The Washington Post's John Kelly rarely gets political in his Metro section columns, but when he does, they can be real doozies. So it's not all that surprising that Kelly found it irresistible to attack the late President Ronald Reagan in today's column in which he opposed a new bipartisan proposal by Missouri's U.S. senators Claire McCaskill (D) and Roy Blunt (R) to rename the federal city's iconic Union Station railway terminal as the Harry S. Truman Union Station.

"[T]here's the irony of naming an airport after the guy who broke the air traffic controller's union," Kelly huffed. "It's like renaming Atlanta 'Shermanville,'" he groused, nursing a 16-year-old grudge against Democratic President Clinton and a Republican Congress over a 1998 law which renamed Washington National Airport after the Gipper.

Another educational illustration, on FX’s The Americans, of the alliance of interests between Soviet communists and the Left in the West during the 1980s, when both worked to undermine the Reagan administration’s defense policies.

(The series, set in the early 1980s, revolves around “Philip and Elizabeth Jennings,” undercover KGB agents living as an ordinary American husband and wife in suburban, Washington, DC. A new episode debuts tonight.)

Chris Matthews's recent book Tip and the Gipper examined how President Reagan and Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill sometimes set aside their ideological differences in favor of compromising and dealmaking. In a Tuesday post, the New Yorker's Jane Mayer also portrays the '80s O'Neill positively, but in her case it's to contrast his statesmanlike reaction to terrorist attacks that occurred on Reagan's watch with Darrell Issa's hackish exploitation of Benghazi.

Mayer writes that this past Friday, Issa "announced that he had issued a subpoena to Secretary of State John Kerry for a new round of hearings devoted to searching, against diminishing odds, for some dirty, dark secret about what really happened in Benghazi." She goes on:

Comedian Don Rickles told David Letterman, on Friday’s Late Show, that “the highlight of my life was doing the Ronald Reagan Inaugural,” the 87-year-old (88 on May 8) recalled of his legendary career.

He reminisced about how Frank Sinatra used his clout to overcome opposition to his inclusion by Reagan aides concerned Rickles would “make us all look like jerks.”

Sounding remarkably like American liberals and journalists at the time – not to be redundant – last week’s episode of FX’s The Americans set in the early 1980s (a new episode runs tonight), included a scene in which a KGB operative, working in the United States, sputtered in disgust at President Ronald Reagan on her TV: “Look at him. He’ll do anything. He doesn’t care. Kids, nuns, journalists -- he doesn’t care.”

That came from “Elizabeth Jennings,” played by Keri Russell, as she watched Reagan speak on TV, a speech I figured out was delivered at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) dinner held at the Mayflower hotel on Friday, February 26, 1982.