As a masochist, I could not help but watch a few minutes of last night's debate among the Republican Party challengers for the presidency. The irony is that the debate was held at the Ronald Reagan Library in California. This irony was lost on the Republican faithful sitting politely in the auditorium. If any of them got bored during the debate, they could have wandered off to the library. They would have been able to ask a question that I have been asking for years: are they are any books at the Ronald Reagan Library? It would be like finding cookbooks at a McDonald's.

The younger generation may think that things fell off the table when George W. Bush got elected. But actually, George W. takes after Reagan, a subliterate demagogue who got by on the strength of his smile and a teflon personality that allowed him to get away with murder. The candidates last night kept comparing themselves with Ronald Reagan and did not mention George W. more than a few times, but any rational person would avoid these imposters like the plague. Here are two of my favorite Reagan stories which prove two things: first, Reagan was a terrorist who got it on with pathological killers, and second, Reagan was a dunce who behaved like a wind-up robot.

After Reagan died in June 2004, the country took a week off and coronated Reagan as the greatest human being in the history of the world. But some bloggers pointed out that the man was a little bit dumb. Here's the Daily Howler from June 10, 2004, quoting from Lou Cannon's Reagan biography, Role of a Lifetime, on how Reagan answered questions in the Tower Commission investigation into the Reagan Administration's sale of weapons to Iranian terrorists:

CANNON (page 631): [I]t was obvious to [Chief of Staff Donald] Regan and [White House counsel Peter] Wallison that the president was still shaky in his recollections. Wallison drew up what Abshire called an “aide-memoire” to help the president recall what he had told them. At the top Wallison wrote, “On the issue of the TOW [missile] shipment in August, in discussing this matter with me and David Abshire, you said you were surprised to learn that the Israelis had shipped the arms. If that is your recollection, and the question comes up at the Tower Board meeting, you might want to say that you were surprised.”

The question, of course, came up...After a preliminary question about presidents and their NSC staffs, Tower asked Reagan about the discrepancy between his statement and Regan’s on the question of whether he had given prior approval to the Israeli arms shipment. Reagan rose from his chair, walked around the desk and said to Wallison, “Peter, where is that piece of paper you had that you gave me this morning?” Then he picked up the paper and began to read, “If the question comes up at the Tower Board meeting, you might want to say that you were surprised.”

Tower’s jaw went slack. It was, as Abshire put it, “a low moment.” Tower suspected that Reagan was being manipulated by his counsel, and the Tower Board’s chief of staff, Rhett Dawson, asked Wallison for a “copy of the script” when the board departed. But Wallison was even more amazed than the Tower Board by Reagan’s response. “I was horrified, just horrified,” Wallison recalled later.

So Reagan was so dumb that he read out loud coached testimony from his index card and also read out loud the instructions that would highlight the way that he would snow-job the Tower Commission.

Even worse, Reagan loved military dictators who tortured and brutalized Central American peasants in the name of American foreign policy. The following is a damning summary of Reagan's special relationship with a fascist dictator in Guatemala, where the U.S. sponsored a military dictatorship for decades:

Reagan & Guatemala’s Death Files

By Robert Parry

Ronald Reagan's election in November 1980 set off celebrations in the well-to-do communities of Central America.

After four years of Jimmy Carter's human rights nagging, the region's anticommunist hard-liners were thrilled that they had someone in the White House who understood their problems.

The oligarchs and the generals had good reason for the optimism. For years, Reagan had been a staunch defender of right-wing regimes that engaged in bloody counterinsurgency campaigns against leftist enemies.

In the late 1970s, when Carter's human rights coordinator, Pat Derian, criticized the Argentine military for its "dirty war" -- tens of thousands of "disappearances," tortures and murders -- then-political commentator Reagan joshed that she should "walk a mile in the moccasins” of the Argentine generals before criticizing them.

Despite his aw shucks style, Reagan found virtually every anticommunist action justified, no matter how brutal. From his eight years in the White House, there is no historical indication that he was troubled by the bloodbath and even genocide that occurred in Central America during his presidency, while he was shipping hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to the implicated forces.

The death toll was staggering -- an estimated 70,000 or more political killings in El Salvador, possibly 20,000 slain from the contra war in Nicaragua, about 200 political "disappearances" in Honduras and some 100,000 people eliminated during a resurgence of political violence in Guatemala.

The one consistent element in these slaughters was the overarching Cold War rationalization, emanating in large part from Ronald Reagan's White House.

Yet, as the world community moves to punish war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, no substantive discussion has occurred in the United States about facing up to this horrendous record of the 1980s.

Rather than a debate about Reagan as a potential war criminal, the ailing ex-president is honored as a conservative icon with his name attached to Washington National Airport and with an active legislative push to have his face carved into Mount Rushmore.

When the national news media does briefly acknowledge the barbarities of the 1980s in Central America, it is in the context of one-day stories about the little countries bravely facing up to their violent pasts.

At times, the CIA is fingered abstractly as a bad supporting actor in the violent dramas. But never does the national press lay blame on individual American officials.

The grisly reality of Central America was most recently revisited on Feb. 25 when a Guatemalan truth commission issued a report on the staggering human rights crimes that occurred during a 34-year civil war.

The Historical Clarification Commission, an independent human rights body, estimated that the conflict claimed the lives of some 200,000 people with the most savage bloodletting occurring in the 1980s.

Based on a review of about 20 percent of the dead, the panel blamed the army for 93 percent of the killings and leftist guerrillas for three percent. Four percent were listed as unresolved.

The report documented that in the 1980s, the army committed 626 massacres against Mayan villages. "The massacres that eliminated entire Mayan villages … are neither perfidious allegations nor figments of the imagination, but an authentic chapter in Guatemala's history," the commission concluded.

The army "completely exterminated Mayan communities, destroyed their livestock and crops," the report said. In the north, the report termed the slaughter a "genocide." [WP, Feb. 26, 1999]

Besides carrying out murder and “disappearances,” the army routinely engaged in torture and rape. "The rape of women, during torture or before being murdered, was a common practice" by the military and paramilitary forces, the report found.

The report added that the "government of the United States, through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some [of these] state operations." The report concluded that the U.S. government also gave money and training to a Guatemalan military that committed "acts of genocide" against the Mayans.

"Believing that the ends justified everything, the military and the state security forces blindly pursued the anticommunist struggle, without respect for any legal principles or the most elemental ethical and religious values, and in this way, completely lost any semblance of human morals," said the commission chairman, Christian Tomuschat, a German jurist.

"Within the framework of the counterinsurgency operations carried out between 1981 and 1983, in certain regions of the country agents of the Guatemalan state committed acts of genocide against groups of the Mayan people,” he added. [NYT, Feb. 26, 1999]

The report did not single out culpable individuals either in Guatemala or the United States. But the American official most directly responsible for renewing U.S. military aid to Guatemala and encouraging its government during the 1980s was President Reagan.