June 6, 2004
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by Mike Sweet
The rehashing of Reagan's life and times is thrust upon the American public with the same sugar coating that encased his beloved jelly beans.
Many consider it the worst of taste to criticize Reagan for what he did and didn't do. Or to blame him for the many unresolved problems (in addition to the ones he created) that have bedeviled the nation. .
Republicans have spent the last 13 years canonizing Reagan by whitewashing his record.
And even by reincarnating him. George W. Bush is his ideological equal, and probably his intellectual clone. Neither is anything to be proud of.
Reagan loyalists talk about how he revitalized the military. They don't talk about how he did it by plunging the country into an unprecedented debt we are still paying off.
They don't mention the hundreds of billions of dollars that went for Star Wars and B-1 and B-2 bombers -- pipe dreams that sucked the Treasury dry and never lived up to the promises of their backers, who, nonetheless made money.
Republicans don't like to talk about Iran Contra. Or that Ronald Reagan repeated 79 times that he didn't remember when asked what he knew about selling weapons to Iran so his subordinates could buy weapons off the books to run an illegal and immoral war in Central America.
Nobody mentions the Pentagon Bribery Scandal, in which hundreds of Reagan political appointees and contractors cheated the taxpayers out of billions more.
The media mentions the flavor of his birthday cake but muses not on the Savings and Loan debacle. That's where S&L managers got the green light from Reagan's regulators to spend their customers' money as if it were their own.
In the long-term bailout that followed, customers are still repaying themselves with their own tax money, and yet nobody blames Reagan.
Reagan admirers don't weep for the half a million innocent Central Americans murdered by right-wing dictators supported by Ronald Reagan in defiance of U.S. law.
His fans say the Soviet Union collapsed because Ronald Reagan called for Star Wars and told Moscow to tear down the Berlin Wall.
The Soviet Union collapsed because after 70 years it simply rotted from within, and because Mikhail Gorbachev imposed the political change his predecessors feared.
Reagan had the luck to show up as the Soviet corpse was taking its last gasps and took credit for inflicting the mortal wound.
Ronald Reagan, who dumped his first wife and estranged himself from his children, became the head of the political party that maintains to this day that only its members are fit to set and impose family values.
Ronald Reagan's true believers are still among us. Many are back on top, working in the new Bush Administration.
The nation should move on.
But it should be past the unbecoming, sanctimonious and more than a little nauseating sanctification of Ronald Reagan.
Comments (2)
Let's see:
- Raised taxes on everyone earning under $100,000 a year supposedly to bail out Social Security, then spent that, and plenty more, creating more debt than Franklin Roosevelt did.
- Managed to lose a war in Lebanon, but did win one against a caribbean medical school.
- Caused 100 years worth of damage to the environment.
- Allowed the nation's S&L industry to be looted and destroyed, something requiring a 50 year payback by taxpayers.
- Armed the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.
- Supported America's vision in South America by continuing to back Pinochet's regime in Chile.
- Armed Iran illegally while crushing freedom in Central America.
- Destroyed the quality of the nation's Air Traffic Control system.
Yes, he should have almost as many things named after him as Warren Harding.
Ronald Reagan is living (or dead) proof that only the good die young. What was he, 93?
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