It’s been quite an entertaining couple of weeks for misremembering Ronald Reagan. First, Bill O’Reilly and George Will duke it out over memos claiming Reagan was mentally out of it and spent a good chunk of his presidency as more of a Days of Our Lives fan than he did a President.
This week the Reagan “Crazy Train” made a stop on FX as Fargo, a mystery/crime drama set in 1980, decided to take a break from mafia wars and body dismemberment to take a shot at “The Gipper.” Brent Baker described the opening salvo at Reagan here. But that wasn’t to be all.
The next time, they tried to catch Reagan with his pants down:
**WARNING: EXPLICIT LANGUAGE**
Reagan: Oh, no. No, no, wait a minute. Um... Come to think of it, I don't think we made it out of that one. Or did we? Oh, sh*t, I can't remember. Well, either way, it was a fine picture.
Officer: Governor, I don't mean to, uh... What we did over there, the war? Um...and now? My wife's got lymphoma. Uh, stage III. And, uh, lately, the state of things, uh... Well, sometimes, I... Late at night... I wonder if maybe the sickness of this world, if it isn't inside my wife somehow. The -- the cancer. I don't -- I don't know what I'm saying, except... Do you really think we'll get out of this mess we're in?
Reagan: Son, there's not a challenge on god's Earth that can't be overcome by an American. I truly believe that.
Officer: Yeah. But how?
Well, zipper down anyway. But it’s Fargo that has no clothes here. What a glorious illustration of just how convoluted and completely bat-excrement crazy the left was driven by Ronald Reagan.
They could never understand how they lost to Reagan, how they got betrayed by and ultimately defeated beat by an actor, an artist, one of their own. Especially the senior citizen version of Ronald Reagan. So they basically accused him of everything under the sun, hoping that something would stick.
And none of it did, nor does it stick in this scene. That whole sequence at the urinal is meant to make him look like a coward, superficial, and an invalid all at once. The idea that a man who spoke these reverent words to real live heroes and vets would sit there in a bathroom stall comparing a movie he made to serving in Vietnam, is beyond ridiculous.
In fact, as the late, great, Noel Sheppard wrote years ago, it was Hillary who lied about being under sniper fire in Bosnia. So, if TV dramas were genuinely concerned about exposing politicians with presidential aspirations who try to inflate their own courage and importance, which they’re not, but if they were, they could have a field day with the current frontrunner in the Party of Jefferson.
Also, incredibly lame is the “moment of truth” moment that Officer Solverson (Patrick Wilson) has, where he asks Reagan “How are we going to get out of this mess?”
And Reagan responds with a line --a great line-- but a line about Americans overcoming adversity. But then offers nothing as far as real solutions. As if the 20 million jobs that were created over the next 8 years were somehow just lucky accidents for a ridiculously lucky Reagan.
If Reagan had that kind of luck, he probably never would have been shot. Reagan did of course begin to act immediately, to turn the economy around, illustrating the fact that he was never some platitude-preaching, talking-point dispensing campaign president. He had a real plan while he was campaigning, and he used it.
That history is clear. Fargo’s is, shall we say, not.
