Every time I mention a dissident Republican, it seems like the Reagan divide reappears. The dissident Republicans cite how much they loved Reagan, and immediately, there is a visceral anti-Reagan outlash in the comments. Most recently, the post last night about Mickey Edwards brought out the similar rage:
edwards’ bit about CPAC and ‘conservatism’ would have been much better had he not included the gratuitous fluffing of reagan’s corpse.
I think Democrats should realize that anyone coming to their party from the GOP who is over the age of 30 probably still has a warm spot for Reagan. I know I do. I still have my “peace through strength” buttons. I still recall all the stories about Reagan and Tip O’Neill. He was a charismatic guy, and for a lot of people like me, even though we know his policies may not have worked out for the best in the long term in every situation and in some cases were criminal, we still have a fondness for him. Sue me.
More importantly, it is worthwhile to examine how much worse the current GOP is. Reagan may have been a lot of things, but I never perceived him as a hater. Yes, he pandered to the Base elements of the base, but all Republicans have to in order to get elected. Put it this way- which would you take- any one of the potential Republican nominees in 2012, or Reagan?
I know what my choice is…
JenJen
For me, it doesn’t bother me when conservatives profess their Reagan-lurve. What bothers me is how they seem to forget this other President, this guy named George W. Bush. It’s as if he’s been disappeared. The Reagan stuff just sounds so hypocritical to me, since it’s painfully obvious that Reagan wasn’t the last Republican President. We’ve had two miserable Bushes since.
Maybe that’s my problem, and maybe I’m reading too much into it, but whenever I hear some Republican tell me about the Great Ronald Reagan, I just feel like they want us to remember him, and not anything that happened after 1988. And I’m no Reagan fan to begin with, but I loved Bill Clinton and so I can understand part of it, but not the utter irrelevance of talking about Reagan still.
Dave Fud
Presidential Deathmatch! Reagan vs. Obama!
It would be interesting, if cartoonish.
BTD
I think the real Mitt Romney would be preferable to Reagan.
But you’re not going to get the real Mitt Romney so your point is taken.
Zam
You also have lavender scented candles if I recall correctly. I’m seriously starting to consider disregarding you altogether.
BTD
BTW, George Herbert Walker Bush was a very good President imo.
Dave Fud
@BTD: For a Republican, maybe.
Corner Stone
…
NobodySpecial
@JenJen:
I could live with H.W. though. He was at least halfway competent at the whole ‘war in other countries’ bit, which puts him three or four light years ahead of his kid. Plus he avoided losing whole cities to standing water.
Woodbuster
Personally, I loathe Reagan and always have. But, hey, you are right. I would take that son of a bitch over anybody the Republicans are pimping out right now. Including Mitt Romney, in whatever edition we are talking about.
Warren Terra
John, the fondness people have for Reagan’s avuncular charisma despite the awfulness of his policies, the lies of his politics, and the criminality of the thugs around him is precisely what scares me.
Fergus Wooster
As a political tactic, I agree with you – it is not helpful in winning over moderates to our side by bashing Reagan, much as Eisenhower Republicans were too smart to bash FDR.
However, when among friends, I can’t forget a) he should have been impeached over Iran-Contra, b) ketchup is a vegetable, c) young bucks buying a T-bone with food stamps, d) that whole Central American genocide thing. . .
There was a great deal of meanness and some homicidal pathology behind that warm smile. A lot of us can’t forget that.
Darius
That’s it right there. Reagan was, for all his faults, a generally positive guy. (Much like Obama.) The current GOP, by contrast, is an angry, spluttering, incoherent mess.
Keith
I don’t think it’s Reagan people dislike so much rather than the modern GOP’s mythical Reagan that is so disliked. They’ve shaped him into this neocon, no-tax absolutist who would have bombed Iran the first time they…well, whatever. The real Reagan and the mythical idealized Reagan of today’s GOP are two separate beasts.
Dave
I’d take GHWB over the lot of them. At least you knew he had a head on his shoulders, even if you didn’t agree with everything he did.
JenJen
@NobodySpecial: The first campaign I ever worked on was Dukakis, and I was still basically a kid, so I never really got over Poppy Bush beating him so badly. That might have a lot to do with why I’m not a Bush fan from the get-go, and immediately rejected his idiot son.
Poppy was an OK President, though. Nothing really stands out from those four years. In fact, every time I think of Poppy, I think of Dana Carvey. And that fall from the Gulf War high to the ’92 election was just stunning to watch.
@Keith: This.
J.W. Hamner
I think most liberals just can’t stand the mythology that the GOP has erected around the man. I mean, here is the guy who originated deficit spending and yet he’s hailed as a fiscal conservative because it doesn’t count because there were commies involved.
BTD
@Dave Fud:
Bush 41 reversed the overturning by the SCOTUS of important Civil Rights Act provisions, raised taxes to bring the budget closer to balance, built a true coalition for Desert Storm, did not topple Saddam, named David Souter to the SCOTUS.
That’s a lot of achievement for any PRez, Dem or GOP.
The stain on his Presidency is Clarence Thomas.
dr. bloor
I won’t sue you, Cole, but I strongly suggest you think about psychotherapy to snuff out your persisting warm spot for the man. He was just as willing as the gangsters in the previous administration to shred the Constitution when it served his purposes, and the fact that he delivered his welfare-queen bullshit with a warm smile doesn’t make it any less immoral.
On a more personal note–and from the above, you may have guessed that there was one–I will always hold his refusal to acknowledge AIDS as the crisis that it was as partially contributing to my brother’s ultimate and premature death in the early nineties. He was a fucking monster, nothing less.
Mike E
Bill Clinton was the best Republican president we ever had.
I voted for Mondale in my 1st pres election knowing full-well he was going to get crushed–that’s what a real Democrat does, instead of all the hemming/hawing/hedging that goes on these days. Fuck Reagan– he was good for the country like a near-death experience makes one re-assess one’s life in a positive way.
Eric U.
at the time, I thought he was going to bring in a police state and then end it all because the voices told him to. In retrospect, he doesn’t look that bad, but that bar was set pretty low. He ran a criminal administration; corrupt and unwilling to follow the law. Bush wiped out Reagan’s sins and even made Nixon look like a hyper-intelligent saint. He even made Reagan look intelligent. I’m guessing that the 30 indictments against people in the Reagan administration simply wouldn’t have happened under Bush, they hadn’t yet decided that IOKIYAR trumped the law.
Xenos
Being blind to these nuances on the right, these CPACers seem very Reaganesque to me. The simple-minded rhetoric, the moral narcissim, the contempt for people they disagreed with (often expressed in racist and homophobic insults) seems cut from the same cloth.
Reagan did put a few grownups in his cabinet, and did listen to them enough to keep himself and the country out of serious trouble. But many his other picks were classic modern CPACers. for example:
Anne Gorsuch = the folks running W’s Interior Dept.;
Cap Weinberger = Rummy
Ed Meese = John Ashcroft (Gonzo is without parallel)
Bill Bennett = Bill Bennett
Ron Reagan Jr. seems to be an authentically nice guy, however, so maybe his father was not a complete phony. Maybe he was just 95% phony. Although the good 5% might have been brain damage.
joes527
@Keith: Nope. It was the actual Reagan I hated at the time, and I still hate now.
The only substantive difference between Reagan and Bush/Cheney was a lack of imagination on Reagan’s part. Beyond that, they were cut from the same cloth.
Fuck nostalgia.
Randy P
Not a hater? I’m not sure what he was. At the time I thought of him as a genial idiot. I never understood why people said things like “everybody likes him” because his voice and manner made my skin crawl at a visceral level. But for idiocy rather than any feelings (at the time at least) of outright evil. Not like Cheney for instance.
The kind of stuff that bugged me was his “there you go again” line in the debates with Carter, shrugging off annoying facts with a grin and then being called the “winner”.
But then I read about how he kicked off his campaign in Philadelphia, Miss, notorious from civil rights days. A clear dog-whistle to the worst racists. Which seems to me something a hater would do.
MikeJ
@Fergus Wooster: Exactly. He was an evil fuck, and if there’s a hell I’m sure he’s in it now. I tend to avoid pointing this out to anybody who has come halfway to his or her senses and likes Reagan but not the current crop of Republicans.
Oh, and “peace through strength”? The kind of strength he showed when he made the United States Marine Corps sneak out of Beirut?
neill
I like the way Reagan taught everybody how greed was good, and how his policies dumped a whole lot of people out on the streets who had never been able to take care of themselves, and destroyed the social institutions that were once assisting these folks, and how “the homeless” has been a fairly large default position ever since.
I like the way Reagan re-armed the moral absolutists who just knew America was the saving grace of the world and the USSR and its evil empire was the spawn of Satan. That is so easily transferrable now to Islamists…
I particularly love how immediately Ronald embraced the cause of those who were dying during the AIDS epidemic.
Yep, ol’ Ronnie Rayguns was just the bestest of all the great ones…no fuckin’ doubt…
But there were a few criminal activities during his administration…but, you know…
Good times!
The Grand Panjandrum
I don’t really harbor any ill feelings toward Reagan. Like most Presidents, his detractors want to blame him for all the ills during his terms in office and his worshippers want to give him credit for every good thing that occurred during the same period. Most of the hate is probably just a manifestation of the disgust many of us feel when this worship gets out of hand and not balanced with reality. For me the face of the Reagan administration will always be that vile and disgusting criminal Oliver North.
Tattoosydney
@Fergus Wooster:
e) the HIV/AIDS thing gets him a special place on my hate list…
NobodySpecial
@JenJen:
First political sign I made, I was 9, for old John B. Anderson. 8)
And yeah, I cried election night, I was too young to understand that he never had a chance, because even at 9 I recognized that he cleaned Reagan’s clock at the debate.
H.W. I’ll take because he wasn’t a pushy asshole with no soul like the party has turned into. I also remember Reagan wasn’t thrilled with him, and neither were the party bigwigs, and they certainly weren’t singing his hosannas even to this day.
H.W. is just about my ideal Republican president simply because he didn’t do much, and he got a few of the big questions right when he tried. Too bad his kid couldn’t absorb any lessons from him.
