Ron Reagan tells it like it is

Big Brother:

On Larry King Live last night, Ronald Prescott Reagan, or Ron Reagan, Jr. as he is known, was about as plainspoken as a guy could be. He said he was surprised by the uproar caused by his eulogy at his father's burial, since he wasn't aware that he was talking about George W. Bush. However, he said, if people thought he was talking about George Bush, he very well "might have been talking about George Bush." He said (pointedly twice) that it is "simply shameful " that stem cell research is still being debated on any grounds, and, when asked, that he "may well" become a spokesman on the issue. He said his father "would never have gone into Iraq. He would have been more interested in going after Osama Bin Laden, who actually planned the 9/11 attacks. The war was a big mistake." He said, "America was lied to." He said that he thought people were willing to wait for up to eight hours in line for two minutes viewing of "really nothing more than a box", because they were aware that what they had in Ronald Reagan could never be had with "the current occupant of the White House." He said the pictures from Abu Ghraib "make you feel slimy, unclean. bhrrrrrrrr!" (as he wiped the imagined slime off his arms). He said he is no authority on the Republican Party, as he is not a Republican and does not "hang out with Republicans much," but that, since he was asked, in his opinion the Republican Party has become "mean" and beholden to the "religious right." He put the blame on the current bipartisan atmosphere in Washington on the Republican Party. He said he would not run for public office, not only because he's not interested, but also because he's an atheist and "according to polls, you can't be elected to office in this country if you're an atheist." He said he and his mother are not so interested in the political labels of "conservative" and "liberal", but more interested in taking the right position on any given issue. And he said that he "would not be supporting" Bush in this year's election. Although the transcript of the interview is not yet available on cnn.com, I'm using quotation marks to illustrate how plainspoken Reagan was, and how recall of his marks feels verbatim. None of the callers challenged him on his politics; they were more interested in how the family was doing, and how Ron felt when he first learned of his father's illness, if he had talked to his father about it, what his death was like, and how he felt when he saw the crowds as he walked up Constitution Ave. This seems to suggest that a large number of the viewing audience were supporters of President Reagan. I wonder what they thought of his son's outspokenness, which he claimed his father would have supported, as he never heard his father claim that only conservatives have a right to speak out about what they see as the truth.