Pruneface was a Klansman
The late Honorable Detroit Mayor Coleman A. Young on Ronald Reagan, before he was elected president:
"Pruneface."
On Ronald Reagan, after he was elected:
"President Pruneface."
Reagan, White As Snow
by Alec Dubro
www.tompaine.com/, May 13, 2007
EXCERPT...
Domestically, he opposed every legislative remedy for African Americans, betraying a meanness of spirit and an open racism. As Sidney Blumenthal wrote in The Guardian in 2003:
Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (calling it "humiliating to the South", and ran for governor of California in 1966 promising to wipe the Fair Housing Act off the books. "If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house," he said, "he has a right to do so." After the Republican convention in 1980, Reagan traveled to the county fair in Neshoba, Mississippi, where, in 1964, three Freedom Riders had been slain by the Ku Klux Klan. Before an all-white crowd of tens of thousands, Reagan declared: "I believe in states' rights."
It's hard to believe now, but in 1965, a higher percentage of congressional Republicans voted for the Voting Rights Act than Democrats. Reagan, then, wasn't following party tradition; he was making a grab for the white racist vote-and it worked. Southern Democrats abandoned the party en masse for one more welcoming to white supremacy. No wonder so many loved, and still love, the man: He validated people's whiteness.
It's true that Reagan knew enough to occasionally disguise his racism. He appointed Samuel Pierce to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development, where Pierce presided over the halving of housing subsidies. No matter. Reagan couldn't remember the man's name. Once, at a reception for the nation's mayors, he greeted Pierce with a '"Hello, Mr. Mayor." Despite this, a few black conservatives, such as Armstrong Williams, were willing to validate him as someone who knew better than the "civil rights establishment" what was good for African Americans.
But it was in foreign affairs that he showed that he could rise above mere opportunism and flaunt his racism for all the world to see. He was the best friend that South Africa's apartheid government had in the developed world.
CONTINUED...
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Ronald_Reagan/Reagan_WhiteAsSnow.html
For all the lurking Fundamentalists: Reagan and his ilk brought America full-spectrum evil.
Bell Book Says Officials Told Racist Jokes : Reagan Aide Says He Doubts Claim by Ex-Education Secretary
October 21, 1987|Associated Press
WASHINGTON — President Reagan's first secretary of education says mid-level Administration officials made racist jokes and other scurrilous remarks during civil rights discussions, but Reagan's chief spokesman said Tuesday he does not believe it.
Terrel H. Bell, in a memoir of Reagan's first term, said the slurs included references to the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as "Martin Lucifer Coon" and calling Title IX, a federal law guaranteeing women equal educational opportunity, "the lesbian's bill of rights."
SNIP...
Bell did not identify those who made the racist or scurrilous comments. He could not be reached for further comment.
In his book, he says the jokes about King were made as Reagan was deciding whether to sign or veto a bill establishing King's birthday as a national holiday. He eventually signed it.
Bell said: "I do not mean to imply that these scurrilous remarks were common utterances in the rooms and corridors of the White House and the Old Executive Office Building, but I heard them when issues related to civil rights enforcement weighed heavily on my mind."
Bell added: "It seemed obvious they were said for my benefit, since they often accompanied sardonic references to 'Comrade Bell.' "
CONTINUED...
http://articles.latimes.com/1987-10-21/news/mn-9912_1_racist-jokes
What it has to do with the present situation:
Media Ignores Ronald Reagan’s Unmasking as Donald Trump’s Racist Grandpa
By Tommy Christopher
Mediate, August 3, 2019
Excerpt…
You could be forgiven if you missed the news that a racist telephone conversation between then-California Governor Reagan and then-President Richard Nixon was unearthed and released this week.
The call took place in October of 1971, during which Reagan and Nixon discussed the United Nations delegation from the United Republic of Tanzania following a vote on a resolution to seat China in the world body.
“Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television as I did,” Reagan said in the brief recording.
“Yeah,” Nixon agreed.
“To see those, those monkeys from those African countries — damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” Reagan continued, to hearty laughter from Nixon.
Continues…
https://www.mediaite.com/opinion/media-ignores-ronald-reagans-unmasking-as-donald-trumps-racist-grandpa/
= new reply since forum marked as read
A Four-Decade Secret: One Man's Untold Story of Sabotaging Carter's Re-election
by Peter Baker
The New York Times, March 18, 2023
WASHINGTON — It has been more than four decades, but Ben Barnes said he remembers it vividly. His longtime political mentor invited him on a mission to the Middle East. What Mr. Barnes said he did not realize until later was the real purpose of the mission: to sabotage the re-election campaign of the president of the United States.
