Letters to the Editor
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Electro Robot
She did! Old Nancy gave that old wicked head of the living dead. She could suck a golf ball through a garden hose.
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Reagan was not even President when the wall came down
The great orator was already in his impaired mental state when the wall came down.
President George W H Bush was President was in office when the USSR fell, not Reagan. The Republicans can't even get their lies straight. And, the USSR crumbled from within, not because of anything any of our Presidents did.
Reagan was a blow hard. He wrecked unions, started the privatization of government agencies and threw people in health care facilities on the street, many of whom eventually wound up in (now private) prisons. He said there was no recession, he looked at a LA newspaper and said as long as there was want ads, people could find work. Of course, his military moves are legendary to anyone who really remembers the era.
He skipped WWII so he could play brave soldier in the movies. He was a fake hero. He acted brave, and acted cocky. He was pure phony and as brave as a rich man surrounded by body guards. And remember Nancy telling him what to say?
Reagan was also a true racist. Check out where he started his campaign. Check out what he did to women's rights. Personally, I hope history reflects the truth: Reagan started the downward spiral that eventually spawned the evil of George W. Bush. Let's hope it stops there.
What I find amazing is that I have had to explain this to young DEMOCRATS today. They have been taught Reagan was a god that saved us from the evil by Jimmy Carter. Even our history is already lying.
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Wilentz
Send me a comlimentary copy of your book, I'm running low on toilet paper.
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Not so sucky?
Let us not forget that the machinations of our government during the cold war gave rise (and aid and comfort) to the to the very terrorist groups who actually did attack us on 9/11. There is Reagan's real legacy. So that era of fear- the cold war- helped the republicans write their play book for manipulation making George Bush (junior) his natural heir.
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You're just adding to the denial... (Raygun sucked completely)
Ronnie Raygun created the denial mentality that Rove et al. have spun into complete form. This is dissolving our middle class, and under Bush has permanently destroyed our country's status - ethical and economic. Faced with an obvious fact, we'll just Deny It! Deny It! Life is much easier with Denial! (This needs a nice happy song to be set to...)
If you think no one else has had culture-changing ideas in our history, you must be from another planet... Raygun's Planet...
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That great sucking sound
That the Washington Post writers and other opponents kept silent at his funeral is a mark of their civility, rather than approval. We have a tradition of speaking kindly of the newly deceased. I have had to write many an obituary where many people were glad the person died, but wouldn't say so publicly. This I think is to the good generally. But don't mistake good manners for anything but that. Reagan may have been a profound influence but it was to the detriment of our country and world.
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Hey, he's a hero if you forget about all the negative and non-factual stuff, okay?
Isn't it the conventional wisdom that everybody deserves a hero? And haven't Karl Rove and the GOP created a campaign to ensure that every county in the United States has something named after Ronald Reagan?
With all of the various public institutions named after liberal icons JFK, RFK and MLK, the right wing has long been struck with the political version of hero envy and has created a propaganda campaign to try to promote their interests. What seems to pass as objectivity in this era of corporate-controlled mainstream media is the practice of representing an opposing view whether it is factual or not. The actual result is that creationism is put on an equal footing with evolution, petroleum company-sponsored pseudoscience is considered as equivalent to the overwhelming opinion of established scientists, and Ronald Reagan is put on the same level as FDR, Truman, and JFK.
Was Reagan influential? Absolutely. Did tax breaks for the wealthy generate an economic boom? Did trickle down ever work? What are the facts? Will the Reagan monuments memorialize The Great Communicator's ability to lie with impunity (aka spin the truth for political gain, or it's not really a lie if you believe it) and not have it tarnish him? Isn't that what Teflon is? A no-stick coating? And why doesn't it stick?
Reagan's dismantling of the liberal welfare state and demonization of the public interest has found its culmination in the imperial presidency of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. It'll probably take the rest of our lifetimes to undo the damage of Reagan's legacy which includes a military/industrial/prison complex that President Eisenhower foresaw and warned against, and the steady erosion of a common good that isn't totally yoked to the self-serving interests of the wealthiest Americans.
Conservatives like to blather about political correctness, and yes, we liberals have become self conscious, silly even, about never saying anything offensive to anyone, but if we examine our public discourse, there's a vast and underlying political correctness of a different sort, a homogeneity that doesn't allow the uttering of anything substantial to challenge the status-quo by branding it as treason or by marginalizing its spokespersons. And this too, is the legacy of Ronald Reagan.
Which of course, begs the question, how long will it take someone to write a book that says George W. Bush didn't completely suck?
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Ray-gun, Tool for Fools
the ray-gun 'revolution' (and it was revolting) was thirty years in the making. A New Deal Democrat, ronnie's moment of revelation came when he started to get rich. The gubmint was taking his money. A low-grade intellect and a B grade actor, he became a shill for corporate America, on tee vee (Death Valley Days, others) and on the business hooker circuit, where he honed his single minded message that Washington was the enemy. He became a fascist out of greed, period. His so call Kitchen Cabinet, a group of proto-neocons in Southern California, hand picked him and groomed him to run for governor. He was perfect for them: shallow, dim, but a great reader of lines and an obedient servant. He never had an original idea in his life. He won the governorship of California running against anti-war activists and welfare mothers: you know, hippies and coons. It's the same gospel the fascist base preaches today. He was programmed, sent out with sound bites on 3x5 cards, and his shit eating grin. the lunchbucket, "hard working white american" vote that Hillary prides herself on was the Ray-gun base- and I do mean base. He ran up more deficit than all his presidential predecessors put together. A whore moaning about big gubmint made it much bigger, and never met a weapons system he wouldn't support. He was an affable tool, a willing conscript in the conversion to the military industrial complex we have been strangled by today. His last years were not deserved. No one merits Alzheimer's. I pity him, and Nancy, that. the rest of his career deserves to be mocked and scorned. The demise of America started with his nesting in the White House.