Cat Lady
I never got the Reagan thing – I saw that he was a puppet and a snake oil salesman, with bumper sticker thought bubbles over his mostly empty head. I was a new mother at the time, and the stories about his terrible relationships with his children validated my gut feeling that he had no empathy and no heart, and sealed my contempt for him forever. The day he got elected is one of those painful memories like car accidents and emergency room visits, but knowing that we wouldn’t get better. He was the beginning of the end of this country, Obama notwithstanding.
If we can’t drive a stake through his dead heart once and for all, there’s no hope of ever recovering from his time at the wheel.
Xenos
@Fergus Wooster: You forget opening his campaign with a states’ rights speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Unforgiveable.
A Thousand Faces
Reagan was an abomination in nearly every way imaginable. The fact that you have warm feelings for him is a testament to the power of the neverending hero worship bullshit parade from the right. No president’s record has been so distorted and glossed over. Let’s get it straight. Reagan did not end the cold war. He had virtually nothing to do with it. He was reprehensible on social issues, particularly homosexuality and AIDS. He propelled the Christian right to new heights. Our current financial crisis is a direct descendant of his voodoo economics. His foreign policy was indefinsible and, in fact, criminal. I could go on, but suffice it to say that no other President since Hoover has done more damage to America precisely because, unlike W, people (apparently yourself included) have completely swallowed the lie of his legacy. W was cut from the exact same cloth as Reagan. An incurious man who pushed whatever policy some “expert” gave him that lined up with his “gut.” It’s troubling to often see your winger history peek its head out, and frankly I would rather have many Republicans than Reagan.
Mike Kay
Cole is right, there’s no upside in poking converts as they step aboard a new ship.
that so short sighted. I would rather have Jim Webb representing VA than Macacawitz.
David
The eternal “feud” between the Hatfields and the McCoys could be about the Palins vs. the Reagans. The Hatfields were the dirty, uncouth hunters and the McCoys effeminate farmers (clodhoppers).
Outsiders couldn’t tell them apart.
JenJen
And one more thought on Poppy Bush: The man who put him there was Lee Atwater, and Lee Atwater was a bastard. Poppy’s political team took Nixonian fuckery to its logical conclusion, and the way they operated sickened me. We have Atwater to thank for Rove, and Atwater/Rove/Their Kind to thank for our current, broken political discourse, IMO.
Llelldorin
You’ll never convince any of us who were blue before blue was blue, I’m afraid.
To those of us who were Democrats in the MN+DC days, it was obvious from the very, very beginning what would happen if “voodoo economics” (as the much smarter HW correctly called it at the time) took hold, and one party decided that cutting taxes was guaranteed to raise revenue, and that defense spending should magically not “really” count.
Reagan was also a master of the veiled insult–an outrageous insult couched as humor. If you ignored it, you’d look weak; if you complained about it you’d look like an insufferable boor. Fortunately, the current Republicans can’t master that trick, because they’re utterly humorless.
So go ahead–retain your fondness for the old bastard. Just don’t expect those of us who were trying to save the country from itself 30 years ago not to piss on his grave.
Steerpike
Reagan may have been a lot of things, but I never perceived him as a hater.
Bullshit.
Reagan was every bit as much of a hater as any troglodyte in the current GOP crop. What he was is an actor, who knew how to play the cheerful old avuncular nice-guy. He was also a consummate politician, who knew how to use surrogates to spew the hate and racism, without soiling his own hands. He was also–yes, at the same time–a clueless tool who was manipulated by those same surrogates and by the corporate powers to fatally weaken the regulatory apparatus that kept them in check. We are paying the price for all of this now.
Fergus Wooster
@MikeJ:
But. . . but. . . He invaded Grenada!!!
And let’s not forget “The bombing [of Russia] begins in five minutes.”
The only positive thing I can come up with was his conversion to nuclear arms control and diplomacy with Gorbachev. And that only happened because he watched “The Day After” and got a-scared.
Bobzim
@Keith: Exactly. The hagiography around Reagan now is similar to reading a dime novel about Wyatt Earp in 1890. It’s mostly crap and romance, and they should just put Reagan’s head on Fabio’s body on the cover.
Tone is important, but so is not letting conservatives use the mythology to convince independents that they were at one time what they say they are. They aren’t and have never have.
iLarynx
Reagan or the current GOP crew? Given that slate of options, I know what my choice would be too: NONE OF THE ABOVE!
flounder
If going to Philadelphia Mississippi and paying homage to the way the KKK murdered civil rights workers there isn’t an example of being a hater, then I don’t know what is.
soonergrunt
I don’t know about the others, but I hate him for that very reason. He may not have been a hater personally, but by pandering to the haters, he gave one of the major political parties over to them.
We would not be here today if it weren’t for Reagan.
Mike Kay
Oh-Oh. Tiger invoked the tenets of the Buddhist religion. Heads at fixxed news begin to pop!
Waynski
@John Cole — I think you’re opinion of Reagan may have something to do with age — as you alluded to. I was 13 when Reagan was elected. I was interested in politics, but like all teenagers had other things on my mind. Therefore I didn’t pay much attention to some of the policy aspects, many of which negatively affected me later on (like student aid). But for me he was kind of like the national Grandpa as I was growing up. If you look back, he made some terrible decisions, implemented some awful policies, and, yes, there was a certain amount of meanness to him (he was an old man btw) but there was also pragmatism. He wasn’t afraid to reverse himself (like with taxes), which I think is something today’s Republican jackboot party lacks the courage to do. It may also be about what the Republican party has become. I don’t think Reagan would recognize it.
Phaedrus
You admit that Reagan was a criminal, and that his ideas have proved disastrous in the long term.
But still, you remember him fondly….
And really, compared to Bush, he’s tolerable.
This is the kind of thinking that shakes my liberal “all people should be allowed to vote” ideal.
You can take the Cole out of the wignuts, but you can’t take the wignuts out of the Cole – it’s a way of thinking.
BTD
@JenJen:
Sure.
I am talking about Bush 41 as President, not the campaign he ran to be President.
To be sure, as bad as Bush’s 88 campaign was, Reagan’ s 80 campaign was pure racist.
The 1988 campaign did not invent that type of campaign. In fact, Nixon’s 68 campaign was probably the first modern campaign to be so pervasive with it.
I’m fairly confident that the Presidential campaigns after the end of Reconstruction may have been a tad nasty too.
Not to mention the 1860 and 1864 campaigns.
jayackroyd
The thing about Reagan is that the Reagan the right worships is mythical. They think he lowered taxes, but he raised them. They think he was tough on national security, when in fact he loathed war and also loathed nuclear weapons. They think the wall came down because he made a speech, when in fact the Soviets had hollowed out their economy to the point where they couldn’t hold onto Eastern Europe any longer.
See Will Bunch’s Tear Down This Myth.
BTD
@flounder:
Exactly.
Sentient Puddle
For my money, the Gulf War alone makes him a very notable president in my book. Immediately after the Cold War, America was at a point where it could have easily fumbled around clumsily trying to figure out what a unilateral superpower was supposed to do in the world. Herbert Walker laid down a blueprint for how to go about it, and for better (Gulf War I the obvious high point) or worse (uh…Gulf War II), that is the legacy of our foreign policy.
I could easily do without his social conservatism (“I do not believe atheists are citizens”), but eh, that’s the kind of shit you come to expect from Republicans.
Corner Stone
@Warren Terra:
I generally disapprove of the THIS post but –
THIS.
It’s like saying Ted Bundy was a charming fellow.
MattF
I’m a librul who never understood the Reagan-love… but I can see that it’s a genuine feeling among those who have it.
But, in reality, Reagan’s heritage is very mixed, at best. The obvious example is that the (correct!) notion that you don’t have to be a genius to be a national leader has morphed into the notion that it’s a good thing to be dumb. So, we had GWB, and weren’t allowed to mention that a lot of his failures were due to plain old stupidity. And now, we have Palin, and aren’t allowed to mention that she doesn’t have an actual idea in her head. This sort of thing actually matters, and it’s clearly getting worse.
Fergus Wooster
@Xenos:
Noted. The symbolism of kicking off the campaign in Philly, MS definitely makes the list (coming just behind his admin’s actual murders).
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
If Reagan’s tax policies were teh awesome why was George H.W. Bush saddled with a recession? Also, how many people died of AIDS because of Reagan?
Oh yeah, didn’t Reagan, God of Republicans, prove that deficits don’t matter? Why are we so obsessed with them now?
As a young boy (born ’73), I thought Reagan was the cat’s meow – like every kid does of their grandparents. When Reagan survived the assassination attempt I thought he was Superman. And when Reagan got kicked in the head by his horse, I truly felt awful.
But I was a kid.
Omnes Omnibus
@Llelldorin: This.
JC, you are, of course, welcome to harbor whatever fondness you have for the bastard. You, however, must understand that there are very strong feelings running the other way on this side of the aisle.
Egilsson
Reagan was a fraud and a dog-whistler extraordinaire. He surrounded himself with haters and extremists – and a lot of ordinary criminals too.
It’s too bad all the bad things he did get glossed over now. And what the heck good did he do? The “he won the cold war stuff” is a lie told to children.
GHWB is the one who should get more credit than he does; the vileness of his presidential campaigns notwithstanding.
russell
I’m with Warren Terra’s at 10.
I appreciate what you’re saying here Cole, but the above is just a really weird sentence to read. In particular the “criminal” bit.
former_friend
Reagan set the world’s attitude and agenda toward AIDS.
“I’m seriously starting to consider disregarding you altogether.”
Word.
"Fair and Balanced" Dave
You didn’t live in California when Reagan was Governor. Governor Ronald Reagan was an insufferable prick. Always the actor, he softened his image when he ran for President in 1980.
In addition to the actions already listed, I would add his nominations of Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court. We now know how bad Scalia is as a Justice but Bork would have been Scalia with the crazy cranked up to 11.
vwcat
too many on the left are beginning to see anyone from the right as the enemy and not really think or use insight into where they are coming from.
