Grover Norquist's work on Ronald Reagan's legacy

From Crooks and Liars:

One of the more down-to-earth tributes was written by Norquist, who said: “Every conservative knows that we will win radical tax reform and reduction as soon as we elect a president who will sign the bill. The flow of history is with us. Our victories can be delayed, but not denied. This is the change wrought by Ronald Reagan.” Norquist all but revealed one of his missions in the coming two years — finding a presidential candidate who would assume the Reagan mantle in a way that neither Bush 41 nor Dole ever could — but not the other. His second big push was practically a guerrilla marketing campaign to make sure that the less-engaged Middle America would get the message that Reagan belonged in the pantheon of all-time greats right next to Lincoln, Washington and FDR. Norquist had learned the lessons of Normandy and of the Brandenburg Gate, which was that powerful symbols can mean a lot more than words (especially in a little-read policy journal), that a motorist under the big Sunbelt sky of Ronald Reagan Boulevard will absorb the message of the Gipper’s greatness without ever pondering if ketchup should be a vegetable in federally funded school lunches or if “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers” in Central America were drug-dealing thugs, the kind of stubborn things that popped up in those newspaper articles ranking the presidents.

I've never understood the 'worship' of Saint Ronnie, but now I can see who was force feeding the public the load of tripe about him.

Gates and Iran-Contra.

Laura Rozen: (my bold)
"former CIA Soviet analyst Jennifer Glaudemans on Robert Gates and the politicization of intelligence:
In 1985...Iran-Contra was in the planning stages then, a secret scheme in which the Reagan administration was going to sell arms to an enemy country, Iran, and use the proceeds to fund the anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua.

In order to justify these actions, administration officials felt they needed some analytical backing from the intelligence community. Those in my office knew nothing of their plans, of course, but it was the context in which we were asked, in 1985, to contribute to the National Intelligence Estimate on the subject of Iran.

Later, when we received the draft NIE, we were shocked to find that our contribution on Soviet relations with Iran had been completely reversed. Rather than stating that the prospects for improved Soviet-Iranian relations were negligible, the document indicated that Moscow assessed those prospects as quite good. What's more, the national intelligence officer responsible for coordinating the estimate had already sent a personal memo to the White House stating that the race between the U.S. and USSR "for Tehran is on, and whoever gets there first wins all."

No one in my office believed this Cold War hyperbole. ...

We protested the conclusions of the NIE, citing evidence such as the Iranian government's repression of the communist Tudeh Party, the expulsion of all Soviet economic advisors and a number of Soviet diplomats who were KGB officers, and a continuing public rhetoric that chastised the "godless" communist regime as the "Second Satan" after the United States.

Despite overwhelming evidence, our analysis was suppressed. At a coordinating meeting, we were told that Gates wanted the language to stay in as it was, presumably to help justify "improving" our strained relations with Tehran through the Iran-Contra weapons sales."