PETT-Speak!

The Lexington Herald-Leader, monopoly newspaper of Lexington, Ky., has instituted a new feature – or at least a new feature for its December 6 online edition…an oral commentary by the paper’s editorial cartoonist, Joel Pett, a bright guy who is recognized nationally. Besides his work just being seen, his work can now be heard in Pett-speak. In his commentary of the sixth he took as his subject a putdown of former president Ronald Reagan, remarking the plethora of structures named in his honor and suggesting that the only reasonable dedication of the Martin Luther King Memorial would be to inscribe it with Reagan’s name…sort of like the official change of the name of Washington’s National Airport to Reagan International, or something like that – perfectly reasonable.

He ticked off some matters handled during the Reagan years as reasons for this action. He mentioned the Iran-Contra affair as sarcastic proof that Reagan is entitled. The evidence determined otherwise but one hopes Reagan knew all about it since it was not a bad idea and carried out during the Cold War when all bets were off vis-à-vis international trustworthiness, especially in dealings with tin-horn dictators in the home hemisphere and duplicitous Middle Eastern ayatollahs and other monsters elsewhere.

It was during the Iran-Contra hearing that Democrat Senator “Leaky” Leahy was kicked out of the clambake because of his ramblings of classified secrets to the proper liberal ears, thus establishing further reason for the public to hold Congress to an approval rating somewhere in the vicinity of 20% today…sort of beneath contempt. Pett didn’t mention Leahy, of course. He also didn’t mention Lt. Col. Oliver North, who does very well today and is still the guy the Leahy-clones love to hate.

Pett was compelled to mention that Reagan did not have an African American in his cabinet, but conveniently avoided mentioning that he appointed the first woman in history to the Supreme Court. He ridiculed Reagan’s “Star Wars” plan (SDI – Strategic Defense Initiative), but failed to mention that the Soviet Union folded soon after SDI was introduced (still in the works, too), meaning that the entire world was eminently safer then than at any time since the late 1940s. He compared Reagan with President Kennedy, Reagan asking the public if it was better off than it had been, while Kennedy asked what one could do for the country. The relevance of or the comparison of either of these statements with the other defies any effort to understand.

Pett claimed Reagan urged office-seekers to hate the government and therefore run for office. Pett thinks, then, that Reagan served two terms as California governor and two terms as president because he hated the government, apparently exponentially since both offices were top jobs and consequently exacted a huge amount of hate on the part of the top banana. Go figure.

Pett accused Reagan of “busting” the Air-Traffic Controllers Union. What he didn’t mention was that the controller signed a sworn affidavit upon his employment that he would never strike, and that according to federal law he was not allowed to strike, just as soldiers are not allowed to strike. As head of the executive branch, Reagan was bound by his oath of office to uphold the nation’s laws, so he had no choice. The strikers were given 48 hours (two full days) to get back to work and about 30% of them responded. The other 11,350 or so strikers were fired and never rehired. Through intensive planning by the administration, the air industry, even in the short term, was minimally affected. Commentary is one thing, but this part of Pett’s screed was “yellow journalism” at its most vitriolic and disingenuous level.

Reagan was against the Voting Rights Act, according to Pett, though Reagan was never in Congress and so never voted on this legislation. On July 2, 1964, Democratic President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act after former Klansman Robert Byrd's (Democrat senator from West Virginia) 14-hour filibuster and the votes of 22 other Senate Democrats (in an overwhelmingly democrat-controlled Congress) failed to defeat the measure. Illinois Republican Everett Dirksen, with 26 GOP senators and 44 Democrats voted to invoke cloture, allowing the bill's passage. According to John Fonte in the January 9, 2003, National Review, 82 percent of Republicans voted for passage, but only 66 percent of Democrats did. On June 29, 1982, President Ronald Reagan signed a 25-year extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. So much for Pett’s hatchet job on this subject.

One wonders why this diatribe – at least why now? The paper is about as liberal as papers get, so a hatchet job on most any republican is always in order…nothing unusual about that. Reagan was born in February 1911 and died in June 2004, so those dates don’t call for a special notice in December. He was almost killed by an assassin, but that was in March 1981. The Grenada invasion took place in October 1983, so that’s not significant…unless, of course, it’s because all the Americans were not off that island until about mid-December. Maybe that fact triggered this presentation by the cartoonist-turned-online-commentator. Surely he doesn’t blame Reagan for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 65 years ago and just missed the date by one day. Only the shadow knows.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark