World News Korner

Newly declassified documents indicate that British officials thought that Ronald Reagan was a "bozo" and were incredulous that he was elected President.

Courtesy of the Daily Beast:

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were often portrayed as geo-political soul mates, but government files declassified in London on Wednesday expose a deep British disdain for the president who was described in official papers as homophobic, uninformed, disinterested and, not to put too fine a point on it, “a Bozo.”

The British Foreign Office files seen by The Daily Beast show that Prime Minister Thatcher was warned President Reagan had little interest in world affairs and was unable to sustain a serious conversation about contemporary politics.

The damning critiques, which expressed sheer incredulity that this man could occupy the White House, were shared at the highest levels of government before and after Reagan’s first State Visit to Britain in 1982.

Despite the hostility of her advisors, Thatcher appeared to strike up a close relationship with Reagan based on their shared values. They loudly battled Communism together and were determined to vanquish the post-war economic consensus, which had been based on the work of John Maynard Keynes, in favor of trickle-down economics and low taxes.

Successive British ambassadors in Washington were deeply unimpressed with the former California governor, however. Sir Nicholas Henderson, who was in the job when Reagan was elected, described him as a dogmatic and simplistic man. “He has clear-cut opinions, not to say prejudices, as was apparent to me when he told me à propos Keynes that it must not be forgotten that he was a homosexual,” Henderson wrote in his United States Annual Review of 1981.

Anti-intellectual, anti-gay, anti-comprehension, oh yeah that was the Ronald Reagan that we knew and loathed here in the U.S..

Sir Oliver Wright, who replaced Henderson as the British Ambassador, was even less impressed with Reagan.

Wright was aghast to find that smart and serious political operatives in D.C. appeared happy to work under Reagan’s leadership. “No one in Washington smirks when they are expounding the President’s views or communicating his policies,” he said. “No one in official and hardly anyone in non-official Washington decries his want of powers of analysis or his inability to argue a closely reasoned case.”

Wright’s summation of the twin threads of the Administration’s policy objectives was equally damning. He described Reaganomics as “unsophisticated… it’s component parts self-contradictory” and his foreign policy as cartoonish and based on Reagan’s Wild West heritage. “California is on the look out for baddies and Public Baddie No 1 is the Soviet Union… baddies, as we all know, have only one proper fate: to bite the dust.”

Of course fortunately for Reagan there was Mikhail Gorbachev to usher in perestroika and do the dirty work in Russia, and allow Ronnie to take the lion's share of the credit.

Is it any wonder that a certain political lightweight choose him as her role model?

Palin at Reagan ranch

Since the British found Reagan so distasteful one can only imagine how upset they were by the election of George W. Bush in 2000. And if by some miracle Palin HAD been elected as the VP in 2008 perhaps they would have stopped returning our calls altogether.




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