Tuesday, February 15, 2011

How the right is rewriting the Reagan legacy (Tear Down This Myth!)

Last Sunday marked Ronald Reagan’s 100th b-day and we once again heard the myths about his legacy. The reality is that Reagan’s legacy is far different than what so often gets repeated and were he alive today he probably couldn’t be elected as a conservative Republican.

(If you are a Reagan loving Republican Tea Partier reading beyond this line could blow your mind.)

This article describes “when Reagan was (much) less popular than Carter” and “how the Gipper was transformed into a conservative demigod”. It seems the further we get away from the Reagan years the easier it is to forget what he actually did while he was in office in the United States of Amnesia.

As I described in this article most other modern Republican Presidents (with maybe the exception for Bush I and II) would be considered far too liberal for today’s GOP which has moved to the extreme right. (Heck, Reagan was probably even more liberal than some Blue Dog Democrats.)

As one caller recently explained about Reagan to Rush Limbaugh before being muted, "He's a tax-raiser, an amnesty-giver, a cut-and-runner, and he negotiated with terrorists," Stark continued. "Why is he a hero to conservatives?"

As Cenk Uygur pointed out on MSNBC, Reagan raised taxes 11 times as President and as Governor of California he signed into law the greatest tax increase in the history of any state. He nearly tripled the Federal Budget Deficit. During his administration the debt increased to nearly $3 trillion.

It should be noted that the Republicans undermined the President of the United States of America and the US government by negotiating with terrorists during the infamous October Surprise which is widely believed to be the reason Reagan beat Carter. He secretly and illegally traded arms for hostages with Iran during the Iran Contra Affair. In 1984 Reagan “cut and run” out of Lebanon. He had deployed an American “peace keeping force” in Beirut but withdrew US troops after 241 servicemen were killed in a bombing ordered by Hezbollah during the Cold War.

You’ve probably heard things like “Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot”. But in realty Reagan supported brutal dictators around the world, funded and trained drug running death squads in Latin America and he certainly doesn’t deserve all of the credit for the end of the Cold War. Most Americans at the time gave most of the credit to Gorbachev.

I quote in "Tear Down This Myth" a USA Today poll that was taken after the Berlin Wall collapsed (in October 1989) and a majority of Americans credited Gorbachev and only 14 percent credited Reagan.


Reagan helped to start the Taliban by funding Osama Bin Laden and his Muhajadeen to fight the Soviets-who were also dumb enough to invade Afghanistan which needless to say didn’t work out so well for them either. (Can you say blow back?) Of course he had bipartisan support for those things. Imagine this, he worked with Democrats and was known for making compromises. How is that the model Tea Party Republican?

Reagan helped Saddam Hussein get WMD’s and turned a blind eye when he would use them. His use of WMD’s would be used as justification for the $3 trillion Iraq war which was based on lies.

Reagan supported “States rights” and he vetoed the Anti-Apartheid Act. He strongly support South Africa’s Apartheid regime.

Desmond Tu Tu denounced Reagan for his racism. Reagan consolidated and fulfilled the racist Southern Strategy.

Reagan did so by beginning his general election campaign in 1980 in Neshoba County, Miss., where white supremacists had recently fire-bombed a black church and had earlier murdered three Northern civil rights activists, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney. In a thinly disguised appeal to white Southern racism, Reagan declared, "I believe in states' rights."


In this sense his values were right in line with the Tea Party Republicans. Reagan was the favorite candidate of the John Birch society. The group was considered fringe in those days, but now the extreme right has merged with mainstream conservatism.

Reagan believed he had seen a UFO and he often talked about extraterrestrial life visiting Earth. He dedicated lots of funding for SDI or Star Wars which never worked while ignoring the AIDS epidemic that was killing tens of thousands of Americans every year. AIDs has claimed many lives, but not one extraterrstrial has attacked yet.

Reagan hated public education saying, “Education isn’t a right, it’s a privilege”. Though he started out as a union boss he waged war on unions. He had the solar panels that Carter had placed on the roof removed and killed the investment in solar that Carter had championed. Carter was right and Reagan was wrong so now we lag behind countries like Germany that still have a lot of manufacturing jobs.

As this article describes there was a dark under belly to Reagan’s sunny optimism. "It wasn't all patriotic homilies: Just ask the "welfare queens," "radicals" and "filthy speech advocates".

Reagan gave amnesty to 3 million undocumented immigrants. How would that fly today?

Reagan’s own budget director sets the record straight.

The Reagan Revolution was a Lincoln Day Dinner speech. It never happened in the real world of fiscal policy. During the 1980's, Big Government got bigger and the Federal tax burden was just shuffled, not reduced. The main fiscal legacy of the Reagan era is that the Federal debt was raised from $1 trillion to $3 trillion. Unfortunately, when the economy rebounded after Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker's conquest of runaway inflation, Republicans embraced the dangerous shibboleth that deficit-financed tax cuts are good for growth.


Reagan’s real legacy is much different than the narrative Republicans are pushing. Flag waving Americans can only claim America’s past is so great by rewriting our history. If we went back to the original intent of the constitution our country would be a lot less free and democratic. We can’t understand where we really are as a nation until we get real about America’s past.

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