AMERICA CONTINUES TO BE SUBJECTED to fallacies regarding the supposed accomplishments and success of former President Ronald Reagan. But it is not in America's best interests to revisit those days.

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Now that the Republican Party has lost control of Congress and suffered huge losses in state and local elections this past November, politicians of the right are clamoring to be more like former President Ronald Reagan while running from President George W. Bush, whom they blame for engineering their losses.

Those who have declared or are apparently on the verge of running for president in 2008 are the most obvious in their love of all things Reagan.

At the recent Conservative Political Action Conference Rudy Giuliani, the new front runner for the Republican presidential nomination, ranted on about his admiration for Reagan, Reagan's legacy and Reagan's vision to fight the spread of communism.

The Republican Party "must return to the common sense Republican ideals of fighting for hardworking Americans," said Mitt Romney, the retired Massachusetts governor.

Arizona Sen. John McCain says Reagan provided the kind of leadership the GOP needs. "We can do it again if we lead and inspire as he did," McCain claims. Even age isn't a problem for the 70-year-old McCain who said, "Ronald Reagan wasn't" too old to be president.

And Sam Brownback, the Kansas senator, labels himself "a full-scale Ronald Reagan conservative." On his recent announcement to enter the 2008 race he reiterated his love for all things Reagan.

At the Republican debate Thursday night at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., the 2008 hopefuls literally gushed over Reagan, calling his name 19 times in the 90-minute debate. "Ronald Reagan was a president of strength," Romney opined. "Ronald Reagan used to say, we spend money like a drunken sailor," said McCain. Former New York City Mayor Giuliani praised "that Ronald Reagan optimism."

As the campaigning heats up, expect repeated love for Reagan, repeated praise of his greatness and genius, repeated fawning over his memory. Expect Reagan, Reagan, Reagan ad infinitum over the next 18 months.

But, can the nation afford another Reagan, whose presidency set the nation on the disastrous course now followed by Bush, the president numerous Republicans cut and run from daily?

Examine the true Reagan legacy to see where these men might lead the nation should any of them succeed to the presidency.

Reagan compiled one of the worst legacies in modern America politics and did nothing to better the United States. Bush only made matters worse while traveling the very path that Reagan laid out.

A list of Reagan "accomplishments" has to include economic disaster, subversion, explosion of crime, misuse of the military, wasted resources, paranoia, and a general anti-democracy and un-America agenda. Those are just his domestic accomplishments. In foreign policy, Reagan left a bloody trail of mass murder and genocide through his support, training and arming of Latin American dictators who slaughtered hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of their people just to keep a few privileged right-wing elites in seats of power and lives of luxury while the majority lived in abject poverty and misery.

Let's start with economic disaster.

Reagan mismanaged the economy so badly that he presided over the worst recession in America since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Unemployment hit 10.8% under Reagan, the highest since 1940 when the world was still in the Depression.

Reagan increased a national debt of less one one trillion dollars ~ much of it refinanced costs from World War II ~ and ran it to more than five trillion with his tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations while increasing military spending. The debt went from 33.5% of the Gross Domestic Product to 75% under Reagan. Poverty, that hit the historic low of 11.4% under Jimmy Carter, rose about 33%. Homelessness exploded and Reagan's deregulation and willingness to look the other way while savings-and-loan executives looted their institutions saddled the nation with a $500 billion bill. Regulations exist to address evils that are present in the system, and when those regulations are removed the evils return, and they returned with a vengeance in the savings-and-loan industry, just as they returned later in deregulation of the electric utility industry. None of this benefited "hardworking Americans," as claimed by Romney.

Right wingers claim (and even the most-trusted man in America, Walter Cronkite, repeated as fact) that Reagan's tax cuts resulted in an explosion of tax receipts because of economic growth. Not true. Tax receipts went up 82 percent in the 12 years of the Reagan-George H. W. Bush regime; but they increased 177 percent in the 12 years preceding the Reagan-Bush rule. During the Reagan-Bush years, population increased 12 percent and inflation increased 70 percent ~ 12 plus 70 equals 82. That means there was not a cent of increased tax collection generated because of the Reagan tax cuts. But, the rich and corporations paid billions of dollars less in taxes, and that had to be made up with tax increases on working-class Americans. The payroll tax was increased dramatically ~ with its surpluses used to camouflage the Reagan-inflated deficit ~ and many deductions historically available to middle-class consumers were eliminated. Those tax increases on working Americans were not "fighting for hardworking Americans", as Romney claimed, they were the beginning of the class warfare being waged by the elite on the lower classes. And placing hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars into the economy, then immediately taxing them also helped increase tax receipts.

