dear leader

thanks to my dad for sending this along. although we may not agree on what the reagan legacy will ultimately prove to entail, we can at least honor the man as having lived here on this earth. life is hard. he lived well enough to become an old man - which i, too, hope to become in due time - and for that at least, i guess, respect is warranted.

all the other hoopla surrounding his death, however, left me feeling quite scared and confused. i'm not even sure why. a presidential corpse paraded hither and thither for most of a week, dominating all news in the meantime; bush and his handlers starting in with the comparisons: (from frank rich of the ny times)

...no one has more strenuously tried to emulate the 40th president in both style and substance than George W. Bush. Reagan's body was barely cold when Ed Gillespie, the Republican chairman, said: "The parallels are there. I don't know how you miss them."

...

The White House's efforts to follow the Reagan playbook have been nothing if not relentless. As Michael Deaver's crew famously would have Reagan cut ribbons in front of nursing homes even as he cut funds for their construction, so Mr. Bush can be found communing with nature each time his administration takes a whack at the environment. To pass himself off as a practiced hand at proletarian manual labor, Mr. Bush clears brush on camera at his ranch in Crawford just as Mr. Reagan did in Santa Barbara. In Washington, the Bush speechwriters strain to equate an "axis of evil" with the "evil empire."

i think this kirk cartoon sums it up well: it's nice to remember the good stuff, but it's important not to forget the bad.
for what it's worth.