It was 1980 and Jimmy Carter was in the White House, bedeviled by a hostage crisis in Iran that had paralyzed his presidency and hampered his effort to win a second term. Mr. Carter’s best chance for victory was to free the 52 Americans held captive before Election Day. That was something that Mr. Barnes said his mentor was determined to prevent.
His mentor was John B. Connally Jr., a titan of American politics and former Texas governor who had served three presidents and just lost his own bid for the White House. A former Democrat, Mr. Connally had sought the Republican nomination in 1980 only to be swamped by former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California. Now Mr. Connally resolved to help Mr. Reagan beat Mr. Carter and in the process, Mr. Barnes said, make his own case for becoming secretary of state or defense in a new administration.
What happened next Mr. Barnes has largely kept secret for nearly 43 years. Mr. Connally, he said, took him to one Middle Eastern capital after another that summer, meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.
Then shortly after returning home, Mr. Barnes said, Mr. Connally reported to William J. Casey, the chairman of Mr. Reagan’s campaign and later director of the Central Intelligence Agency, briefing him about the trip in an airport lounge.
Mr. Carter’s camp has long suspected that Mr. Casey or someone else in Mr. Reagan’s orbit sought to secretly torpedo efforts to liberate the hostages before the election, and books have been written on what came to be called the October surprise. But congressional investigations debunked previous theories of what happened.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/18/us/politics/jimmy-carter-october-surprise-iran-hostages.html
https://archive.is/FgABN
Why that hasn't gotten wall-to-wall coverage is evidence our national news media are corrupt.
Reagan announced his 1980 candidacy in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964.
Aug. 3, 1980: Reagan Gives “State’s Rights” Speech at Neshoba County Fair
On August 3, 1980, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan addressed a large crowd at the Neshoba County Fair as he campaigned in his bid for the presidency.
The fairgrounds are mere miles away from the site where three civil rights workers — one a student participating in Mississippi Freedom Summer and the other two CORE members — were murdered and buried in shallow graves by members of the Ku Klux Klan in 1964.
Reagan appealed to the “George Wallace-inclined voters” dreaming of a return to segregation and freedom of unfettered white supremacy in his stump speech:
I believe in states’ rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.
In his appeal to white supremacists, he did not acknowledge the murders, which had been investigated by the FBI and were just one instance of violent assaults on local Black civil rights advocates and white allies in recent history.
Source: https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/reagan-speech-at-neshoba/
Like all cowards, the racists like their victims unarmed.
What did these “Christian” men think of the rest of the world?
Rev. Billy Graham (left) Tricky Dick Nixon (always to the right)
The Preacher and Vietnam:
When Billy Graham Urged Nixon to Kill One Million People
BY JEFFREY ST. CLAIR - ALEXANDER COCKBURN
CounterPunch, SEPTEMBER 27, 2017
There’s a piquant contrast in the press coverage across the decades of Billy Graham’s various private dealings with Richard Nixon, as displayed on the tapes gradually released from the National Archive or disclosed from Nixon’s papers. We’ll come shortly to the flap over Graham and Nixon’s closet palaverings about the Jews, but first let’s visit another interaction between the great evangelist and his commander-in-chief.
Back in April, 1989, a Graham memo to Nixon was made public. It took the form of a secret letter from Graham, dated April 15, 1969, drafted after Graham met in Bangkok with missionaries from Vietnam. These men of God said that if the peace talks in Paris were to fail, Nixon should step up the war and bomb the dikes. Such an act, Graham wrote excitedly, “could overnight destroy the economy of North Vietnam”.
Graham lent his imprimatur to this recommendation. Thus the preacher was advocating a policy to the US Commander in Chief that on Nixon’s own estimate would have killed a million people. The German high commissioner in occupied Holland, Seyss-Inquart, was sentenced to death at Nuremberg for breaching dikes in Holland in World War Two. (His execution did not deter the USAF from destroying the Toksan dam in North Korea, in 1953, thus deliberately wrecking the system that irrigated 75 per cent of North Korea’s rice farms.)