We are stunned by the right’s reaction to any republican who says something nice about Obama and yet we react the same as the right does all the time.
Someone who embraced Reagan and conservtivism is not the enemy. My father loved Reagan and yet, he also became an indy over a decade ago and he has always been pro-choice.
Many of those who loved Reagan were standard republicans who were not evil.
The really nasty conservatives came out with Atwater and Gingrinch. Before then, republicans called themselves conservative but, were fairly standard issue.
Of course, some of their beliefs went way right but, as a whole….
Many of these Reagan lovers were supporters of McCain in 2000. he is now seen as a Rino.
We, on the left, need to make sure we don’t follow the republicans to crazyland and go over the rails in purity and stubborn refusals to listen openly to others.
I remember the 80s and railed against Reagan. But, I also have seen that compared to what we have today…
Mike Kay
I actually like to see Ronald Reagan Jr. run for office. Reagan could go to the convention and paraphrase his father’s line, “I didn’t leave the Republican party — the Republican party left me!” Oh the joy in seeing the wingers faint.
Kryptik
I think that’s the problem we have with a lot of folks who outright deify Reagan. They remember his charisma and salesmanship but never own up to how downright awful his policies were, not to mention a lot of the tonedeafness of his policy statements. And like others have already noted, remembrance of his policy is even further warped to fit the current, further whacked-out GOP mold (Reagan purity test anyone?). At the very least, you recognize his policies were bad. Many of the folks fellating Reagan’s ‘legacy’ don’t and tend to think they didn’t go far enough.
I’m just sick of the political religion surrounding the man. Give credit to his charisma, but at least recognize that his policy ended up awful and planted the seeds for the clusterfuck we have of a GOP today.
Cackalacka
Point taken about the soft spot, John.
Be advised, many of us have heard of Philadelphia, MS, and many of us have Bonzo Goes to Bitburg on our playlists.
Joey Maloney
If your point is that a several-years-dead body would do less damage to the country as President than any of the current crop of likely GOP nominees, well, I won’t disagree with you. But if that’s your angle, wouldn’t it be lot easier to just get a cardboard standup rather than fuck around with exhumation?
JenJen
@BTD: I imagine you’re right, but for many of us, our politics begin to be shaped in our teen/young adult years, and so Poppy is my touchstone to that. Everything is relative, and while I learned later (from reading the excellent “Nixonland”) that most of what we’re dealing with today originated with Tricky Dick, for me personally, it began with George H. W. Bush.
Even as a young person from the Ohio suburbs, I was able to recognize Atwater’s race-baiting on sight, and I couldn’t believe the people rewarded that. My disillusionment set in early, and then when Clinton was elected and was immediately delegitimized by these same forces, I just turned my back on politics. It wasn’t until impeachment that I started paying attention again, because it seemed like the GOP finally had what they wanted, and were trying to overturn the results of two popular elections. They never “forgave” Clinton for whooping Poppy, and I never forgave them for how they handled it. I never liked Republicans, but that’s the moment where “never liked” turned to absolute loathing.
It’s been a downward spiral ever since. The joy I felt on Election Night 2008 has been replaced by that sinking feeling of 1988, and 1998, and 2004 even more.
(I’m being quite the Negative Norma this afternoon. I’ll snap out of it.)
Steerpike
Nice move, JC, BTW. Set off an obvious flame-war, then refuse to defend yourself. C’mon, John, where’s your rebuttal?
Kryptik
@Mike Kay:
But that wouldn’t work! I mean, remember, he never even really knew his father! Pam Atlas said so!
Michael
I voted for Reagan twice (1980 was my first Presidential election vote), was military for part of his term, and bought into the whole myth. Since I’ve grown up, I have come to realize just how wretched the whole con job was, and how so much of the crap we endure sprang from his time in office. Others will talk at length about the culture of economic status quo magnification, the union busting by design (and subsidy of nonunion foreign auto competitors via Southern states and localities), the dismantlement of infrastructure for private gain, the disdain for minorities, the subsidization of middlemen, the subsidies of proselytization and the erosion of education. I won’t bother rehashing those.
One of the things that really pisses me off the most was the deliberate nuclear brinksmanship. As we’ve seen, our incompetent military can barely get a handle on responding to natural disasters of relatively limited scope. How in God’s name did anyone think that they could respond to civilian needs in a civilization-clearing nuclear exchange? What maniac had enough hubris to joke about it, to play games with it, to go to the brink with it just so Reagan could measure his dick next to the Soviet counterparts? I think that was the biggest asshole game of all, and I’m sad to say I supported it at the time.
WereBear
I can appreciate how John feels it is mean-spirited when it is his own happy memories involved. But it’s not personal… to YOU, John Cole.
It’s a similar dissonance for anyone to struggle with, when they hear of heinousness on the part of someone who was good to them, interpersonally.
This is the cry of parents when their precious little boy is off to jail for murdering his ex. This is the cry of children who grow up with the grandfather who dandled them on his knee before going off to work in a concentration camp. This is the bewilderment of the clueless neighbors and co-workers, who remember the person who mowed their lawn when they were laid up or stopped by with a casserole; they didn’t know about the bodies in the basement.
You were young and you were happy and you are making it personal… when it is not.
Dave Fud
@BTD: The only reason Poppy lost is because of the Perot insurgency, which is now re-labeled the Tea Party. The idiots rise again.
Comrade Darkness
Wait, Reagan who needed all those nukes so the God-blessed West could win the apocalyptic battle against the evil of the USSR just like the bible’s last book said?
Him or Palin? That’s a false choice. Either one, really.
My formerly nuke lovin’ insane parents who are now Bush torture lovin’ insane parents don’t make Reagan look any better with the benefit of hindsight.
freelancer
59 comments and no one has brought up Bill Hicks?
Some of you should be ashamed. This seems to be the definitive 2 minutes hate of the man. He deserves no less of a tainted legacy because of what his administration single-handedly did to Central and South America.
Napoleon
@NobodySpecial:
I miss the days when the Republican party had people like John Anderson in it.
El Cid
People who weren’t the target of Reagan and his cohort’s bitter derision and policy-screwing over — or who didn’t realize that they were — thought of him as a warm and sunny guy.
I also don’t care too much for people who get giddy over hiring death squads to slaughter civilians in Central America and Southern Africa to the tune of perhaps millions of lives lost. 200,000 or so of them to the Guatemalan evangelical Reagan befriended generals alone.
I’m sorry that some people are nostalgic for him.
Morbo
Me, I would prefer Nixon.
Trinity
sigh…it’s Friday and all I want is a Tunch pic.
eemom
I’m with the Reagan bashers.
But I’d take Reagan’s corpse over the current GOP palette of suckdom.
Rick Taylor
Back during Reagan’s presidency, there was a bumper sticker that said, “You know, I miss Jimmy. Hell, I miss Dick!” After 8 years of George W, I missed Ron.
Cackalacka
Oh, and as for not perceiving him as a hater, I’ve got an aquantence from elementary school whose mother was a Maryknoll nun.
I’m sure she can tell you some stories of some dead colleagues that might change your mind.
Svensker
@joes527:
Many things wrong with Reagan. But he pulled out of Lebanon, for which he still gets big props from me, and sat down with Gorbachev. Both of which still get him enmity from the neocons.
Svensker
@MikeJ:
They didn’t sneak out of Beirut. Reagan realized that it was not our fight and our army shouldn’t be there. He pulled them out. That was a very strong thing to do.
Fergus Wooster
@freelancer:
Can’t open, but please tell me it’s the bit where Reagan and Bush are peeing on Rush Limbaugh.
Michael
And that was only 16 years after the event. Of course, for the wingers, that was an event to be forgotten as “ancient history” as they would whine about “them n*****s and yankee jews needin’ to ‘git over it'”.
I’m imagining the winger head pops were Obama to decide to give a speech about intolerance at Ruby Ridge 18 years after Vicky’s husband got her dumb ass killed.
Bob L
@soonergrunt:
hehe, even worse that that. He started talking with Gorbachev when the CIA told him he had scared the shit out of the Soviets with his “bombing will start in five minutes” wisecrack to the Soviets were about to launch. Ironically that puts Regan’s low example head and shoulders about the current group of GOP ass clowns because Regan did learn from his mistakes.
And do note that on of the first thing Cheney and the Neo-Cons did during Bush II was attack the CIA. I guess the GOP ass clowns do learn after all, just not the right lesson.
Probably it is fairer to say Regan is better than the current GOP because Regan never viewed the United States of America as his personal toy.
JenJen
@Dave Fud: How many states did Ross Perot win?
By 1992 Poppy had so alienated the GOP Base, and the economy was so awful, and his approval ratings were so low, that I’m not at all certain Clinton would’ve lost without the assist from Perot. Without Perot, an argument could be made that the GOP Base would’ve just stayed home instead of splitting the vote. Kind of like they did in 2008.
jacy
I agree with John, in that I think it does no good to attempt to disabuse people of their opinions about Reagan. The whole Reagan thing has passed into the land of Myth, and there ain’t no getting it back.
My S/O’s favorite president is Reagan, so I know what I’m talking about.
It’s like when some people start pining for the good old days, an idealized “Leave it to Beaver” 1950s. They’re longing for something that didn’t exist, or existed for a very few.
Yeah, it was sure great back then — unless you were a woman or black or disabled or gay…..
norbizness
“Which would you take- any one of the potential Republican nominees in 2012, or Reagan?” None of the above; they’re all Republicans! Doy!
Mark
I grew up in Canada, and one of the things that reminds me that I will never truly be an American no matter how long I live here is that I don’t understand the Reagan man-love. (Interestingly, my mom worked with mostly African-American people at the time of Reagan’s death – she said nobody was sad in that office.) That Nixon was hated and Reagan was not is a sign of how schizophrenic American culture has become.
