"When someone tells you who they are, believe them"

One of the many movie lines (almost) that Ronald Reagan used was the one about the most terrifying words in the English language: "'I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

His party loyalists cheered him.

The reality is far from that.  In fact, it is closer to what Maya Angelou said: "When someone tells you who they are, believe them."  Almost always, except when the chief executive is from the GOP, the government is here to help.  Under the GOP Presidents, it seems true that those are some terrifying words.

Back when tRump was merely one of the contenders in the GOP primary, when he launched his blitzkrieg, his supporters cheered him on and some even defended him by saying that the media and his critics were taking tRump literally but never seriously.

But, those of us who adopted the Angelou guideline, took him literally and seriously.  How could we not?  He was so obvious. So transparent in what he said and did.

"When someone tells you who they are, believe them."

And here we are, when the President and his government machinery cruelly turns away the asylum seeking desperate people!

Caption at the source:

A protester holds a sign during a demonstration outside of the James R. Browning United States Courthouse on June 11th, 2019, in San Francisco, California. Dozens of activists staged a demonstration in support of restoring protections for asylum seekers.

tRump proves that reagan was right about the terrifying words in the English language.

The good thing is that the majority of my fellow citizens will not play his cruel games.  We may not be Jesus-loving Christians, but we practice a lot more of Jesus's preaching than they do when they support tRump.

A majority of my fellow Americans are like the jurors in the recently concluded trial in Arizona, where Scott Warren was accused as being a danger to the country all because he is a humanitarian. A Good Samaritan.  He provided water and food to migrants in the harsh desert.  That was his crime.

In the closing argument, the US Attorney--from the government to help us--said this:

“He gave them food, he gave them water, he gave them a place to stay...He did a bad thing.” -- Anna Wright, @USAO_AZ in her closing argument that #ScottWarren should be convicted. pic.twitter.com/jm67RYlzX1

— No More Deaths (@NoMoreDeaths) June 7, 2019

He did a bad thing, for which the government wanted to send him to prison for 20 years!

The jury didn't buy that argument.  It ended in a mistrial.

For now, at least, tRump and his terrifying government have been held under check.  My hope is that the reign of terror will end soon.  We will return to the days of a helpful government.

The charms to soothe a savage breast

Something happened a couple of nights ago, and I ended up watching almost two hours of opera arias and classical music, thanks to YouTube.  As I was wrapping up the show that I curated for myself, I remembered a piece that I came to know when my daughter was taking voice lessons two decades ago.

I searched for it.  We live in a miraculous world.  A few keystrokes and, bingo!  How did we ever live before Google and YouTube?

I watched Luciano Pavarotti sing it.  A relatively young Pavarotti.



But, the lyrics (in translation) and recalling my daughter practicing it, I wanted to listen to a female voice.  YouTube delivered.



I texted that to my daughter. Yes, in the night!

The following evening, I decided to get back to the old country's classical music.  I went after one of my favorites--L Subramaniam.  Not only because I have memories of listening to his performances, but also because his improvisations were always magical even to the half-baked that I am.  That magical experience is the bhkathi for me--not the other one that the rasikas blabber about.

I started with this.  It was even sweeter than I had remembered.

YouTube suggested this performance at Georgetown University.  I fast-forwarded through the talks and watched/listened only to the music.



Against such plenitude of music and the arts, the current White House has become a cultural wasteland!  Unlike the Obama years, there is no music from this White House.  It is a dead zone:

Since his inauguration in January 2017, there have been no official concerts at the White House (the Reagans had one every few weeks). No poetry readings (the Obamas regularly celebrated young poets). The Carters began a televised series, “In Performance at the White House,” which last aired in 2016, where artists as varied as Mikhail Baryshnikov and Patricia McBride performed in the East Room. The Clintons continued the series with Aretha Franklin and B. B. King, Alison Krauss and Linda Ronstadt.

Of course, the ultimate show business President was unmatched in this:

But perhaps no Republican could match the presidency of Ronald Reagan, whose guest list was a relentless celebration of the diversity of American culture. He and Nancy Reagan hosted Lionel Hampton. Then the Statler Brothers. Then Ella Fitzgerald. Then Benny Goodman. Then a night with Beverly Sills, Rudolf Serkin and Ida Levin. That was all in the fall of 1981. The Reagans did much to highlight uniquely American forms, especially jazz. One night in 1982, the White House hosted Dizzy Gillespie, Chick Corea and Stan Getz. When Reagan visited Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow in 1988, he brought along the Dave Brubeck Quartet.

