LOL an astrologer running the nation
the quotes from St Ronnie's closest aids and Cabinet are LIES?
Well he sold arms to the Iranians and turned tail and ran after a terror attack probably orchestrated by those same Iranians.
Of course he's an American her
He just happened to be pres. In possibly best era of this nation. 80s music, michael Jackson. 80s movies, back to the future. Kicking Soviet ass and no internet to expose the American murdering machine.
Sure he was no worse than Obrotha but he was lucky he happened to be president in such a great American era tbh.
Those times are gone btw
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