What the right won't admit about Reagan

By Gene Lyons
Salon.com

Nothing better symbolized Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday celebration than that it should fall on Super Bowl Sunday, with Air Force jets roaring unseen over a hermetically sealed stadium, almost, but not quite, drowning out a tarted-up former Mouseketeer who mangled the lyrics of the Star-Spangled Banner.

It was all there: the bombast, the grandiose self-congratulation, the willful blindness, the elevation of showbiz spectacle to patriotic rite. After which, thankfully, a pretty good NFL football game broke out. It's for pseudo-events like the Super Bowl, I believe, that a merciful God gave us high-def DVRs.

How fitting that George W. Bush, the late President Reagan's vicar on Earth, was seated in a front-row celebrity box to witness the spectacle. Reagan's genius as a politician was that he repackaged and sold to millions of Americans the comforting daydreams of the 1950s. Not the '50s as they were -- no Korean War, no Army-McCarthy hearings, no lynchings, no John Birch Society denouncing commie traitor "Ike the Kike" -- but as depicted in TV sitcoms like "Ozzie and Harriet, "Leave It to Beaver" and "The Andy Griffith Show."

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