And we now have this White House, where the arts have been murdered.  What a shame!

When we are without art, we are a diminished people — myopic, unlearned and cruel.

Awful!

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength

As I get older, I am forgetting the details.  As a good chunk of life fades in the rear-view mirror--I know, I shouldn't be looking there--I am glad that I am able to recall whatever it is that I am able to.

The principal of the wonderful school--where I always longed to look at that girl--had plenty of laudable goals that were always badly executed.  We students had many mean jokes about him, and continue to do that even now whenever we get together.  One of his goals was that students ought to be interested in local and global current affairs.  Thus, during the weekly assembly under the morning hot sun, we students stood there as one of his hand-picked favorites read a few news stories for a couple of minutes.  (No, I have never been any teacher's favorite..Not anybody's.  Not even my parents' favorite. The story of my life!!!)

One day, the guy who read it out uttered "Mr. Ayatollah" while referring to the then-new leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini.  The news junkie that I was even back then, I thought it was bizarre that he said "Mr. Ayatollah."  Those were beginnings of the Iran-Iraq war and not a day passed without the The Hindu providing reports on the war, and that war was a big reason why "Mr. Ayatollah" was often mentioned at the news reports during the weekly assembly.

The war, coming on the heels of the revolution that forced the Shah of Iran to flee the country, continues to haunt the world's affairs, especially the ongoing negotiations over the nuclear deal, writes Robin Wright:

Iran suffered more than a hundred and fifty thousand dead between 1980 and 1988. In Tehran, it’s called the Sacred Defense. In the final stages, U.S. aid to Iraq contributed to Iran’s decision to pursue nuclear capability—the very program that six world powers are now negotiating to contain.

Keep in mind that this was not a war that Iran launched.  It was Saddam Hussein's war.  And, in the realpolitik of American "diplomacy," Saddam was "our son of a bitch."  Ah, yes, the twisted and tangled webs that we have woven and into which we are now trapped!

Back in the eighties, Western intelligence agencies questioned whether Iran’s eighteen-month-old revolution could survive for even a few weeks after Saddam Hussein’s surprise invasion. Tehran scrambled to mobilize remnants of the Shah’s army, the new Revolutionary Guards, and almost anyone, of any age, for a volunteer paramilitary. Tehran’s Holy Defense Museum has pictures of thirteen-year-old kids and eighty-year-old men who signed up. (Three per cent of the dead were fourteen or younger.)
Instead, the war dragged on for eight years.

 The CIA got rid of a democratically elected government in Iran so that the US and its allies could install in power the Shah of Iran who would serve as "our son of a bitch."  When the Shah was thrown out two decades later, we looked across the border and encouraged the madman Saddam.  Robin Wright narrates how that messed up things:

In 1988, for the final big Iraqi offensive, the Reagan Administration spent months advising Baghdad on how to retake the strategic Faw Peninsula, where the Shatt al Arab waterway flows into the Persian Gulf.

I was curious about the location of the Faw Peninsula.  Unlike the final year of my high school, I now have Google at my disposal, which easily informs me where this peninsula is:

Wright says this battle got worse, thanks to the madman Saddam.

Iraq also used U.S. intelligence to unleash chemical weapons against the Iranians in Faw. U.N. weapons inspectors documented Iraq’s repeated use of both mustard gas and nerve agents between 1983 and 1988. Washington opted to ignore it. At Faw, thousands of Iranians died. Syringes were littered next to bodies, a U.S. intelligence source told me; Iranian forces had tried to inject themselves with antidotes. The battle lasted only thirty-six hours; it was Iraq’s biggest gain in more than seven years. The war ended four months later, when Iran agreed to a cease-fire.

The apologies that the US owes to people all around the world! :(

Iranian officials told me that the theocracy debated countering Iraq with chemical weapons, but opted against it. However, aware that Baghdad had a nuclear-weapons program, Iran decided to resume the nuclear research-and-development program initiated by the Shah. After the war, Tehran decided to keep it.

I think it is remarkable that Iran didn't unleash its chemical weapons against the Iraqi forces.  

