Stealing from the Dead.

Things are dark at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley. Thousands of the Gipper's personal artifacts are missing. That's Nancy keeping a watchful eye on that attractive pillow up there, just in case someone tries to snag that baby too.

You can read more here.

An amusing side note to this bizarre story is how different news orgs are covering this. Most headlines had some version of "artifacts missing" or "libarary can't account for artifacts" but Fox News takes a different approach. Their headline reads "Ronald Reagan Library Misplaces More Than 80,000 Artifacts."

As in, "Those things have to be around here somewhere. Did you look behind the filing cabinet?"

When in the story itself they report:

Part of the problem has to do with a lack of supervision and a "near universal" security breakdown that may have left the mementos vulnerable to pilfering, "the scope of which will likely never be known," the audit found.

When auditors tried to locate a sample of 21 items from a larger list of "high-value objects," one vase was missing even though library records indicated it was accounted for.

They also found that nine of 26 items in two unpacked boxes had gone missing. The missing items included a hand-crocheted American flag and an elephant figurine.

Mmm, a crocheted flag. Who the hell could resist that?

But we all know what's going on here, don't we? The Reagan loyalists just can't keep their fingers off things St. Ron might have actually touched. They're slipping those ash trays and elephants into their shorts to add them to their enormous home shrines to RR, just like the Disciples rifled Jesus' desk for pens and ashtrays after He'd done that ascension thing.

I was talking to a co-worker this morning about this and she concluded, "People are weird."

Indeed they are. Thank God.

Or should I thank St. Ron?