You know what I remember about Reagan? The “we will commence bombing in 5 minutes” “joke” that someone referenced above. I was eight years old and I couldn’t sleep because I thought he was going to start a global nuclear war. I told my mom I couldn’t sleep because I was worried about this. And she said: “Kennedy was crazier than Reagan and he didn’t start a nuclear war. Reagan isn’t going to do it.” I slept soundly after that.
someguy
Well John, you’re not quite being a Hitler apologist, but given the destruction wrought by Reagan, it’s probably pretty close. You may not remember this but he supported the murder of Catholic nuns by right wing death squads in Central America, that depraved murderer Ferdinand Marcos, and a whole bunch of right wing tyrants around the globe. His whole supporting right wing terrorism project, including creating the Afghan Mujahideen (how’s that workin’ out for ya?) really has to give you pause.
In the end it doesn’t matter if he was a bottle of 180 proof evil, or just a dangerous idiotic and senile old man surrounded by fiends in human form. The damage he did is inexcusable and probably irremediable, and no decent person should defend the old charlatan.
R. Johnston
The line from Reagan to the current crop of potential Republican Presidential nominees is quite straight. Reagan made anti-intellectualism the new norm. He finalized the divorce of policy from Republican politics.
Reagan may not, in isolation, have been as bad as the current crop, but he made the current crop inevitable. They’re his legacy. At this point the Republican party fire just needs to be let to burn, and setting the clock back thirty years would only mean thirty more years until something useful arises from the ashes.
Alan
@Llelldorin:
Didn’t David Stockman eventually come out and say the tax cuts were the reason for the huge deficits?
That was then this is now–the Right has been conditioned by Rush Limbaugh to believe tax cuts are a revenue creator and the only moral course of action against huge deficits.
MagicPanda
@vwcat: Agree 100%
For me, the issue isn’t Reagan per se. The issue is how we deal with Republicans as they start to wake up and realize that their party is basically crazy.
I, for one, would welcome that kind of conversion, even if they continue to vote Republican. Anything to keep the crazies from getting more power.
Don’t get me wrong. I actually think Reagan’s policies were terrible. If nothing else, I think there is a straight line between the Laffer curve, deregulation, and the financial collapse we just lived through last year.
But every time a Republican wakes up enough to say “I love Reagan, but Cheney is no Reagan, and neither is Limbaugh”, then I’m not going to shit on that guy for liking Reagan. I’m going to be happy that he’s calling out the crazies for who they are.
John Cole
@Waynski: Of course age has something to do with it. I was 10 when he was elected.
People here think I am offering a glowing critique of the man, when all I am trying to point out is that attacking him every time his name is mentioned is kind of pointless and may even be off putting for converts.
Redshirt
It’s a sign of how terrible things have become when HW Bush and Reagan can be looked back at fondly. And I do, to a degree. Even though I was against both of them at the time, and it was clear as day to me way back then what these men meant to America…. but compared to these absolute and complete Repuglicans today? At least they gave lip service to the institutions of Government.
But make no mistake: Regan was a bad President and deserves to be mocked.
I found it very intriguing when I finally got around to watching “Watchmen”, they replaced Reagan with Nixon as the President. Can’t blaspheme St. Ronny after all, even though in the comic, published during his Admin, that’s a constant running theme.
Violet
Didn’t Obama take some heat in the primaries – or was it the general election? – when he said something about Reagan having some good ideas? That always struck me as a smart move by Obama and stupid for the left to get their feathers ruffled over.
It’s stupid politics for the left to completely lose it when Reagan’s name is mentioned. People liked Reagan. Deal with it. Recognize it, give the man some credit for being liked and winning two elections pretty handily. And then work to change actual policies.
cat48
@BTD:
Actually, to me better. I liked “A thousand points of light.” I liked Nancy Reagan because she was so controversial for a Republican first lady. Classy dresser. Reagan was just ok. If he hadn’t had Iran Contra, I might feel better about him. (Ollie North & all the other criminals.) The orange streaks in Reagan’s hair bothered me.
Sorry, John.
rootless_e
media browski – “emo-progressive” ! YES!
emo-progressives
don’t get no respect
our tender feelings are
always being wrecked
well listen up Democrats
and that President dude
you best reassure us
or we’ll get in a mood
ignore us at peril
of your own certain doom
and be more supportive
and get out of our room
Fergus Wooster
@Mark:
And even that is partly myth – by the time Reagan left office, he was not much more popular than Nixon at his resignation. He was very polarizing. It’s taken decades of mythmaking to make us think that everybody loved Grandpa.
vwcat
People here say Reagan was just a charismatic actor but, don’t the right say the same about Obama? And while we are sick of them worshipping Reagan’s era, don’t we do the same with FDR or JFK?
We need to look at this hypocrisy thing. We can strongly dislike policies or Reagan but, we have to see that while it annoys us how the right loves Reagan, we do the same thing.
We also need to stop reacting the way republicans do to things they dislike.
I also find the article in the Atlantic interesting. It is insightful to get to know how the right thinks and try to understand the mindset. And how those early conservatives see their party and movement today.
It’s valuable and educational.
Frankly, while I really did not like Reagan at all and found his presidency awful, I also can see that he was not the way the conservatives of today are.
I also see how many conservatives misread their hero.
They see total military arrogance and Cheney, neocon thinking as being like Reagan and it is not. Reagan did diplomacy. Reagan forged ties with allies.
Reagan rejected Torture.
And yet, today’s conservatives claim Reagan and then go on to attribute the neocon and repulsive thinking to him.
As a lifelong liberal, I can definitely say Reagan would not approve of the awful way the republicans are acting today. And he would abhor the obstruction and demonizing of the president. The total disrespect and hate spewed.
We need to look clearly at things and not just react in negative ways.
Rick Taylor
I think the era Reagan was the beginning of the decline of the Republican party. That was when they began to favor image over substance, words over actions, ideology over competence. What was important was that Reagan made people feel good. That’s when the character of the party changed. It was a long slow decline, that’s culminated in the mess we see today.
Brick Oven Bill
Reagan was the last President to celebrate the Constitution.
This is why smart people like him.
rootless_e
@Violet: Indeed he did. And it was clear then that certain “progressives” were more interested in validation of their feelings than in winning elections.
Shade Tail
Who would I choose between them and Reagan? I would vote for none of the above. You’re welcome to your warm nostalgia, Mr. Cole, but the only difference between Reagan and the current crop is that he tended to stop just short of the logical conclusion.
So he raised taxes when it was needed. And he dropped the saber-rattling “evil empire” shit and started negotiating when Gorbechev indicated he was open to it.
But this is like the difference between having a closed bone break vs. an open one. Sure, the closed break that isn’t poking out through the skin is better than the open break, but it’s still a serious and damn painful injury. Between his war-mongering and his trickle-down economics, Reagan was a very bad president.
Besides, the fact that he was so charismatic in selling America on policies that were so terrible and harmful to our social and economic health is another indictment, not something to be nostalgic for.
eyelessgame
I will give Reagan this. He had a sense of vision about the world and the future, and could imagine beyond his circumstances. He didn’t want the cold war for its own sake (cf. his sci-fi comment about wishing for an invasion from outer space to settle our differences.) He opened the door for Gorbachev when a lot of his advisors were against it.
He honestly believed he was doing what was right for the country. Of course, so did Dubya and so will Palin, so that’s not exactly a virtue.
But he was pragmatic in a way that his supporters today have forgotten. He passed a huge tax cut — but he followed it with a huge tax increase, to save Social Security and get the ruinous deficit spiral at least a little under control.
So what I blame him most for was his rhetoric. He governed quite a lot to the left of his libertopic fantasies, and that’s why he’s not reviled like Dubya is — when the rubber met the road, he was only moderately conservative, as opposed to wholly irresponsible. But his rhetoric made irresponsibility respectable, and for that I can’t forgive him.
The country has certain good things about it that we wouldn’t have if not for Reagan. But the anti-intellect poison infesting the Republican Party would not be possible if not for Reagan, either.
That’s as close as I can come to not-Reagan-bashing.
freelancer
@Fergus Wooster:
No, but that one’s a decent bit. It’s from “Sane man” toward the end.
“‘How far up your ass does this guy’s dick have to be before you realize HE’S FUCKING YOU?!’
‘You know, I like that Ronald Reagan, he brought back patriotism, he made all feel good about- Hold it- Something’s slapping my ass! …OMG, He’s fucking us!”
Tecumseh
I think Reagan was the one who started the downfall and the one who started the unwinding of the threads of society, but his corpse has been raped so many times by clueless dunderheads that I’ve caught myself feeling like I have to defend him. He was somewhat flexible, wasn’t dogmatic, and his work with Gorbachev was pretty much antithetical to Conservative beliefs then and now. He also appears better in retrospect if only because he wasn’t as crazy as most of the people who claim to be upholding his legacy.
HW will probably go down as a better President than he looks, especially on foreign policy (with the exception of Panama) and deficit fighting. I still can’t forget how feckless, clueless, and tone deaf he was about most things, though, mainly domestically. And then there was the sheer slime he threw against both Dukakis and Clinton and the way he’d pretend he had nothing to do with it. I also think he looks better in retrospect because all the damage his son did.
Fergus Wooster
@John Cole:
I think a lot of us agree on that point. It can be frustrating to make that concession and have to grouse privately (or among fellow Bolshies) that the man was really a virus. But I guess that’s what distinguishes grownups from firebaggers.
Osprey
@russell:
This is like the election between Bush and Gore. “Well, Bush just seems like the type of guy you’d like to have a beer with” is about the same as “well Reagan was a Charismatic guy” even though they were both a couple of fuck-ups.
Sadly this is somewhat of a disease with a lot of people. We deify our own heroes a lot of the time based on some mythical projection of who we thought they were, or wanted them to be, instead of what they really were.
kay
It isn’t really about the person, for me.
The word “Reagan” is a stand-in for a whole myth that was absolutely jammed down our collective throat.
It’s purely political, it has little or nothing to do with what actually happened, and I resent it. We have an actual shared history in this country, it belongs to all of us, and when one political Party rewrites whole sections to their liking, I resent that.
Everyone here understands what is meant by “black Jimmy Carter”, and that isn’t about Carter the man or Carter the President, in reality.
It’s about this story of Carter that conservatives sold and the media eagerly adopted.
I hate that.