The Iraq war still haunts Iran—and shapes the theocracy’s positions at the negotiating table—partly because tens of thousands are still dying from chemical weapons, according to the Society for Chemical Weapons Victims Support. Years after the war ended, Iranian doctors noticed a pattern of patients reporting chronic pulmonary, skin, and corneal conditions associated with mustard gas. They were diagnosed with what is now known as low-dose exposure.

Wright notes this:

During my recent visit, Iran was gripped by news that the bodies of a hundred and seventy-five military divers had been recovered in Iraq—three decades after their capture by Saddam Hussein’s forces. The men had reportedly been buried alive after their wrists were tied together with wire. Tehran released gruesome pictures of the recovery, and of the decayed and bound corpses still dressed in diving gear.
The country was consumed with mourning yet again—even young people, born after the war ended, were deeply moved.

 To think that the US encouraged Saddam all those years that he was in power!  For what?

 As the country’s diplomats prepared to return to Vienna for the nuclear talks, [Mohsen Rezai, who commanded the Revolutionary Guards during the war] declared, “Iran’s enemies stood by Saddam for the whole eight years of the Sacred Defense.” It was clear that he included the United States among them.

Soon after the war ended, Saddam was no longer "our son of a bitch." 

It is unfortunate that we have never truly given peace a chance.  Oceania will always be at war, ably helped by its Ministry of Peace, wrote George Orwell in that memorable 1984. 

Perhaps it is time to start another war. Maybe against Eurasia; after all, Putin is not "our son of a bitch."

The GOP Convention sounded so much like 1984!

Doesn't the following sound like a pretty good summary of the recently concluded Republican convention?

The fundamentalism that the Republicans had embraced went beyond religion. It simplified the world in general; it rolled together many different kinds of anxieties—schools, drugs, race, buggery, Russia, to give just a few; and it offered the simplest, the vaguest solution: Americanism, the assertion of the American self. Practical matters were in the party’s printed platform and remained locked up there. Apart from "Condoleezza Rice’s" speech about foreign affairs, there had been very little of purely political discussion. Americanism had been the theme of the convention, now defiant, now sentimental, as in "Mr. Romney's" acceptance speech. Fundamentalism, in its Republican political interpretation, was not just a grim business; it was as stylish as Mr. Romney himself. The Republicans were “pro-life.” That meant anti-abortion; but during the week another, metaphorical, meaning began to be attached to the word. To be pro-life was to be vigorous, joyful, and optimistic; it was to turn away from the gloom and misery of the other side, who talked of problems and taxes.

But, you know what?  This was how VS Naipaul described the convention that was held in Dallas way back in 1984! 

In the paragraph that I had excerpted, the original had "Reagan" where I substituted "Romney" and "Jeane Kirkpatrick" in place of Condoleezza Rice.

In other words, not much has changed in the Republican convention and its message!

Next up: the political theatre at Charlotte, courtesy of the Democrats.

Embarrassed Republicans Admit Confusing Reagan with Eisenhower

In time for Presidents Day is this report from America's Finest News Source:

The GOP's humiliating blunder was discovered last weekend by RNC chairman Reince Priebus, who realized his party had been extolling "completely the wrong guy" after he watched the History Channel special Eisenhower: An American Portrait.
"When I heard about Eisenhower's presidential accomplishments—holding down the national debt, keeping inflation in check, and fighting for balanced budgets—it hit me that we'd clearly gotten their names mixed up at some point," Priebus told reporters. "I couldn't believe we'd been associating terms like 'visionary,' 'principled,' and 'bold' with President Reagan. That wasn't him at all—that was Ike." ...
Following his discovery, Priebus directed RNC staffers to inform top Republicans of the error and explain that it was Eisenhower, not Reagan, who carefully managed the nation's prosperity, warned citizens of the military-industrial complex's growing influence, and led the country with a mix of firm resolve and humble compassion.

As always, of course, The Onion does a satire that is well founded on critical thinking.  It is amazing that the Onion staffers turn out such fantastic stuff without fail.

Thanking Egypt for diverting our attention away from Reagan's 100th birthday, I blogged earlier about the Reagan myths, which the Onion recaps here:

many were "horrified" to learn that the former president illegally sold weapons to Iran, declared amnesty for 2.9 million illegal immigrants, costarred in a movie with a chimpanzee, funneled aid to Islamic militants in Afghanistan, and suffered from severe mental problems.

