SAINT RONALD GETS THE HEAVE-HO

Unlike the thousands of Americans who will line Constitution Avenue to see the horse-drawn caisson delivering Saint Ronald's coffin to the Capitol Rotunda, where his body will lie in state -- and unlike the media maestros who will sanctify the rites as whispering hosts of a civic religion -- Greg Palast has lost no love, admiration or respect for the 40th president of the United States.

A BBC investigative journalist, Palast writes: "In 1987 I found myself stuck in a crappy little town in Nicaragua named Chaguitillo. The people were kind enough, though hungry, except for one surly young man. His wife had just died of tuberculosis.

"People don't die of TB if they get some antibiotics. But Ronald Reagan, big hearted guy that he was, had put a lock-down embargo on medicine to Nicaragua because he didn't like the government that the people there had elected.

"Ronnie grinned and cracked jokes while the young woman's lungs filled up and she stopped breathing. Reagan flashed that B-movie grin while they buried the mother of three."

Palast, who is a native Californian, wrote the best-selling book, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy." He invariably takes the powerful to task. As Noam Chomsky has said of him, he "upsets all the right people" -- and for all the right reasons. Although Palast often writes for the mainstream media -- The Guardian and The Observer in London, Harper's magazine, the Baltimore Sun, The New York Times, to name a few -- it, too, comes in for his withering critism.

Palast heaps scorn not only on Reagan but on the Times for embroidering the legend in a "canned obit." He blasts the paper for writing that "Reagan projected, 'faith in small town America' and 'old-time values.'"

"'Values' my ass," he fumes. "It was union busting and a declaration of war on the poor and anyone who couldn't buy designer dresses. It was the New Meanness, bringing starvation back to America so that every millionaire could get another million.

"'Small town' values? From the movie star of the Pacific Palisades, the Malibu mogul? I want to throw up."

Tom Carson feels the same nausea. At Reagan's funeral, Carson writes, "there will no doubt be buckets of false poetry, grievously misrepresenting the man -- yes, even if Peggy Noonan shows up, doing her best to be Walt Whitman to his Abe: 'When Star Wars Last in Gorbachev's Dooryard Bloom'd.'"

In "a sincere spirit of tribute to an enemy," Carson proposes that, as "a noted fantasist ... perhaps best remembered for the eight years he spent believing he ruled an entirely fictional United States ... a delusion shared by most of his compatriots," Reagan "deserves the honor of being the first person ever embalmed at Disneyland."