I’m sorry the word “Reagan” brings up those associations for me, but I wasn’t the one selling the myth, and it’s not my fault it’s now impossible to look at the man’s actual record and give anything like an honest appraisal.
frankdawg
Thats easy! Anyone but Reagan! Ronny put a pleasant face and charming tone to the evil done. It was ‘his’ tax cuts, followed by the obscene FICA tax increase to hide the true cost added to the deregulation and greed is good that lead directly to the financial collapse and the right-wing insistence on everything for nothing (cut taxes, shrink the gov but don’t cut medicare, SS or DoD) that binds us today. According to David Stockman, his first budget director, that was their hope and plan all along.
So give me the incompetent boobs of today who are so obviously evil banality. They at least can be beaten.
mapaghimagsik
Ketchup as a vegetable. Pissing on the nutritional needs of children is fine as long as you’re jocular about it.
So now that we know what you are, we’re just haggling on the price?
Nothing wrong with recognizing the charisma, but voting on it, I’d have to say that’s a pretty big lapse in judgment, and starts to approach a more artful way of saying that Reagan put a Mathewsian shiver up your lavender candle — er leg.
Other people have already pointed out that Reagan was part of a crew that gave us the current shithole. So I’ll steal a Reaganism if you’re all excited about voting for a Reagan like character — “There you go again”
Redshirt
Well, on the subject of “image over content”, did not Reagan prove that you can say one thing (fiscal conservative!), do the exact opposite (deficit exploded), and as long as you cut taxes for rich people and then parrot the same standard tropes (those Dems are TAX N SPEND!!!), you succeed?
Is that not the RNC playbook to this day?
eyelessgame
(godwin>You know who else was charismatic? H*tl*r!(/godwin>
(stupid editor won’t let me make a less-than, even with ampersand-ell-tee)
mr. whipple
I never got the Reagan love thing. He was always a dolt to me, a guy that was as stupid and filled with hate as Sarah Palin but wrapped up in a nicer more genial package due to his handlers and acting background. His administrations were riddled with typical GOP crooks. He cut taxes for the rich, then stiffed working people with FICA increases when the deficit skyrocketed.
In retrospect I can see how he got elected. I can deal with that.
But this mythology of being sooooo popular galls, and I think it’s a particular pathology of the RW to manufacture icons. You won’t ever see Liberals want to put Clinton’s face on Rushmore, which is both our blessing and curse.
JenJen
@Mark: I was managing a hotel-restaurant when Reagan died, and I’ll never forget the televisions being tuned to his viewing and funeral, and all eyes glued to them. The young servers would walk by the televisions and roll their eyes. In the back of the house, they were saying things like, “This grown woman at my table is bawling her eyes out. Over that guy? WTF? God, it’s just too much!”
I reminded them that he was, after all, a former President, and asked them to be as reverent and professional as they could muster, and I was surprised by their negative reaction. I don’t know if it had more to do with Reagan himself, or a rejection of the patriotic pomp of it all. Anecdotal, I know, but I always think of my young workforce that afternoon when I think of Reagan’s funeral.
Ian
Stockholm Syndrome
vwcat
MagicPanda, I understand. I railed against the man but, we cannot confuse him with today’s conservatives.
I disliked his policies and what he brought this country but, he was not like the conservatives of today and just as we confuse a bit our intense feelings towards republicans today with Reagan’s day, the right also confuses it.
A good way to think of what Reagan did and what became of the movement he championed is that he moved the country rightward and as such, the democrats as well. In response the conservatives went over the right edge of things.
The democrats moved to the right and the right moved to the crazy house.
pretty good dog
It seems to me that a fair hypothetical question to ask is, if there had been no Reagan presidency (or the subsequent rise of the Reagan myth), and if that same candidate Reagan were running today, would he and his positions be embraced by the majority of today’s Republican party? I am not sure that he would.
MikeJ
@Tecumseh: “Not quite as dumb as Sarah Palin” is no compliment.
Fergus Wooster
He did pass the War Crimes Act though, and rather eloquently denounce torture. That doesn’t fit into the current wingnut myth.
Terrapin Station84
Yeah, I guess you’re right. We’re not winning any votes by bashing Reagan.
I sure do hate Reagan, though. . .
Jay B.
Like Hunter Thompson’s Nixon obit, I think it counts if you kicked the fucker while he was up and alive too.
I’ve seen a slippery slope from Goldwater (and then giving him props for being “truly conservative”, even though he was a fucking warmongering maniac) to Nixon (absolving high crimes and misdemeanors and endless race-baiting, because, well, domestically, he was practically liberal!) to, now, Reagan (because he was popular and nice!). I’m sure in a few years, we’ll have the stupid reassessment of GW too because a Palin-type will be steering the ship.
It’s fucking disgusting. Nixon and Reagan should have died in jail. Seriously and literally. GW should be serving right now.
Brick Oven Bill
Reagan would never dress like this.
Comrade Dread
Gotta agree. I’ve stopped voting for the GOP and probably never will, but you know, I still like Reagan. He wasn’t perfect, but he was inspirational and he (at least before his mind started degrading) was intelligent and had done some effort to think through his beliefs and form coherent principles.
Hell, I even think (in hindsight) GHW Bush as a decent president: realist, sane, recognized some economic reality.
Though, I do remain convinced that if Ronnie was somehow resurrected, he would be shunned by the Gingrinch/Rove/Beck/Tea Party crowds as a liberal Soc**list
David in NY
I know this kind of thing has been said at least once here, but let me agree: Reagan was scary because he seemed like your nice uncle who wouldn’t hurt anybody even while he was making jokes about starting nuclear war. Sue me.
The “joke,” off the air as he was preparing for his Saturday speech: “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” This resulted in the Soviet Union’s nuclear forces actually going on alert. Peace through strength, indeed. That’s just stupid scary.
eemom
@John Cole:
hmm. That would mean you have a big 4-0 coming up this year, Mr. Cole.
I was 18, and cast my first ever vote for poor Jimmy Carter.
joes527
@Svensker: @John Cole: I’m too young to really remember Nixon. Yes, I remember all the coverage and argument about Watergate, but I was in elementary school at the time, and it was all just talk to me.
Ford was a placeholder, and while it is all cool to diss Carter, I think of him as the best President of my lifetime. (yes, he failed in many ways, but in my book there are things worse than failure.)
In my life experience, Reagan is the president who abandoned “don’t be evil” as a guiding principal for this nation. I’m sure that that is just my limited view, and if I was of a different age, I would see a different President as the one who turned the nation. (I doubt that I would ever see Washington as the one who turned the nation… but, yeah, take you pick of any of the ones that came after him)
So yeah, I get the fuzzy nostalgia for the Gipper. It isn’t any more reality based than my identifying him as the first evil president.
JGabriel
John Cole:
I never understood the love for Reagan, the repeated assertions of charisma, or the praise for his speaking his skills. Reagan always came across to me as a particularly unbelievable, dishonest, and unctuous used car salesman. Always.
Was he personally a hater? I don’t know – probably not, I guess. I’m pretty sure the younger Bush had no racial animus (c.f., Condi Rice and Colin Powell), but his policies certainly did nothing to alleviate racism or its pernicious effects. And Reagan’s rhetoric on the issue was even worse.
So, I’m not really seeing a lot of light – in policy, rhetoric, or anything else – between Reagan and today’s potential 2012 nominees. About the best that can be said of Reagan, is that he was personally friendly enough to get along with people from the other side of the aisle, and that his base wasn’t strong enough, or large enough, to make him enact in its entirety the platform he ran on, which was pretty much just as mean, delusional, and unworkable, as the current GOP platform and its advocates.
.
Professor Fate
Personally I found Reagan’s folksy warmth was as fake as his hair color. Hell Poppy Bush won in part by running against him remember “Kinder gentler America”. he wasn’t talking about the Democrats. And while yes the GOP has gone crazy – those are his children poltically speaking.
And his policy’s worked wonders – for the well to do and connceted. The gutting of the middle class, the demonizatin of the poor – the continuing concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands – the use of the goverment’s funds as a feed bag for contractors – the trasformation of our ecomony into a weid casino trip – these were all features not bugs of what Reagan has given us.
Sarcastro
Yes, evil and competent is preferable to evil and stupid.
Comrade Dread
I wish you would be more vocal. For all the RW hate Clinton generated, he was actually a decent president and was probably the most fiscally conservative president in my lifetime.
kay
@mr. whipple:
Oh, I “got it”. I honestly don’t know how I could have missed it.
It’s been an absolute battle to tune out the noise and propaganda regarding this icon and try to look at what actually happened.
Christ. FDR, the liberal hero, gets more critical analysis. Lincoln gets a more rigorous and reality-based measure.
It was deliberate. I feel almost a duty not to go along.
drillfork
@Mike E:
And Obama will be the second-best…
Ken J.
I have some sympathy for Our Host John here, but the 1980 election of Reagan is what pushed me out of the Republican party. To me, Reagan’s lasting gift to America is the destruction of any ability to talk responsibly about public finance. “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter” – Cheney, quoted by Paul O’Neill.
Lesser gifts include the elevation of religious nutters to high policy positions and significant political power, and the creation of armed militant Islam in Afghanistan by appealing to the most reactionary, anti-women factions in the country. And the GOP’s fascist streak was reinforced with the fighting in Central America.
Reagan comes out smelling good because (1) Carter appointee Paul Volker wrung Johnson/Nixon’s inflation out of the economy; (2) oil prices fell, boosting the economy; and (3) the Soviet empire crumbled on his watch. To his credit, he knew when it was time to pivot on Russia. But only the early approach of Alzheimer’s kept him from being impeached on the Iran-Contra affair. (There was speculation that Reagan’s inability to remember key stuff about Iran-Contra was an act, but it looks like it wasn’t.)
Sentient Puddle
@JenJen: Speaking as a young’un, I can second the anecdote. None of the conservative people my age that I know invoke Reagan’s name for anything.
Lost Left Coaster
Is this a joke? Have I been reading the wrong blog? Do we have to debate now about what a truly evil and depraved person Ronald Reagan was?