Reagan began his reign of thoughtlessness with his first budget proposal to Congress by killing tax deductions and credits for alternative fuels. The tax provisions were implemented following the oil embargoes of the 1970s and were aimed at getting the nation off its dependence on imported oil. Reagan's action left the US thirsting for foreign oil, which led to the first Gulf War when Iraq attempted to gain control of Kuwait's oil reserves. That invasion prompted Reagan's successor, President George H. W. Bush, to form a coalition of nations under a United Nations mandate to oust Iraq, but Bush's reluctance to finish off the dictatorship of Iraq's Saddam Hussein required the US to leave US military forces in Saudi Arabia to protect other Arab nations from Iraq. Those US troops in Islam's "Holy Land" were all the excuse Osama bin Laden needed to stage the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon at Arlington, Virginia. That, in turn, led the US into wars against Afghanistan, which protected bin Laden, and a second war with Iraq for still-unadequately explained reasons.

Reagan abandoning the search for alternative fuels also is a major factor in increasing global warming that America is only now waking up to address, despite repeated warmings over several years from a few politicians and concerned scientists.

Reagan, in his anti-communism zeal, armed and trained the fanatics who took over Afghanistan who then sheltered bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network that attacked the United States and murdered Americans in many parts of the world. Reagan sent arms and toxic chemicals to Iraq, then remained silent when Hussein used them to murder thousands of his own people.

Reagan subverted the United States Constitution several ways during his Iran-contra scandal. Article IV, Section 3, says Congress decides by law how to dispose of US property. Reagan's regime stole weaponry worth hundreds of million of dollars to sell to the rogue nation of Iran. That's subversion No. 1. The Constitution says government money can be spent only under authority of law and any spending must be published in a journal and made public. Reagan spent the money without authority of law (subversion No. 2) by sending it to Nicaragua in an attempt to return that nation to the rule of henchmen from the Somoza dictatorship that ruled for years by imprisonment, torture and murder. Subversion No. 3 was not publishing the transactions. Subversion No. 4 was keeping that transfer of money secret.

Reagan then made speeches from his office denying that the Iran-contra episode ever happened. He did this while under a constitutional oath to "... faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States, and will to ... preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." This lying under constitutional oath makes President Bill Clinton's denying a sexual relationship with a competent adult ~ under a lower-court oath ~ pale in comparison because the Constitution is the "supreme Law of the Land"; a deposition under a minor court's authority is much lower in stature.

Reagan befriended and armed foreign fascists around the globe, especially the right-wing death squads that terrorized Latin America for years, murdering peasants whose only "crimes" often were trying to crawl from under the oppressive jackboots of despots or wishing to share in a nation's wealth that they helped create and which elite right-wingers controlled for only themselves. He supported such genocide under the guise of fighting communism even though the despots he supported were worse than any communist regime. Many of us who worked in US intelligence defending this nation from communism for years knew those Latin American fascists weren't fighting communism, they were fighting progress, fairness and, usually, democracy. Reagan downplayed, ignored or denied these mass murders and never explained how children and infants were communists or how murdering them contributed to his anti-communism crusade. The right-wing mind can't understand how Reagan's horrors helped create the anti-US movement now engulfing Latin America. And keeping the wealth of Latin American nations in the hands of the privileged few while excluding the majority of the population is a key component of why the United States today has a major problem with illegal immigrants from Latin America.

Reagan created anti-America "citizens militia" with his version on "homeland security," a neighborhood watch initiative. The hatred those "militia" held for America's constitutional principles ~ possibly formed by listening to Reagan spew disdain for the US government he headed ~ emboldened registered Republican Timothy McVeigh to bomb the federal building in Oklahoma City killing 168 Americans in a fit over the death of religious fanatics in Waco, Texas, who ambushed and killed four US agents because they couldn't understand basic biblical principles.