2011 is also the 50th anniversary of Ike's farewell address when he referred to the military industrial complex.  Marking that occasion, Slate ran a great column that reminded us:

Eisenhower's fears about standing military power never outweighed his conviction that it was necessary. As Ledbetter writes, Ike was, "by any definition, a leading figure in that complex." He loved the army and devoted his life to it. Within the Republican Party, his great accomplishment was to drag the rank and file into the age of internationalism with his triumph over Robert Taft for the 1952 presidential nomination, which isolated the isolationists in the GOP.

The GOP could certainly benefit from one observation that Eisenhower apparently made (ht):

"This is what I mean by my constant insistence on 'moderation' in government. Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid," - president Eisenhower

Yes, Ike called them "stupid" :)

Thanks to Egypt for eclipsing Reagan's 100th birthday :)

So, Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday was hailed, for all practical purposes, only the the likes of Sarah Palin.  Most of the rest of America was engrossed in Jersey Shore the developments in Egypt and, of course, the Super Bowl mania.

It is awful that Reagan is being elevated to such levels of political saintliness.  Michael Kinsley's column from a few years back is a must read on the myths about Reagan.  But, for those who prefer not to read more than a few words, and like the Reagan story in a cartoon, well, here it is:

Obama plays the fiddle while the Maghreb burns

Meanwhile, back here in America, we are still fighting two major wars, and battling economic problems of magnitudes that should send most amongst us hibernating in caves.  I didn't watch the President's State of the Union address because, well, that is nothing but political theater.  It does appear that the President is increasingly going the Bill Clinton route, which makes me all the more convinced that I was correct, after all, when way back I characterized the candidate Senator Obama as "Slick Willie without the sex."

Not that there is anything particularly wrong with Bill Clinton's approach to presidential and national politics.  Even now I am a big supporter of Bill Clinton.  It is the facade that Obama presented, that he would be different from Bill/Hillary Clinton, with all that highfalutin rhetoric that did not impress me.  I was watching Bill Clinton's talk at the World Economic Forum in Davos yesterday.  Even now he makes way more sense to me that most of the Congress put together.

In the NY Review of Books, David Bromwich notes this comparison between Obama and Clinton:

Obama now speaks in strings of sentences like these: “The stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing again.” The stock market, it would seem, plus corporate profits equals the economy: an odd equation to hear from a Democrat. Bill Clinton in 1995 is Obama’s only precursor on this terrain, but even Clinton would quickly have added that corporate profits are not the measure of all good. By contrast, Obama is now convinced that there is no advantage in putting in qualifications except as a formality.

It does seem like Obama is firming up his chances on getting re-elected, and has given up on Congress, and wouldn't care if it went Republican. 

A main inference from the State of the Union is that in 2011 and 2012, the president will not initiate. He will broker. Every policy recommendation will be supported and, so far as possible, clinched by the testimony of a panel of experts.... The idea is to overwhelm us with expertise. In this way, a president may lighten the burden of decision and control by easing the job of persuasion into other hands. Obama seems to believe that the result of being seen in that attitude will do nothing but good for his stature.

Yes, his stature.

Today no one can easily say who Barack Obama is or what he stands for; and the coming year is unlikely to offer many clues, since all the thoughts of Obama in 2011 appear to concern Obama in 2012. 

Meanwhile, there is a good possibility that 2011 will turn out to be the year of the geopolitical game-changers that I have been blogging about.  Obama has been strangely missing in the picture. 

But, with his responses to the rapidly evolving situations in Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Algeria, Obama seems to be sending nothing but mixed messages.  Hey Mr. President, either talk principles of democracy, or talk realpolitik, but don't try to mix the two.  President Obama seemed to have lost the entire Middle East already:

Obama did surprisingly little to fulfill the hopes and dreams he unleashed worldwide during the election of 2008. Moreover, he deliberately magnified them in the Arab world with his 2009 Cairo speech. But coupled with his continuation of America's cynical policies to prop up tyrannical Arab regimes, and particularly his spectacular failure to rein in the illegal Israeli settlements in the so-called Arab-Israeli Peace Process in 2010, Mr. Obama may have inadvertently exacerbated the explosive combination of frustrated expectations and business-as-usual that pressurized the current eruption of resentment, anger, and alienation among the Arab people in 2011.