His policies may not have worked out in the long term? Which ones? Selling arms to Iran? Supporting genocidal regimes in Central America? Ignoring HIV/AIDS?
Just because George W. Bush makes him look good in comparison doesn’t mean he was actually good.
Comrade Darkness
The goal of not causing converts to shun dems because of the Reagan Reality dems seem to cling to is admirable as a strategy. But I don’t think I can do it without some serious self discipline. The direct line between him and the crap we took from Gingrich’s Revolution of letting bankers rob us blind and then GWB is straight and clear.
If the idea is to get people on the cusp to decide that the current republicans are not Reagan and have in fact sold Reagan out. Sure, that’s a plan, I guess. I’m trying to trick them in that case because, well that would be a lie. But okay, let’s start there.
And . . . go with Socrates? I’m really struggling here . . . I need some help. What do I say to one of these people? “What do you remember was great about Reagan?” then follow up with (besides choking, but I can work on that…) “And does Palin have any of those qualities?”
This is going to turn into a discussion of Reagan’s hair, isn’t it? Trouble is, you know, Mittens has the hair.
Nellcote
I’ve hated Ronald “you’ve seen one redwood tree, you’ve seen them all” Raygun since he was governor of California.
LT
I had a huge poster of OJ on my wall when I was a kid. Incredibly charismatic guy. I don’t have a problem calling him a murdering thug, or losing my fondness for him. (And ask Central Americans if he was a “hater.” Or people who lost their livelihoods in the film industry because of him.)
Ash
Generation Z (Y? Zed? Fuck if I know the name, 25 and younger) will always remember Reagan as the asswipe that created a generation of Gordon Gekko’s and cokeheads.
Steerpike
@John Cole:
Nice try, JC, but you didn’t just say “all I am trying to point out is that attacking him every time his name is mentioned is kind of pointless and may even be off putting for converts.”
What you said was “anyone coming to their party from the GOP who is over the age of 30 probably still has a warm spot for Reagan. I know I do.”
That “soft spot” is in your cranium, methinks. That warm fuzzy nostalgic feeling is exactly what the GOP capitalizes on every time they dry hump his rotting corpse at their conventions, and Democrats have no business promoting the hagiography you seem to have embraced.
Reagan was an absolute failure, domestically, internationally, fiscally and morally, as so many posters here have documented here.
bemused
The fondness for Reagan is for the amiable grampa image. He was an experienced actor even if not on the A list. I didn’t care if he was a nice guy or not. I think of him as a Mr Magoo. He seemed to be pretty disengaged even before the rumors of oldtimers began surfacing. I cared about what his policies did to the middle class & the country. So I have no use for this nostalgia bs.
demo woman
Reagan raised taxes. That is what the right refuses to admit. Sure the wealthy got large breaks but that’s about it. Reagan ended progressive taxation. The deficit was out of control also. The one thing that was positive during the Reagan years was Paul Volcker.
Michael
PS – Can we replace the word “conservative” with another one?
My preference is for “lazy asshole”. As in “I’d go for HCR, but I’m a lazy asshole”. Or “I’d come up with meaningful financial reform, but I’m a lazy asshole.”
robert green
yes, reagan. so the choice you are proferring is between:
a guy who was surrounded by billionaires whose every bidding he did without question, even when it meant changing his lifelong held views?
a guy who thought nothing of professing a religiosity that he himself did not follow?
a guy who made anti-intellectualism cool for elites?
a guy who invented hippie-punching?
a guy who talked about small government and ruined our relationship as a nation with the new deal, and with each other?
a guy who was senile for at least 2 of his years in office?
a guy who used the constitution as so much toilet paper?
a guy who was objectively pro-terrorist in multiple ways?
a guy who may have come into power by subverting our nation’s interests (october suprise is not proven but it is pretty damn close)?
this list could literally go on forever. he was a terrible man and a terrible president. you were a fucking sucker to fall for his bullshit and while you have manned up quite a bit it’s time for you to take the last step. your hero was a fucking traitor idiot empty-headed monster. deal with it.
FlipYrWhig
I still think the whole Dubya presidency was a _Trading Places_ kind of premise that went terribly wrong. I imagine Poppy and Bar Bush betting $1 on the idea that even their idiot son could become president. And I imagine Poppy Bush betting against it.
I think it took the kakistocracy of Dubya to make anyone feel nostalgic about Poppy Bush, the Republican Carter.
And as for Reagan, I thoroughly disliked him at the time–I was almost 13 when he was reelected and paid a lot of attention to politics–and it was precisely because he came across like a doofus. It felt like he was lulling people into supporting him for no tangible reason, just a soft voice and some truly lame wisecracks. I wanted everyone to wake up and admit how horrible he was.
ed
Yeah, well, in our defense, Reagan was, in fact, a racist dumbfuck and a war criminal. So we have that going for us.
I can’t remember the circumstances (something akin to a Max Blumenthal interview), but someone asked some young dumbass wingnut what were some of Reagan’s policies they disagreed with. The dumbass wingnut stared for a beat, then blinked, then slowly answered, “Reagan didn’t make any mistakes.” (or something to that effect). Really. No shit. This is where we are.
Could some enterprising Max Blumenthal types ask more of these questions to Idiot America? Please? For the Teabaggers, how about along the lines of “What were some of the Founding Fathers’ mistakes.” I bet they have trouble coming up with any. We’re so fucked.
Violet
The point is not whether Reagan was great or horrible. The point is that many people who voted for him are not very happy with the current Republican party. They are looking for a place to go – people to vote for. If they’d been leftists back in the day, they never would have voted for Reagan. But they did. And now they don’t like the Republican party.
So do you want them holding their noses and voting for a Republican or a Democrat? I’d prefer they vote for a Democrat. But slamming Reagan every time his name is mentioned isn’t going to win over those kinds of people. Being courteous to his memory, while working hard to point out that your current policies are better for the country is the way to do it.
norbizness
I like the implied advice for the host: even though Reagan left office with pretty low approval ratings (I don’t think he was above 50% in his last term), it is the conventional and revisionist consensus that he, and by extension his cancerous policies, are beloved by the people. So SHADDUPAYOFACE.
CaseyL
Sorry, John.
AIDS. He should have spent a tidy time simmering in Hades for the malign neglect on this issue alone. You should go back and read about the AIDS patients who were left to die in hospital corridors because no one wanted to touch them; the ones who were essentially kidnapped by their homophobic families, torn from their friends and lovers and everything that was familiar to them, to spend their dying days with people who despised them. We’ll never know if calls for compassion coming from the President himself would have made any difference… if mobilizing the nation’s public healthcare system to combat ignorance would have made any difference… because he never even tried.
The contras. Overturning popularly elected governments, again; using the School of the Americas to turn out sadists and murderers; becoming a sponsor of terrorism, fer crissakes!
Ketchup = vegetable. This wasn’t just some rhetorical flourish; this was how Reagan undermined nutrition programs for poor children.
These were deliberate and massive moral failures. And they hurt the entire country; they hurt people who were helpless and desperate; hurt them for no reason other than burnishing credentials for the likes of Falwell, Robertson, and the other Limbaughs of the day.
It’s not even that I, personally, can’t forgive him. What he did didn’t harm me directly. I don’t have the right to forgive him, even if I wanted to. It’s for the people his policies harmed and killed to forgive him, and good luck with that.
Evinfuilt
Obligatory Zombie Reagan clip.
As a zombie he would be a lot better than the current crop.
Macha Maguire
Sorry, Reagan and Thatcher between them *buried* the chances of diverting climate change before it really got out of hand. NASA had the data, the science was rock solid, even then, and the scientists were scared.
So he had them re-write the papers and moved those he could move out of their jobs and took the solar panels off the white house and we had 3 more decades of Oil Business as Usual – and an industry of denialists. All on his watch, but his say-so.
He was a disaster.
PTirebiter
I was still living in L.A. when Ronnie became the Guv and then the Prez, so my hate was strong. Like most my old hot buttons, it’s subsided with time and comparison with the current GOP. I’ve lived in North TX now for over twenty years and unfortunately, it’s bit like seeing a picture of my ex-wife displayed on every other road marker. I have no need to bash, but I’m glad that the real history of the cold war’s end is finally breaking through. And why aren’t we hearing about Reagan’s self proclaimed JACKPOT for deregulating the S&L’s?
I don’t think Rahm was involved with that little nest of vipers.
drillfork
I’ll never forget Election Night ’80. I was 16, and seeing the nation, elect, by a landslide, some actor who bamboozled people by telling them what they wanted to hear — America’s great, fuck the metric system, fuck the speed limit, fuck welfare recipients and fuck unions, among other things — I absolutely knew this country was headed down a dark path. I just never figured it could get so much worse.
The thing is, Cole, all of the batshit that’s out there now got a huge-kick start from Reagan. He put a warm friendly face on savage policies, domestic and abroad, and the whole country has been in steady decline since.
Had to laugh at the way you brushed past the “criminality” though:
Really, you could say the same thing about Obama…
Da Bomb
@NobodySpecial: But I don’t think H.W. Bush’s motherly-looking wife had a problem with cities being underwater, especially the ones with dark people.
And as for Reagan, the contempt my father held for the man knows no bounds. Especially, his war on drugs and pushing HIV/AIDS under the rug.
But in the end, compared to some of the loons walking around now, I just don’t know.
soonergrunt
@Bob L: ??
Dave Fud
@JenJen: See this for an idea about how close it was.
xjmueller
I didn’t like him then and I wouldn’t like him now. I do respect him more today than I did 30 years ago. However, his GOP begat the current crop; there’s a direct line from that generation to this. Would he be a better candidate than some of the projected ones? Not really. Would he be more likable and electable? Yes. I didn’t/don’t hate the man, but the party is still the party. His administration would be drawn from those ranks and would reflect that ideology. I can’t go for that now, just like I couldn’t 30 years ago.
inthewoods
It always amazes me when people bring up Reagan and the need to build up our weapons systems to battle with the Soviets and then not address why we thought we should respond with hugely expensive shit like Star wars.