Crime exploded under Reagan, most noticeably in his administration. There were 123 federal officials indicted on criminal charges the year before Reagan took office. Thereafter, a steady fivefold increase of indictments occurred, ending with 629 in 1988. In the same time period, indictments of local politicians increased from 247 to 276 and state officials indicted fell from 72 to 66. This wave of administration crime occurred after the "law-and-order" Reagan fired thousands of "hardworking American" air-traffic controllers for striking illegally. Inmates in the nation's prisons tripled during the Reagan years.

Reagan misused the military in Lebanon and Grenada by employing them there for combat without congressional approval nor any treaty obligations.

Reagan wasted billions of dollars on his Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars), a folly reputable scientists say will never work but did enrich his friends in firms doing defense contracting.

Reagan ignored the AIDs epidemic that cost thousands of Americans their lives when research into diseases of the immune system could lead to remedies for many divergent illnesses.

Reagan's paranoia about "pornography" gave rise to a situation in which parents are afraid to photograph a nude infant on a bearskin rug.

Reagan opened the government door to the religious right, with Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition leading the way in determining much public policy, except in those areas in which corporations called the shots.

Reagan's contribution to the so-called "war on drugs" was his "zero tolerance" policy of confiscating property without any form of conviction or even an indictment. That led many innocent people to lose homes, vehicles, boats because of the actions of others and which hadn't benefited the person whose property was taken and who knew nothing of drug activity.

Reagan named Antonin Scalia to the US Supreme Court where he has screamed loud and often against the fundamental freedoms the United States Constitution promises to protect. Scalia may be the most-anticonstitutional judge of all time, with his crowning achievement being leader of the cabal that appointed the intellectually impaired George W. Bush to the presidency

The age of Reagan evidently was a contributing factor to his dismal record, for he was exhibiting signs throughout his administration of being mentally damaged by the alzheimer's disease that eventually took his life.

It must be remembered that Reagan kicked off his quest for the presidency in Philadelphia, Miss., infamous as the site of the murder of three civil-rights ativists in the 1960s, thereby delivering a backhanded blow to the constitutional rights of equality the civil-rights struggle was all about. While president, he visited the graveyard of Nazi soldiers in Germany, citing their sacrifices in World War II.

In February, a Gallup poll found Reagan second as the public's idea of the greatest U.S. president ever, trailing only Abraham Lincoln. John F. Kennedy edged Bill Clinton for the third spot, with Franklin D. Roosevelt coming in at number five. George Washington did no better than sixth.

That followed a January survey of Americans that considered Reagan the nation's greatest president and pined for his leadership in these times of peril. Respondents in the nationwide poll said they preferred Reagan's qualities of "far-sighted vision" and "who persevered despite harsh criticism from enemies and was firm in pursuing his agenda." Apparently the 28 percent of the respondents who wanted a Reagan replication were unfamiliar with his true record or agenda. Nor did they remember that he went into office with a Republican Senate, which he kept for the six years in which he did the most damage to the nation, and a conservative House controlled mostly by Southern right-wing Democrats who eventually became Republicans, so had few enemies in power to oppose or criticize him.

About the only bona fide accomplishment by Reagan was to put a warm-and-fuzzy facade on evil, and it should be obvious to anyone that Reagan did nothing to benefit this nation and much to harm it, and we should never pine to relive such failures and national damage.

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Authors Bio:
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Thomas Bonsell is a former newspaper editor (in Oregon, New York and Colorado) United States Air Force cryptanalyst and National Security Agency intelligence agent. He became one of American journalism's leading constitutional experts through years of study at Georgetown University Graduate School of Government in Washington, D.C., and tries (without much success) to be patient with people who argue endlessly on subjects they have never studied. He is the author of "The Un-Americans: Trashing of the United States Constitution in the American Press", a critique of the mainstream media for ignorance of, or disdain for, our constitutional principles of self-government. He left newspaper work years ago, disgusted at the direction the Fourth Estate ~ under the mismanagement of ineffectual, out-of-touch, can't-do executives ~ was taking away from honest responsible journalism and the observation that there was no place in the mainstream media for a progressive, or liberal, constitutional "expert". Bonsell is an honors graduate of Woodbury College (Los Angeles, California) with a bachelor of business administration degree. He is profiled in Marquis Who's Who in America. (Self-portrait, above, was handled to make author/artist appear prettier than he actually is.)

Personal motto: Have brain; will use.