So YOU are one of the ones who voted for Bush!

You should be ashamed of yourself.

Why do you hate America?

I could go on for hours, but why waste the effort on those who embrace treason.

CHEERS!

of course this sounds natural from a liberal but I have been asking myself for years who is it this person they are talking about because it is not the Reagan I remember.

I remember a very loose managerian style which to me indicated lack of either interest or ability from an actor who I remember looked good on a horse in the movies but wasn't much of a actor.

The pleasant wrinkled man he became was in the beginning stages of alzheimers which I realize now were responsible for that "laid back" managerial style. As for his actual abilities to govern this country I still think he was at his best sitting on horse in the movies.

I'm so glad that someone agrees with me. I can finally stop wondering why he was idolized by so many.

but then the MANY elected George W Bush TWICE. ignorance is bliss.

During the years when Reagan was most afflicted with Alzheimer's I held my tongue, so to speak, out of sympathy for him and his family. But then came his death, and the outrage I felt during all the years of his presidency was only trebled by the disgusting right-wing party that was his funeral. As Reagan did not die while in office, he deserved none of the honors bestowed upon him: the slow march down Pennsylvania Avenue, the cortege and cayson, lying in state. His funeral was a moral and political outrage (there's that word again).

Someone way up-thread suggested a book to read. I'd like to suggest two more: Sleepwalking Through History by Haynes Johnson, and The Worst Years of Our Lives by Barbara Ehrenreich. The former tome is explicitly about Reagan, his political rise going back to the 60s, the cabal of reactionary businessmen behind him, all the way through to the day of his inauguration. It proves definitively that the Reagan Revolution was precisely that - a right-wing, reactionary revolution to reverse the paltry gains made for average Americans by unions, the New Deal and the Great Society. The latter is more a socio-political, -economic and -cultural examination of the 1980s in general, but Ehrenreich makes a strong case that Reagan's malign influence had a powerful effect on that odious decade.

This latest book by Will Bunch is EXTREMELY important and necessary, and should be required reading for every freshman Congressperson for this point forward.

Amurican Oz

An optical illusion

A fool's new found mirage

A Walt Wizneyland

Full 'o Bonzo chimps

And goofy 'ol Gippers

Tap three times

The heels

Of your little

Ruby red slippers....

I thought of another place for Mount Clownmore with W's, Reagan's, and Cheney's images carved there. How about one of those mountains with the tops blown off to get at coal? Dyn-o-mite!

Although I was only in my late teens when Reagan was elected the first time, I feared what the man meant to our country. I saw him as false optimist about to take us backward to a time that never really existed, a time when Americans did not have to worry about the pressing issues of the future...the so-called "shining light on the hill." And we bought into it. What followed: financial deregulation, corporate power and malfeasance run amok, environmental degradation, petroleum gluttony, conspicuous consumption, greed is good, massive debt, creepy arms deals,the rise of Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing propagandists, union-busting, a Republican majority... And a political shift that eventually brought us 8 miserable years of Cheney and W. the Bamboozler.

One of the things that the Reagan worshippers want is for his face to be carved onto Mount Rushmore. I'd like to suggest a compromise: How about "Mount Clownmore" at say, Haliburton headquarters? Reagan and George W. Bush could be side by side, with Cheney glowering from behind.

I have lived

in the age of,

Ronald Reagan, Actor

&

Ronald Reagan, President.

He was mediocre

at both.

Thanks for this report. It gives me a chance to add an often overlooked outcome of the Reagan years. Reagan and his policies created a national de facto policy of homelessness as normal. This in part was achieved by eliminating funding for perhaps the most powerless of our citizens, the indigent mentally ill, who now either reside on our streets or in our prisons.

There is something deeply shameful in the nation's acceptance of this de facto policy, and as a nurse I have never fully recovered from watching this horror unfold. As a nurse educator, instead of teaching our students in hospitals, we shifted to teaching in homeless shelters because that was where the patients were.

The indigent mentally ill have no real advocacy groups to tell their story. Instead, we have all become accustomed to one or another shameful personal adaptation to dealing with the seriously mentally ill who we find on our paths in any given day in any given city in the US.

My first reaction is that this loser is a homeless person. But then I remember that somehow or another he got "published" on Salon. Reagan was one of our greatest presidents, even Obama can grasp that. Who is the audience for infantile garbage like this?

I find it amusing when people are still crediting Reagan as having destroyed communist leadership in the former U.S.S.R. I do not know why Hitler's contribution has been overlooked. His invassion killed an estimated 28 million Soviet citizens; destroyed over 42,000 cities and towns and devestated most of that nation's infra-structure such as railroads, bridges and roads. This destruction plus operating under a difficult, impossible economic system accomplished Churchill's goals head had initiatated in the 1920s. In fact, Hitler had essentially fulfilled the role Churchill had originally undertaken in the '20s when he enlisted and aided Poland's Marshal Pilsudski to fight the Bolsheviks. That effort eventually failed because the left-wing longshoremen's union in Britain fefused to load war supplies to Poland. Nikita Khruscheve, when visiting the U.K. many years later, gave a belated "Thank you" to the union for their actions taken decades before. Steve, World War 2