Specifically, that the intelligence was massively overstating the capabilities of the Soviets. The famous Team B was constructed to support the military build up under Bush Senior (as head of the CIA) – and created an alternative universe where the Soviets had undetectable anti-submarine technology (how could they detect it if it was undetectable?).
For more on Team B:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_B
More shocking (or not) is that Neo-con moron Paul “I never saw a war I didn’t like” Wolfowitz was a part of that committee.
Bush Jr. show echos of the same shit with the Office of Special Plans and the like….same bullshit, different time.
mrmobi
Put it this way- which would you take- any one of the potential Republican nominees in 2012, or Reagan?
Reagan was an awful President, John. Look at a bar chart of the deficit to see what I mean. As a percentage of GDP, Reagan was worse than Bush Jr., on that score, in spades.
However, I kind of know where you’re coming from on this. I personally have a soft spot for George H. W. Bush.
Poppy might have clueless in a lot of areas, but he was miles ahead of any recent Republican President. (remember him calling Reagan’s economic policies “voodoo economics?”)
And Dana Carvey, too.
Irony Abounds
Speaking of conversions, it took Reagan for me to vote for a Dem presidential candidate. I was a big Republican in high school, voted for Ford in my first election and Anderson in ’80. Finally, after seeing what Reagan brought to the table, I had to vote for Mondale in ’84 even though it was a futile effort. But then, I always characterize myself as more of an anti-Republican than a Democrat. Particularly these days. It ain’t easy supporting what Dems in Congress do, or don’t do, but given the alternative, I have no choice.
soonergrunt
@robert green:
Don’t hold back. Tell us how you really feel.
Eric U.
Reagan’s genius was to take the tax burden from the rich and move it to the poor and middle class. The poor were screwed by the ’83 tax increase that “saved” Social Security.
Fergus Wooster
@soonergrunt:
He block-quoted me, but must have clicked on your entry.
JGabriel
@Ken J.:
I’m always shocked by the continuing life of that myth. The USSR fell during the period 1989-1992. George Bush the Elder, not Reagan, was president.
.
numbskull
Why should I be silent about an evil just because it makes you uncomfortable?
Even within your bounds of supposed political savviness, such silence has not produced political gain. Quite the contrary. If more Democrats had been more vocal about Reagan’s crimes, we as a country would be much, much better off.
So would the rest of the world.
tomvox1
Touching moment, John. ;)
I think for people over the age of 30 who are not recent converts to the Democratic Party (ahem), we can trace a direct line for the shit storm we are in back to Reagan. He embraced Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” to the nth power and thereby ensured that one of the two major political parties in this country would turn into the refuge for latent white supremacy and delusions of antebellum grandeur while mainstreaming a truly idiotic something-for-nothing economic philosophy that ensures that the powerful get more so, the middle class gets it in the neck and the poor are the ones to blame for the whole mess because FDR made them lazy. And let’s not even get into the debate over how the MSM lost their credibility forever when they decided to place style (The Gipper) over substance forever more. That gave us 8 years of W.
The maudlin garbage about Reagan being a great guy is really beside the point. One can argue that keeping alive the myth of Reagan as “The Last Great President” only enables the insanity that we’re hearing from CPAC and the rabid Right, which is the de facto ideology of today’s Republican party. Sure, he wasn’t as nuts as the current crop of dingbats. But they are his mutant offspring just the same. And so responsibility for that has to be laid at his tombstone along with all the irrelevant sentimental bullshit.
Evinfuilt
@eyelessgame:
You want > and < (which is “& g t ;” and “& l t ;” with spaces removed.)
darryl
Ronald Reagan is like your uncle who had a warm smile and always gave you a nice little toy at christmas when you were young. But he talked your parents into a disastrous refinancing of their house, used his bank job to foreclose on blacks and gays, then drove drunk and killed a busload of schoolchildren.
But because he gave you those toys when you were a kid, you still have fond memories. That’s the position Cole is in.
soonergrunt
@tomvox1: This.
PTirebiter
I think JC is right about it being counterproductive to bash Ronnie. The Reagan years are likely viewed as the golden age of Washington by the current Deans and Deanettes of the beltway. Why reverse hippie punch when we have so many other fish to fry?
Redshirt
@Irony Abounds: I hear you, Irony Abounds. I’ll never be a member of the pathetic Democratic Party; however, I am rock solid in the “Anti-Republican Party”, whatever and whomever that is.
What’s odd is I really want to be a Conservative, I do hold many of the purported beliefs Conservatives hold – but I’ve never seen an American Conservative Politician come anywhere close to those stated beliefs. Instead it’s all been lies and naked power grabs.
So I vote Democratic, always, but still with the hope that someday sanity might return to America. Not optimistic though!
The Raven
People often have warm spots for the pleasant uncle who turns out to have been a child abuser, too.
As a matter of political tactics there is no reason to attack the man for the sake of attacking him, but I wish you, personally, would look past appearances. Reaganism was the deeply destructive beginning of the triumph of modern “conservatism.” Among other things he laid the groundwork for the current financial disaster by gutting the SEC. (Something I don’t think other commentators have mentioned.) The policies he brought to national politics have come to fruition in our time in war and economic ruin, and the factions he represented are the ones we now struggle against.
Croak!
Evinfuilt
@Macha Maguire:
Thank you for bringing that up. Every time someone says we need more studies I try and explain that we’ve had enough studies done before Carter left office to know whats wrong. 30 years wasted and growing. Hard not be cynical about our future at this point.
Corner Stone
And no doubt if the modern GOP were more like your mythical Reagan love you would certainly still be voting Republican.
Even though their policies are murderous, disastrous and criminal. As long as they put a sunny face on it, that warm spot would keep you glowing when you went to the polls on election day.
geg6
@Warren Terra:
This.
I honestly didn’t think my visceral and burning hate for Reagan could be topped. But the Cheney Administration managed to leave that particular hate in the dust.
That said, I hated Reagan then and I still do now. I would take death over either Reagan or any other GOPer. But if people want to persist in their zombie love affair with St. Ronnie, I wish them well in their delusions.
Pangloss
@tomvox1: A thousand white gloves.
Redshirt
Put it another way: I doubt the Teabaggers and wingnuts of today would accept a politician like Reagan as he was in 1978. He’d have to bring his “game” up to 2008 levels at the least.
JGabriel
@PTirebiter:
For the joy of kicking a dead horse, of course!
.
Fergus Wooster
@Redshirt: No, he would have just kept his game at his California Gubernatorial levels instead of softening up. As Gov, he was rabid, mean, and scary. (“If we’re gonna have a bloodbath. . .”)
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
Oh f_ck me with a sharp stick up the poopchute.
Reagan was a charlatan and a sociopath. His Contra support alone qualifies him for the Eternal Hall of Moral Shame, even if half the grotesque stories they tell about the Contras turned out to be false.
Are we really that hard up to troll the blog this morning, John?
Get serious. You’ve embarrassed yourself on this one.
Will
US-illegally-funded Central American death squads kind of kill the Ronnie buzz for me. Sorry.
Everyone should see Salvador. Also.
darryl
@Jay B.: One of the funniest things I’ve ever read, from that HST piece:
fasteddie9318
I can has one-way ticket out of here?
@PTirebiter
Because the enduring legacy of the Reagan fraud is the only thing that still gives today’s GOP ass-clowns any shred of credibility. It’s the Big Lie. You think Mitt Romney would be a fair bet to be your next president if his entire life wasn’t a bad knock-off of Weekend at Bernie’s with St. Ronnie’s corpse? If you can somehow wake people up to the con-job Reagan played on this country, you pop the entire GOP balloon.
Plus what tomvox1 said.
MTiffany
Of course Republicans of a certain age are fond of Reagan — you have to be that fucking charming to sell as much snake oil as that man did. I’m still waiting — for nearly thirty years now — for lowered tax rates to produce increased tax revenues and a balanced federal budget. That rat bastard.
JenJen
@Dave Fud: OK, but the states that were 2% and under still wouldn’t have been enough to toss Poppy the reelection, in fact, it wouldn’t even be close. If you give Bush every state with a <5% margin, he wins, with 279 electoral votes to Clinton's 259.
But that's a big "if" and you could make the same argument for just about every presidential election in the 20th century. 5 points is a pretty big margin in modern politics. I continue to believe the “Ross Perot was a Spoiler” thing is way overblown. If he’d have picked off a few states like Wallace did, it would be a stronger case to make.
JGabriel
@The Raven:
Nah, modern conservatism is a 5 act Shakespearean tragedy, and Reagan’s the third act climax:
Prologue: Sen. Nixon – VP Nixon / HUAC / Bill Buckley
Act 1: Goldwater
Act 2: Nixon / Ford
Act 3: Reagan / Bush, the Elder
Act 4: Bush, the Elder / Quayle – Bill Kristol
Act 5: Cheney / Bush the Younger
Epilogue: Palin / Tea Parties / Bill Kristol – Erick Erickson
.
The Raven
A lot of Russians loved Stalin, too. But Stalin fed us corvids well.
John, how do we teach people to be wary of the leader with a pleasant manner and destructive intent? How do we get people to look past the manner? Is there anything that would get you to do so?
Fergus Wooster
Best. Thread. Ever.
drillfork
Oh ya — and bribing Iran to hold our hostages till the Inauguration?
Kinda shitty.
The Raven
@JGabriel: good points, I like them.
MAJeff
Reagan may have been a lot of things, but I never perceived him as a hater.
Maybe you and yours weren’t targets of the administrations hostile neglect with regard to AIDS. Reagan’s response to the disease: “let the faggots die.” Sounds like a hater to me.
LGRooney
John, your point is well taken. By comparison with the Republicans who followed, Reagan was a decent politician. I tend to think he actually gave a damn about the country and its people – regardless of whether one thinks he did the right things or not. Yes, he was surrounded by a criminal group hell bent on avenging Nixon’s forced resignation but I don’t think he was in that mind set.
That being said, my beef with Reagan primarily comes down to the hagiography encompassing the period after his administration. I would venture to guess that is the basis for most of the vitriol felt by those opposed today, i.e., it is reactionary in the face of a successful propaganda effort.
