Arbor Update

Ann Arbor Area Community News

Ron Reagan Speaks Out

30. July 2004 • Rob Goodspeed
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This week’s Democratic convention included at least one nonpolitical speaker – Ron Reagan, son of the late President Ronald Reagan, who spoke eloquently on the pressing need to legalize stem cell research, which might have eased his father’s sickness. He made clear his talk would have nothing to do with “partisanship,” leaving many to wonder what, precisely, Mr. Reagan thought of George W. Bush and the Republican party.

Wonder no longer. In a scathing polemic to run in September’s Esquire, titled “The Case Against George W. Bush”, Mr. Reagan outlines what he calls “the honest guy’s critique of George W. Bush”:

Right-wing talking heads continue painting anyone who fails to genuflect deeply enough as a “hater,” and therefore a nut job, probably a crypto-Islamist car bomber. But these protestations have taken on a hysterical, almost comically desperate tone. It’s one thing to get trashed by Michael Moore. But when Nobel laureates, a vast majority of the scientific community, and a host of current and former diplomats, intelligence operatives, and military officials line up against you, it becomes increasingly difficult to characterize the opposition as fringe wackos.

Does anyone really favor an administration that so shamelessly lies? One that so tenaciously clings to secrecy, not to protect the American people, but to protect itself? That so willfully misrepresents its true aims and so knowingly misleads the people from whom it derives its power? I simply cannot think so. And to come to the same conclusion does not make you guilty of swallowing some liberal critique of the Bush presidency, because that’s not what this is. This is the critique of a person who thinks that lying at the top levels of his government is abhorrent. Call it the honest guy’s critique of George W. Bush.

> Read the article in Esquire magazine online, or a plain copy