Kai Bird makes a similar point at Slate:

But now the moment has come when President Obama must demonstrate that his words were not just words. One way or the other, hard consequences will follow. The end of the Mubarak era will also spell an end to Egypt's cold peace with Israel. No post-Mubarak government, and certainly not one populated with Muslim Brotherhood members, will tolerate the continued blockade of their Hamas cousins in Gaza. Israel will thus be faced with additional strategic incentives to end its occupation of the West Bank, dismantle its settlements and quickly recognize a Palestinian state based largely on its 1967 borders. But as the recent leak of Palestinian-Israeli negotiating transcripts demonstrates, the detailed contours of a final settlement are all in place.
Change is coming to the Arab world. It can no longer be held back. So the pragmatist and not just the idealist in Obama would be wise to make it clear that he really is on the side of the protesters in the streets of Cairo. It is time to stop hedging our bets.

But, Obama seems to be even more cautious than ever :(  And, even worse, don't merely sit on that metaphorical fence.  Stanford's Middle East historian, Joel Beinin, writes:

our president has remained silent about the demonstrators’ goal: a democratic Egypt. In his June 2009 Cairo speech, when nothing was immediately at stake, President Obama uttered eloquent words of support for democracy. If he spoke out forcefully in support of the Egyptian people, as he did for the Tunisian people in his State of the Union address, he could tip events in a direction that would earn America the gratitude of the Egyptian people.
This would go far to undoing the damage to America’s standing in the Arab and Muslim world created by the catastrophically wrong-headed foreign policies of the George W. Bush era. It would also do more to undermine al-Qaeda’s international campaign of hatred and terrorism than has been achieved by two wars and over a trillion dollars in military spending.
The whole world is watching. If the tanks of Tiananmen Square roll into Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the people of the Middle East will know who to blame. Tell them "No," Mr. President.

And, here is what Mohamed ElBaradei says, Mr. President.  I hope you are listening:

"It is better for President Obama not to appear that he is the last one to say to President Mubarak, 'It's time for you to go," he told CNN.
ElBaradei, a possible candidate in Egypt's presidential election this year, dismissed U.S. calls for Mubarak to enact sweeping democratic and economic reforms in response to the protests.
"The American government cannot ask the Egyptian people to believe that a dictator who has been in power for 30 years would be the one to implement democracy. This is a farce," he told the CBS program "Face the Nation."
"This first thing which will calm the situation is for Mubarak to leave, and leave with some dignity. Otherwise I fear that things will get bloody. And you (the United States) have to stop the life support to the dictator and root for the people."

"The rot set in with Ronald Reagan"

The best articulation, yet, that I have come across of the state of Conservatism in America:

Traditional conservatives disdain populism and respect knowledge. They believe in balancing the government’s books. And they are pragmatists who are suspicious of ideology. Reagan debased all these ideas – and modern American conservatism is still suffering the consequences.

Rachman writes how this Reaganism has led to Sarah Palin:

The most damaging idea propagated by the Reagan myth is the cult of the idiot-savant (the wise fool). You can see it in the very first line of Dinesh D’Souza’s admiring biography of Reagan, which proclaims: “Sometimes it really helps to be a dummy.” Mr D’Souza recounts numerous stories in which intellectuals – even conservative intellectuals – disdained Reagan. They scorned his tendency to spend cabinet meetings sorting jelly beans into different colours, and his taste for flaky anecdotes. But, Mr D’Souza concludes, the “dummy” was right and the pointy-heads were wrong.
A dangerous chain of reasoning flows from this popular version of history. Reagan was apparently stupid and often startlingly ignorant – but he was vindicated by history. Therefore, goes the theory, ignorance and stupidity are good signs. They show that a politician is in tune with the deeper wisdom of the people. Once you start thinking like that, it is but a short step to Sarah Palin.

Meanwhile, within the storehouses of knowledge--in academia--postmodernism, in a way, legitimized such bizarre descent into stupidity by championing an argument that every interpretation is equally valid.  The idiot savant of Reagan-Bush-Palin is similarly reflected in the challenge in the public domain of how old the universe is, or natural selection and evolution, and even in the fantastic growth of the conspiracy theory industry.  The joke is not on Reagan or Palin, but on us in academia :(

Hmmm.... that was a digression :)  Rachman concludes:

The real Reagan was, in fact, rather more pragmatic than the “Reagan myth” that sprang up after he left office. Real Reagan was willing to raise taxes in extremis, and became a firm believer in arms-reduction talks. Today’s American conservatives, who claim the mantle of Reagan, would regard these ideas as treachery and weakness. Reagan was ultimately a successful president. But he left behind a poisonous legacy for the conservative movement.

