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Ronald Reagan: An Over-rated, Under-criticized President

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I have never understood why the neocons deify Reagan and act as if he were God incarnate while on earth. As has been pointed out quite correctly, Ronald Reagan was a disaster on just about every front. The people in his administration would come to create the most infamous reactionary reich-wing cabal in U.S. history, with many of them spawning destructive ideas such as "no new taxes ever" and "American military force is our God-given right to use whenever we dont like another government" and "the poor are all welfare bums" and "feed the rich and they will create jobs for everyone" and "smaller government(aka cut the poor)"...all toxic ideas taken up by Grover Norquist and Karl Rove, Rex Reed, et al, who under GW Bush were the the ideological descendants of his Daddy George H.W. Bush's slander-monger protege, Lee Atwater. Reagan employed a whole host of reactionaries from Oliver North to the young fascists (at the time) Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfelt who as we know became major war mongers under George W. Bush.

So, yes, Ronald Reagan is the most OVER-rated, UNDER-criticized president in recent American history and he was the granddaddy in most ways of the current economic meltdown, banking scandals and severe divide between 'haves' and 'have nots' that we see today. His "laissez-faire "free" market knows best" hogwash and his undoing of Federal supervision of social programs via 'block grants' back to the states, allowed for much of the subsequent unravelling of FDR's and Lyndon Johnson's and Jimmy Carter's improvements in the social safety net and evironmental laws. Clinton was a mixed bag who cooperated with the conservatives a little more than his predecessors and his biggiest mistakes were to continue to OK deregulation and to bow to the 'welfare reform' championed by fascists like Newt Gingrich, which stripped a whole generation of Americans from a chance at belonging to the middle class and put many more in the street because the goverment ended welfare but reneged on its promise to replace welfare with 'jobs for everyone once people were kicked off the welfare rolls". The jobs never materialized, wages remained stagnant and minimum wage hikes continued for years to be stymied, as was health care reform attempts which under Bill Clinton were shot down by a Republican Congress headed by Newt Gingrich and his Contract On America (not Contract with America) which was a master plan to undo the social safety net even further. In 1995 Gingrich even tried to shut down the Federal Government so he could attempt to destroy Social Security and Medicare. Clinton prevented him from achieving all of what he wanted, but the conservatives, ever since FDR put in the New Deal have dreamed of destroying any and all spending on lower income Americans.. The bottom half of the US population never recovered its former independence. Unions were busted under Ronald Reagan,legal safeguards for workers were removed by conservative Supreme Court 'justices' appointed by George H.W. Bush, Reagan's Vice President who later was president.

I've always maintained that there is an ideological unbroken line of succession from Joe McCarthy to the communist-baiting, Imperial Presidency of Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush to finally George W.Bush. There is also a honing of what would become standard operating practice for the GOP of winning elections by way of fear mongering, lying, slandering opponents, war-mongering and sloganeering pushing two-tiered economic class warfare against the poor and styming of sorely needed reform

The GOP's growing dominance during the 1980s and 1990s in national decision making made sure that Ronald Reagan's plans and ideas put us back 30 to 50 years from where we as a country would be and ought to be today in terms of energy independence, health care reform, environmental soundness, global warming, political backlash overseas ageinst US meddling....the list goes on and on of the evil that conservatives, then neo-conservatives have foisted on the country. And the Republicans even had the gall to call those who opposed their malfeasance 'unpatriotic' and managed to turn the American peoples' psyche to buy the now much repeated idea that being 'progressive' amounts to being weak on national defense, a moral pervert, a traitor if not an all out communist and a giant money grabbing tax-and-spender. All of which of course are lies but stuck under the constant repetition of the Reagan and both Bushes. As it turns out, the conservatives actually became the biggest practitioners of all the negatives they tried to pin on the Democrats. The hypocrisy we see today as their hallmark can easily be traced back to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. And these bait-and-switch artists can easily be shown to be ten times guiltier of the so-called "liberal" negatives THEMSELVES, while they point at Barack Obama and the Democrats for "excessive spending". We all know what happened when George W. Bush and the GOP turned the Clinton Surplus into a huge multi-trillion dollar national debt, which they are now trying to blame on Barack Obama.

Right up to the present moment we see the Republicans trying to recycle their same tried-and-failed mantras taken from their same old hackneyed play book as they attempt to derail Barack Obama. They haven't changed a bit except to hone their sneakiness and dirty tricks and get better and better at partnering up with the mainstream media to continue to try to drive wedge issues into the political debate with a drumbeat of falsehoods. 

The GOP's tactics are greatly helped in this, because we no longer have the Fairness Doctrine with which to force the media to be even handed and objective in their treatment of national issues.

The Fairness Doctrine was also removed during the tenure of Ronald Reagan. And you will just be sure to see the Republicans  fight tooth and nail in case it ever came up that the Fairness Doctrine might be re-considered to be restored. The GOP depends on their talking points, which derive from the same Ronald Reagan ideology they always espouse, will be endlessly repeated in nightly newscasts, unchallenged by the "reporters" who appear to every night to repeat GOP talking points while holding Democrats to a different standard of parsing and micro-analysis. Our communities have lost their local independente reporting and our nation has been subjected to nothing less than propaganda and brainwashing of the public. So the GOP, the heirs of Ronald Reagan's reactionary policies, will see to it that Fairness is never restored if they can help it. I hope Obama changes his mind and stops opposing the re-instituting of the Fairness Doctrine. As it is said "he who controls the past, controls the future". If the media keep up the lies that Ronald Reagan started, then the GOP will continue to control our national dialog and thus our future.

Reagan was a terrible president. And we are still paying dearly for his toxic ideology.

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I live in the Pacific Northwest and I am interested in current affairs.
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