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A couple of weeks ago Will Bunch, our blogging friend from Philly and the proprietor of Attytood, visited with John Amato in L.A. for a bit while on the road promoting his new book, Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future.

Will has a rundown of the book's contents at Attytood, and provided an excerpt for Salon.

Of special note, I thought, was this bit about Grover Norquist's role in shaping the Reagan Legacy project:

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 just gotten my copy and started reading, but it's an important book -- especially if you want to have some arguments handy for dealing with your Reagan-loving brother-in-law ...

Will Bunch today writes that the Philadelphia Inquirer still won't admit they screwed up by hiring torture architect John Yoo as a columnist.

It doesn't surprise me. Let me tell you why.

The Inquirer, long a 'liberal' paper, underwent some changes a few years ago when they (and the Philadelphia Daily News, where Will blogs) were purchased by the Philadelphia Media Holdings. The new publisher was Brien Tierney, a well-known Republican media strategist. (Until then, Tierney was best known to Philadelphians for his aggressive media defense of local Catholic churches against child molestation charges.)

When his group of investors bought the paper, he made a public pledge not to interfere with the papers' editorial slant. Since then, Citizen Tierney has hired several conservative columnists, including Rick Santorum and Mike Smerconish, and has overseen (mandated?) the occasional use of opposing editorials, presumably to make sure readers don't take the one with the "wrong" (read: liberal) opinions seriously.

Last week, Will Bunch noticed that Yoo, someone who was thought to be an occasional op-ed contributor, had actually been hired as a regular staff writer, and he generated a blogswarm asking for Yoo to be fired. The NY Times covered the uproar:

Harold Jackson, The Inquirer’s editorial page editor, said he was surprised by the sudden delayed anger directed his way over Mr. Yoo. He said the decision to hire a columnist was his, but that “Mr. Yoo was suggested by the publisher,” Brian Tierney.

Big surprise there. After all, freedom of the press belongs to he who owns the press! Tierney is just as principled in all his activities:

There’s a little-publicized story that the parent company of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, Philadelphia Newspapers LLC allegedly sought a $10-million bailout from the state of Pennsylvania according to lawsuit filed by a Chester County, Pa. charter school. However, the Associated Press reported on April 24 that the company’s chief, Brian Tierney – received $1.175 million in salary and bonus compensation in 2008, despite being forced into bankruptcy protection in February for $395 million in debt.

“Recent court filings also show that Tierney collected $1.175 million in salary and bonuses last year, somewhat higher than previously disclosed,” Maryclaire Dale wrote for the AP. “Tierney's compensation included $650,000 in salary, a $350,000 bonus for 2008, a $175,000 bonus for 2007 and $81,000 in transportation costs.”

Recently, as The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reported, Tierney appeared before a House committee making a plea for government help.

“The biggest request for help at the hearing was from the Philadelphia Inquirer's Brian Tierney, who wanted protection for newspapers to talk about creating a national alternative to Craigslist,” Milbank wrote in the Post on April 22.

Funny how those free-market principles go right out the window when they affect your positive cash flow, eh?

“There was a conscious effort on our part to counter some of the criticism of The Inquirer as being a knee-jerk liberal publication,” Mr. Jackson said. “We made a conscious effort to add some conservative voices to our mix.”

Asked if the release of the memos affected his view of hiring Mr. Yoo, Mr. Jackson said: “From a personal perspective, yes. We certainly know more now than we did then, but we didn’t go into that contract blindly. I’m not going to say the same decision wouldn’t have been made.”

But Mr. Tierney said the memos did not alter his opinion.

“What I liked about John Yoo is he’s a Philadelphian,” Mr. Tierney said. “He went to Episcopal Academy, where I went to school. He’s a very, very bright guy. He’s on the faculty at Berkeley, one of the most liberal universities in the country.”

To critics of the hiring, he said, “The most important speech to defend is the speech you hate,” and he said there were not all that many critics. “I’ve gotten more mail recently on our making our comics smaller than I have on John Yoo.”

So this is all about defending free speech? Hmm. If I didn't know better, I'd almost swear Tierney handed Yoo the spot to help him defend himself (and thus, BushCo officials) against war crime charges. Greg Sergeant:

On March 15, he published a long broadside against “civil libertarians” who have criticized the Bush administration’s expansion of executive powers amid the war on terror — expansions that Yoo helped author.

Needless to say, those “civil libertarians” are the same people that are demanding a probe into the Bush era torture program — one that Yoo himself helped create. At the time of Yoo’s piece, of course, it was still unclear how or whether to probe the architects of that program, as it remains today. You’d think the paper would ask Yoo to recuse himself from writing about such stuff.

It would be one thing for a paper to invite someone under scrutiny to air his side of the story in an occasional Op ed. It’s quite another for a paper to give such a person a regular platform on contract for use in attacking political opponents in an ongoing and potentially criminal governmental dispute.

Oh, don't be silly! They had to do it, Craigslist made them! I hear the next new hire will be Roman Polanski, who will be giving advice on how to cultivate relationships with underage girls and how some people are trying to legislate away his freedom.