Ronald Reagan’s wartime lies: The president had a Brian Williams problem

See http://worldtraining.net/credibiity14.html
Exxon chief has “Waldheimer’s Disease” does not know his firm gets billions in government subsidies

Also, relating to media credibility: http://worldtraining.net/credibiity14.html http://worldtraining.net/OldManTrump.html see Wayne Barrett articles and book.

http://worldtraining.net/credibility2.htm and series runs to http://worldtraining.net/credibility12.htm http://worldtraining.net/banks.htm also http://worldtraining.net/NWO.htm http://worldtraining.net/pharma.htm

See also: http://worldtraining.net/Fox.htm [from comments “…Reality check, guys. Williams was indeed in a helicopter that came under fire. It was small arms fire, not RPG, and most of the shots hit the bridge parts that the chopper was carrying, but I imagine the sound of the shots and of the hits were still pretty terrifying, and it doesn't surprise me that a civilian wouldn't know what type of fire they were experiencing. The helicopter pilot supports Williams's story: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/iraq-pilot-brian-williams-fire Now, Ronald Reagan was never anywhere near the concentration camps in Europe, and as his Alzheimers progressed he had a harder and harder time separating what he'd experienced in real life from what he'd seen in movies.

If you've ever seen an aging parent suffer from dementia, you know the problem all too well. Even completely healthy and normal adults sometimes remember things that didn't actually happen to them, or remember things differently from the way others do, and there's usually no way to determine whose memory is accurate. But Williams deserves more of a pass for the confusion of details in his account than, oh, for example, Chris Kyle for claiming to have shot looters in New Orleans during Katrina, and to have killed two would-be car-jackers and walked away scot free because of intervention by People In Very High Places who insured that no charges would be brought against a great American hero. ///“ …it's absurd to expect the right wing to apply any sort of logical or ethical consistency to their charges of "lying" by others while they consistently ignore or excuse flagrant lies by Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Chris Kyle, and the entire Fox "News" network.

They know what works, and they know that when they rev up the smear machine to accuse someone like Al Gore of saying something he never said by repeating the same out-of-context phrase over and over, or misquoting a key word in a statement, that's what everyone will remember. The media tried fact-checking Reagan's cheery fantasies, but eventually gave up when it was obvious that the public didn't care, since Reagan was telling them what they wanted to hear.” /// “…Reagan's Iran-Contra love affair had its beginning long before he was president. He secretly negotiated with Iran to NOT release any hostages until after the 1980 election. The failure to get a release doomed Carter's chances of being reelected. The bottom line is that Reagan, like so many GOPers, lied about nearly everything. They continue to carry that banner to this day. Reagan was an actor and he spent his entire political career ACTING as if he were a politician. By 1981, he had completely intermixed movies and real life. This country would be no worse off, if John Wayne had been president. That Hollywood mentality is embedded in their genes.”]

Reagan spent WW II in Hollywood. He told the Israeli prime minister he was at the liberation of Nazi death camps FEB 7, 2015 LUKE BRINKER Ronald Reagan knocks his head while responding to a reporter's question at a news conference, March 19, 1987. (Credit: AP/Dennis Cook) When it emerged that NBC News anchor Brian Williams had misled the public for years with a harrowing account of coming under enemy fire on a military helicopter during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, observers were quick to draw comparisons with other public figures caught telling tall tales about combat experiences. Some hearkened back to Hillary Clinton’s bogus 2008 assertion that she had landed “under sniper fire” during a trip to Bosnia a dozen years earlier; in reality, video from the trip showed a smiling Clinton and her daughter walking calmly on the tarmac, with no sign of trouble whatsoever.

There’s another figure who merits mention in this discussion, one whose serial blurring of lines between fiction and reality was a mainstay of his public career. That figure, of course, was Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s fibs were manifold. They included his campaign-trail tale of a “Chicago welfare queen” with 80 aliases, 30 addresses, and 12 Social Security cards, whom he alleged had claimed “over $150,000″ in government benefits. The woman whom Reagan made infamous was convicted of using only two aliases, used to collect $8,000. [See documentary:BoogieMan

Once in office, Reagan’s deception in the Iran-Contra scandal briefly threatened his presidency. First, Reagan flatly denied wrongdoing, publicly declaring, “We did not — repeat, did not — trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we.” Months later, when subsequent revelations rendered that assertion untenable, Reagan delivered an Oval Office address in which he tried to reconcile his public claims with the factual record. “A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages,” Reagan said. “My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.” But Reagan’s fabrications also included whoppers about conflict zones reminiscent of those put forth by Williams and Clinton. During Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s November 1983 visit to the U.S., Reagan told Shamir that during his service in the U.S. Army film corps, he and fellow members of his unit personally shot footage of the Nazis’ concentration camps as they were liberated. Reagan would tell this story again to others, including Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal. But Reagan was never present at the camps’ liberation. Instead, he spent the war in Culver City, California, where he processed footage from the liberation of the camps.

Reagan biographer Edmund Morris proposed an especially charitable explanation for Reagan’s misleading Holocaust claim, arguing that the images “so burned into his brain that later in life — quite understandably — he imagined he had been there at Ohrdruf and Buchenwald.” Like Williams’ mea culpa, in which he stated that he mistakenly “conflate[d]” one helicopter with another, Morris’ explanation stretches credulity. Just as it’s exceedingly difficult to see how someone could misremember such a searing episode as being fired upon in a war zone, it’s hard to believe that one could confuse viewing footage of Nazi death camps with actually being present at them. Not only did Reagan offer misleading accounts of his own experiences during the war; he also made embarrassing flubs about others’ experiences. In his 1981 inaugural address, Reagan told the gripping story of a World War I soldier, Martin Treptow, whom he inaccurately implied was buried in nearby Arlington National Cemetery. Two years later, Reagan found himself in hot water after New York Daily News scribe Lars-Erik Nelson looked into an account of heroism Reagan related during a Congressional Medal of Honor ceremony and discovered that there was no evidence the event ever occurred.

In the story, which J. David Woodard describes in his book “The America that Reagan Built,” a B-17 bomber came under fire in the course of a European bombing raid in World War II. With the plane rapidly losing altitude, the B-17 commander ordered his soldiers to evacuate the bomber. When all but one young soldier had left the bomber, the commander gripped the remaining soldier’s hand and said, “Never mind, son, we’ll ride it down together.” Nelson examined all 434 Medal of Honor cases and could not find any citation of the event Reagan described. But one reader told Nelson that the story bore similarities to a scene from the World War II-era film “A Wing and a Prayer,” while another claimed to have read it in the Reader’s Digest. White House Press Secretary Larry Speakes had his own response. “If you tell the same story five times, it’s true,” he said. Luke Brinker is Salon's deputy politics editor. Follow him on Twitter at @LukeBrinker. [ from comments: “ .. . Not sure how many of you are old enough to have voted for or against Reagan in 1980. but in those days, reagan was considered a moderate, a RINO, a charming con man with loads of liberal buddies from hollywood, and having a nutty wife who really really believed in astrology. He raised taxes, signed bills protecting abortion, gun control and exploding the budget and debt to fund his arms race with Khrushchev. all of this is magically not part of the modern conservative reagan avatar that you hear so much about. Nor is lies in this article. Lying is so much a part of all communications. Fudging the truth, tweaking the story to make it more interesting, omitting your part in the said incident or how it began, etc. This is all part of how people bs each other each and every day. Maybe the truth is a better option. Maybe we would be better people with it. I think so…”]