This disclosure of Graham as an aspirant war criminal did not excite any commotion when it became public in 1989, twenty years after it was written. No one thought to chide Graham or even question him on the matter. Very different has been the reception of a new tape revealing Graham, Nixon and Haldeman palavering about Jewish domination of the media and Graham invoking the “stranglehold” Jews have on the media.
On the account of James Warren in the Chicago Tribune, who has filed excellent stories down the years on Nixon’s tapes, in this 1972 Oval Office session between Nixon, Haldeman and Graham, the President raises a topic about which “we can’t talk about it publicly,” namely Jewish influence in Hollywood and the media.
Nixon cites Paul Keyes, a political conservative who was executive producer of the NBC hit, “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In,” as telling him that “11 of the 12 writers are Jewish.”
“That right?” says Graham, prompting Nixon to claim that Life magazine, Newsweek, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and others, are “totally dominated by the Jews.”
Nixon says network TV anchors Howard K. Smith, David Brinkley and Walter Cronkite “front men who may not be of that persuasion,” but that their writers are “95 percent Jewish.”
“This stranglehold has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain,” the nation’s best-known preacher declares.
“You believe that?” Nixon says.
“Yes, sir,” Graham says.
“Oh, boy,” replies Nixon.
“So do I. I can’t ever say that but I believe it.”
“No, but if you get elected a second time, then we might be able to do something,” Graham replies.
Continues…
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/27/the-preacher-and-vietnam-when-billy-graham-urged-nixon-to-kill-one-million-people/
American leaders who also are racists regard the rest of the nation — especially Democrats who oppose them — like they do the people of this planet: something beneath them. Personally, I blame their upbringing.
President John F. Kennedy reacts to news of the assassination of Congo’s nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba in February 1961. (Photo credit: Jacques Lowe)
JFK’s Embrace of Third World Nationalists
By Jim DiEugenio
November 25, 2013
EXCERPT...
To understand the import of President Kennedy’s foreign policy ideas, one needs to contemplate the photo of Kennedy getting the news of the murder of Patrice Lumumba. The black African revolutionary leader of Congo was shot to death on Jan. 17, 1961, just three days before Kennedy was to take office, although his death was not confirmed for several weeks.
Eisenhower would not have reacted with the distress shown on Kennedy’s face because, as the Church Committee discovered, Lumumba’s murder was linked to the approval of a plan by Eisenhower and CIA Director Allen Dulles to eliminate him. (William Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History, pgs. 175-176) Former CIA officer John Stockwell wrote in his book In Search of Enemies that he later talked to a CIA colleague who said it was his job to dispose of Lumumba’s body. (Stockwell, p. 50)
To fully understand the difference between how Kennedy viewed Africa and how Eisenhower, the Dulles brothers and later Lyndon Johnson did, one must appreciate why Eisenhower and his national security team felt it necessary to eliminate Lumumba. As Philip Muehlenbeck has noted in his book Betting on the Africans, Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles essentially ignored the tidal wave of decolonization that swept through Africa in the Fifties and Sixties. Nearly 30 new nations emerged in Africa during this time period.
Even though most of this transformation occurred while Eisenhower was president, the United States never voted against a European power over a colonial dispute in Africa. Neither did Dulles or Eisenhower criticize colonial rule by NATO allies. Not only did the White House appear to favor continued colonial domination, but with the nations already freed, they looked upon the emerging leaders with, too put it mildly, much condescension.
At an NSC meeting, Vice President Nixon claimed that, “some of these peoples of Africa have been out of the trees for only about fifty years.” (Muehlenbeck, p. 6) And, of course, John Foster Dulles saw this epochal anti-colonial struggle through the magnifying glass of the Cold War. As Muehlenbeck writes, “Dulles believed that Third World nationalism was a tool of Moscow’s creation rather than a natural outgrowth of the colonial experience.” (ibid, p. 6) Therefore, to Eisenhower and his team, Lumumba was a communist.
CONTINUES...
https://consortiumnews.com/2013/11/25/jfks-embrace-of-third-world-nationalists/
Mr. DiEugenio is a DUer, joining in 2013. He was met with a less than kind reception by our resident flock of doorkeepers for the uh status quo.
I'll never forget or forgive them. 
The "Martin Lucifer Coon" remark was well known at the time I remember it being reported by those having heard it! 
Thank you for giving a damn, underpants!
