It’s been a Dump on Reagan fortnight. Jerry Wurf’s big public employees’ union, AFSCME, showed the first of its sixty-second anti-Reagan spots on 13 major TV markets (cost $500,000). . . . AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland’s 15-minute Labor Day address was such an anti-Reagan diatribe that CBS refused to carry it. . . . While union leaders denounced Reagan for firing the air-traffic controllers, 39 per cent of their members said hurray (Harris). … At the prestigious American Political Science Association convention in New York last week the political scientists showed themselves, well, out of touch. While some 60 per cent of the people approve the President’s handling of his job, 69 per cent of the political scientists think he is doing a poor job, only 31 per cent think he is doing a good job. (Their own political and ideological breakdown: 10 per cent Republican, 61 per cent Democratic; 15 per cent conservative, 74 per cent either “moderately” or “very” liberal.)
It’s the same story internationally. Mexico’s José López Portillo has called the neutron bomb “the worst thing that humanity has produced” and blasted Reagan for putting it into production. . . . Fidel Castro’s speech of welcome to the Interparliamentary Union was so incendiary (Reagan is “a fascist,” his Administration is “bathed in blood”) that U.S. envoy Wayne Smith walked out, as did the British envoy at Castro’s attack on British policies in Northern Ireland. A veteran Castrologist rated the speech 7 or 8 on a 1 to 10 scale of Castro vitriol. … In Paris, the French government, topping its performance in support of the Salvadoran rebels, permitted two African liberation movements, the Marxist SWAPO and the (South) African National Congress, to set up missions in France on an “informal” basis. Snapped Mitterrand: “The commitment to friendship with the United States does not include supporting all the world’s dictatorships.” . . . The panjandrum dictatorship of them all, the Soviet Union, has, according to latest intelligence estimates, over 150,000 of its own and satellite troops spotted in twenty countries around the world engaged both in active fighting and in training missions. Breakdown includes: 85,000 Soviet troops in Afghanistan; 25,000 Cubans, East Germans, Soviets in Angola; 14,000 Cubans and Soviets in Ethiopia; 1,500 Soviets, Cubans, East Germans in South Yemen; 2,500 Soviets advising the Syrian army, much of which is to be found in Lebanon.
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