I dread the coming centenary celebrations ....

In two years, the presidential election will start all over again. The GOP candidates will all blabber the same thing about the profound importance of that year, 2011. What will that be, you ask? The centenary celebrations for Ronald Reagan, who was born on February 6, 1911. So, yes, soon after groundhog day in 2011, it will be Reagan all the time, 24x7 on Faux News, and the parading presidential wannabes will go on and on about the wisdom (ha) of Reagan.

As the Reaganpalooza begins, remember the facts about him, like the following one from Megan McArdle:

George Bush was indeed fiscally reckless, but the honor of most fiscally reckless president since FDR goes not to him, but to Ronald Reagan, who ran 6% deficits without even the excuse of a war.

I suppose you could claim that his decline was more impressive, but that decline was only about half due to tax cuts or spending; the rest was the popping of the stock market bubble, which both hammered GDP and changed the tax base in ways that made it less lucrative to the government.

McArdle is no leftie, and nor is the libertarian Mises Institute, which had this to say in 1988, at the end of Reagan's presidency:

Even Ford and Carter did a better job at cutting government. Their combined presidential terms account for an increase of 1.4%—compared with Reagan's 3%—in the government's take of "national income." And in nominal terms, there has been a 60% increase in government spending, thanks mainly to Reagan's requested budgets, which were only marginally smaller than the spending Congress voted. ....

His budget cuts were actually cuts in projected spending, not absolute cuts in current spending levels. As Reagan put it, "We're not attempting to cut either spending or taxing levels below that which we presently have."

The result has been unprecedented government debt. Reagan has tripled the Gross Federal Debt, from $900 billion to $2.7 trillion. Ford and Carter in their combined terms could only double it. It took 31 years to accomplish the first postwar debt tripling, yet Reagan did it in eight.

The end of the Reagan/Thatcher revolution?

Thanks to the economic crisis, I hope we won't have to worry about the Reagan/Thatcher philosophy of political economy that resulted in the likes of Grover Nyquist and Tom DeLay. What a national nightmare that DeLay caused! Everything from closing access to Democratic representatives in the House, to personally overseeing mid-Census redistricting in Texas. Simply awful. Whatever intellectual merits the conservatives (not Republicans!) might have had, all we need is a poster of Nyquist and DeLay to make anybody run the other way.

Krugman's Nobel might well be the proverbial final nail. Reading some of the commentaries from the market-fundamentalist economists, including Mankiw himself, it appears that they are hopping mad that Krugman received the prize. My own suspicion is that they know that it will be years before they can regain the influence to shape intellectual fashions in economics. Or in social science, for that matter.

No, I have no false notions that this will lead to some big time leftist political policies. No Hugo Chavez, thank you very much. But, we might make some much needed corrections to the ultra-right approaches that preferred subsidies for the rich and cried against subsidies for the poor.

BTW, a reminder again that this is not a prize that is one of the original Nobel Prizes. In economics, it is an award in Nobel's memory, and the money for it comes not from Nobel's TNT wealth. The official name for the award is: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel

A secret presidential succession plan? OMG!

Bruce Ackerman, who authored this piece in Slate.com, is no consipracy theory nut case. He is a law professor at Yale. And, slate.com is no National Inquirer.
Which is why his commentary is troubling and terrifying. Apparently there have always been rumors that Reagan put into play some kind of a presidential succession executive order that will bypass our understanding that the speaker of the House will be the one after the VP. But, how can something like this ever be done in a democracy? A president creating his own succession plan as if it were a monarchy? Bizarre, and eerie.

Anyway, Ackerman concludes his comments with:
If Reagan did issue an illegal order, Congress should publicly determine how subsequent administrations dealt with it. Perhaps President George H. W. Bush or Bill Clinton expressly repudiated the order. Or perhaps they reaffirmed it, thereby laying the foundation for President Bush, with the encouragement of Vice President Cheney, to do the same—through a process entirely independent of the administration's formal directives on the subject.

In any event, it is time for Congress to find out. Even if Reagan's initial illegal order has been rescinded, Congress must deprive it of all value as a precedent. Lawmakers should pass legislation that expressly nullifies all secret orders, present and future, through which the president asserts the imperial privilege of naming his own successor.