For goodness sake, change the name back. Nobody around here uses it anyway. Let him keep the monstrosity on 14th Street. It fits, somehow.

Just remembering the sycophantic gushings of various talking heads and assorted political types during Reagan's funeral makes me a little ill.

The Hugh Beaumont experience?

When the final history of the United States is written, Ronald Reagan will go down as the man who started our economic and moral downfall. Running up enormous debt in order to increase the size of the military and commit atrocities around the world could (and I hope it's not) be seen as the beginning of the end, with GW Bush the guy who pushed us over the edge. Reagan was a disaster.

On another note, there's this: his father, a Polaroid executive who raised Norquist in the Boston suburbs, taught his young son to hate taxes at the Daily Joy ice-cream parlor by taking the first two licks of his son’s cone and calling it the income and sales tax.

The man's father raised him to be an idiot. If you were offered an ice cream with 2 licks out of it or no ice cream at all, which would you prefer? Any sane person would say the former is the better option. The anarchists on the right would say the latter. And make no mistake, that's what it is when you literally want no government as Norquist so publicly has stated. He and his disciples are anarchists, who would prefer no government so only the elite can have any control at all.

They loathe us. You and me. They hate us and they hate the government because government gives us power they think should rightfully belong to them. And this is another Reagan legacy. His movement mainstreamed the idea of utter anarchy.

That should be the first sign right there that they are insane. I remember the attempts to rename National, I was just out of high school at the time and even then, with my limited knowledge of politics, I thought it was stupid. Now I think it is even more stupid! The most disturbing aspect about all this was that the media really isn't to blame for this one. They treated it the way they probably should have: as a silly publicity stunt. Yet despite that, the legacy monster continued to the point where they finally caught up until his funeral became a gush fest. Of course the Alzhiemers probably created an abundance of sympathy.

I was a child during the Reagan years so I don't really remember his policies but just the idea of some backdoor campaign to whitewash over someones legacy makes me mad. Maybe he deserves credit maybe he doesn't, that isn't the point. Some group should not be trying to glorify someones accomplishments in hopes of projecting thier own agenda. That is clearly what this "Reagan Legacy" nonsense is all about. Suppose someone comes along 20 years from now and tries to pull the same stunt with Bush? I for one intend to stand in the way of that project. Or at the very least, make sure the world knows the other side of his "legacy".

... I highly recommend Paul Slansky's funny, irreverent, and completely true (and sadly, long-out-of print) 1989 book The Clothes Have No Emperor.

Fortunately, it's a trade paperback, and tends to be affordable when copies turn up. I reread it about once a year for both laughs and a renewed resolve not to let such things happen again.

Had more people read it, we might have been spared 8 years of Dubya.

It just might be the best book ever written. Someone should send a copy to Grover Norquist.

I loathe the fact that National Airport was named after Reagan. (My father, a conservative, was very much against it as well -- he felt the main airport of the nation's capital shouldn't be named for anyone.) However, I thought the post 9/11 flight rule that you couldn't get out of your seat for thirty minutes before arriving or after departing was very apt:

You had to sit and wait half an hour before you could take a crap.

I'm sure Reagan came up with many of his policies under the same conditions.

is the "Ronald Reagan" UCLA Medical Center. Absurdly named after the simpleton who damned near destroyed the entire UC system in the name of his moronic ideology.

His ill-conceived and hugely corrupt chickens have now come home to roast, and we as a country are ruined. All hail the amiable dunce....

The most aggravating myth, that is constantly repeated, is that Reagan won the Cold War. Being there at the end, doesn't mean you get to take credit for the work of your predecessors. The President who won the Cold War was Harry Truman. It was his policies of economic and military containment, that put the slow suffocating death grip upon the Soviet Union. His policies were continued by both republican and democratic presidents. Because Reagan was there at the end, the republicans say he won it. No he merely helped. Also if it was the invasion of Afghanistan that bankrupted the Soviet Union, that wasn't Reagan either. It was Jimmy Carter that tricked the Soviets into invading Afghanistan in the first place. It was Jimmy Carter's funding of the Afghanistan resistance that led to the Soviet invasion. Reagan was most likely the worst president to ever serve this nation, second only to W. It took almost 30 years, but the consequences of Reaganomics has finally caught up with us. The mantra of deregulate, free market absolutism has laid our economy bare.

Hey, think about it. They can never find my luggage when I land there, and by the end of his life, Reagan couldn't find his either.

Cruel? Not as cruel as Reagan giving funds to the right-wing death squads in El Salvador or helping 3rd world dictators 'disappear' dissidents or letting his wife start a phony war on drugs so she could have a better photo-op than feeding the homeless wearing Oscar de la Renta.

Reagan a myth? You betcha!