My background is a mixed bag of economics and Soviet/ Russian studies so I have been engaged in these arguments for quite a long time. I know the Soviets were crumbling as early as Nixon’s second term (this stuff can be found in both US and Soviet archives – DIA, the DoD version of the CIA and thus much less politicized, issued reports that were subsequently quashed (thanks to Scoop Jackson, inter alia) with extensive economic intelligence data showing that the Soviets had 10-15 years left if they didn’t dramatically re-invent their economy.
Andropov brought Gorbachev into the Politburo as his chosen successor (knowing he couldn’t do it himself because of his compromised position) to revamp the economy. One of the main reasons Gorbachev didn’t take the helm earlier is because of the bellicosity of Reagan and fear within Soviet power circles – they put in an old-time hardliner instead and, even though Chernenko was short-lived in that office, Gorbachev had little room for maneuver initially and reform would have to wait. In other words, if perestroika and glasnost were the ultimate mechanisms behind the breakup of the Soviet Union, Reagan actually delayed the break up by several years through his rhetoric and through the rhetoric of those working for him who continuously dismissed Gorbachev as insincere and just a new face on the same beast – hell, they carry that rhetoric to this day only Russia has replaced the Soviet Union.
I don’t mean to give a history lesson here, it is just that the hagiography of Reagan has been so successful and the work of burying the misinformation will take so long, if it is ever successful, that I (and, as mentioned before, I think I speak for others as well) reflexively show antipathy to any warm fuzzies offered in the direction of Reagan and immediately feel the need to attempt to set the record straight (space allowing).
William
I’m late to the party on this one, but I wanted to say that I appreciate being called on my biases, especially ones that get in the way of working with people who could otherwise be allies. Thanks!
PTirebiter
@JGabriel: Does it outweigh the joys of getting laid because you don’t smell of dead horse?
The Raven
I guess I’m also very sick of the cult of personality around Reagan. It is not just that we hear how wonderful Reagan was; we’ve been hearing it for 30 years and the people who believe, believe, and no reality shakes their belief. I think that’s why progressives react so strongly.
“Whoever created the human body left in a fairly basic design flaw. It has a tendency to bend at the knees.”–Terry Pratchett
geg6
@JenJen:
Personally, I bought a bottle of champagne and drank it, with many toasts to “burning in hell,” the day Reagan died. I celebrated for about a week.
Not a whole lotta Reagan love in these old steel towns here. Not even the Teabaggers around here will nostalgically invoke St. Ronnie. Not if they want to live, that is.
LT
And is this really a “You’re hurting their feelings” post? Should we really go that low?
MobiusKlein
@Nellcote: I’ll second that – I condemn Reagan for CA gov too.
Llelldorin
@Alan:
Yes. In the traditional conservative fashion, he did his part to destroy the country, retired, then wrote a book saying “O woe is me! All those dumbfucks I was working with were destroying the country while I resolutely stood inert!”
The Raven
He did a real good job of corvid-feeding in California, too. Made the governator possible, he did. Forgot about that, until you brought him up.
PurpleGirl
Have you all forgotten his belief in a Star Wars security blanket?
MTiffany
@PurpleGirl:
What? You mean there’s no such thing as a missile shield? NOT TRUE! NOT TRUE! (Stuffs fingers in ears, screams at top of lungs) Missile defense IS real! Missile defense DOES work! Missile defense IS real! Missile defense DOES work! Missile defense IS real! Missile defense DOES work! Reagan and Dubya wouldn’t LIE!
PTirebiter
@fasteddie9318:
Easy turbo, I said I was heartened by the real history breaking through, but it’s absurd to think you’ll hasten the process with Democrats bashing their icon. It will be done by non partisan academicians and attrition. All the rest is counterproductive preaching to the choir.
brantl
John, you’re positing the choice between a dog turd in your hand (Reagan), and a whole dump-truck load of manure poured over you (the current lot of Republicans); it doesn’t stop the turd from being a turd, does it? And since that’s only one party, only if you’re a hidebound holder to that party, is it the only choice you have. The worst Democrat that ran for the Presidency in the primaries last time was better than the ‘best’ Republican, no matter how you define him.
whetstone
@J.W. Hamner: I’m with this. There are a lot of things to dislike about Reagan, but there are things to like, or at least tolerate – never picked a fight he couldn’t win, wasn’t a screeching angry bedwetter, and so forth.
I think what the left hates more is not so much Reagan as the historically ignorant Zombie Reagan Mythology that makes people like George W. Bush possible. If Mitt! had any sense he’d run as Actual Reagan and not Wingnut Fantasy Reagan.
Martin
I don’t think the objection is as strongly anti-Reagan as people think. For me, it’s mainly anti-Reagan supporter than anti-Reagan.
Reagan did more than a few good things in his term and I’ll happily champion those things (as will any Reagan supporter) but the did more than few other responsible things that cut against the Reagan narrative that Reagan supporters steadfastly refuse to acknowledge. That little thing about raising taxes, for example.
While Reagan supporters are beating us over the head about how he ushered in a generation of tax cuts, they completely miss the real lesson of Reagan which was that even he recognized that tax moderation was necessary as he blew up the deficit far more than his experts predicted. Now, if the right was in any way honest about the lesson there, it’s that tax cuts will expand GDP, but will also blow up the deficit unless they are VERY carefully done and very moderate in scope. I’ve yet to see a single argument from the right acknowledge that.
artem1s
@NobodySpecial:
not so much. Everyone forgets it took him forever to declare SC/NC a disaster area after Hugo hit. Oprah had to go on TV and point it out to him before he got it. The Bushes were always ready with cash in hand whenever a storm hit FL and its juicy 27 electoral votes, though.
JohnR
Tell you what – I’m a dissident Republican, and I couldn’t stand Reagan. His positions on most things were cartoonish or simply inane, and as became clear later on, either he had no idea what was going on in his White House (which was disturbing) or he was constantly lying about it (which was equally disturbing). The “Saint Ronnie” of modern Republican mythos is a fake – a Rohrschach picture. The horrible catastrophe of the Cheney/Bush administration had its roots in Nixon, but it put out its first beautiful flowers in the Reagan terms. Reagan may have been a likeable fellow; I never met him, so I don’t know, but I don’t want my Presidents to be likeable – I want them to be good Presidents. Reagan, by his actions and those subsequently taken based on his words, did as much to destroy Constitutional government in this country as Richard Nixon and GW Bush. He was an appalling President, and one which should make the country deeply ashamed that it elected once, let alone twice.
res ipsa loquitur
More importantly, it is worthwhile to examine how much worse the current GOP is. Reagan may have been a lot of things, but I never perceived him as a hater.
Kicking off his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi was pretty much the definition of “hate”.
Reagan was loathsome in every sense of the word.
El Cid
Ronald Reagan had to come out and disavow the KKK’s endorsement of him. FWIW. So, on the half-full side, yeah, he did condemn them.
Flip
It seems to me the point isn’t whether Reagan sucks or not. It’s that the GOP has chosen to enshrine him, as they did with W while he was in office. This provides a certain cohesiveness to the party, provides a clear idea for the public what they stand for, and helps them enforce party discipline. Meanwhile, the Dems turn on their presidents within six months of taking office. I have a feeling that had our party treated Clinton and now Obama a little more like the GOP does its presidents (except Bush I, who never stood a chance following Saint Ronnie), they might be in a stronger position to pass we really want.
Ash
@Martin:
Such as….?
Chuck Butcher
Oh yes, asskiss the St Ronnie converts, for sure the Donkey Party is already way too leftish, we needs us some Reaganites to fix things up. Please, more Ben Nelsons and Hoe LIEbermans, can’t let the GOP have all the assholes. Please, please St Ronnie Cultists, get out there and vote in those (D) Primaries, get us some winning candidates, maybe a 75 Seat Senate….that’s indistinguishable from a 53/47 D/R like the current one.
PurpleGirl
Reagan was a mostly out of work actor after WWII. He even tried to do a act in Vegas. He discovered TV and became a show host. Then Jack Welch of GE befriended him and put him on the Republican/corporate rubber chicken circuit making speeches. And so the politician was born. As SAG president he gave a waiver to one agenting company so that they could represent both actors and producers/film companies. It changed the industry forever, and not necessarily for the better. From a Roosevelt Democrat he became a corporate Republican, a bought tool.
(Can you tell I don’t much like him.)
LT
I think I’ve identified what bugs me most about this post: It makes you look shallow, or dumb, frankly. And you’re obviously not. It’s like Reagan in your personal Pony. Wtf?
Mike E
@drillfork: Clinton would’ve been a hell of a pres if he only could keep his clenis in his pants–the smartest man in any room, and a 7th level co-opter of the Repub agenda, hence my pithy Michael Moore quote. Voted for him twice. But I feel no regret, in fact, I’m gonna put this on my headstone:
Never smoked crack
Never voted for a Bush
Will
Peace through fucking strength?
Was he the leader of the U.S. or Cobra? That’s up there with “work makes you free” in the halls of terrifying historical doublethink.
Jesus, the 80s generation are terrifying. It’s amazing that we managed to get through the last decade of the Cold War without incinerating the entire planet.
PurpleGirl
@MTiffany: LOL. Good thing I don’t any liquid at my desk right now.
Will
And, on a more serious note, I’m not 100 percent certain that the Democrats should be wholeheartedly embracing the Republican converts.
Most of them are not and will never be Democrats, just Republicans who aren’t completely insane. Let too many in the party, and you’ll just end up with two Republican parties – crazy and non-crazy flavors.
If they want to vote for Democrats, fine. If not, then they can stay home or work to make their old party less crazy. I don’t see any big upside in paying lip service to all their old myths, especially as those myths paved the way to the destruction of their own party.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
I was young when Reagan took office. I wasn’t old enough to really pay attention to politics until right around the time of Ollie North and Iran/Contra. I was appalled.
That said, my view of him changed a little bit later. In college (around 1990), my economics teacher pointed out that when Reagan took office, we were in a recession. His big deficit spending actually helped pull us out of that recession. When Republicans worship Reagan and then turn around and trash Obama for the stimulus, they have absolutely NO idea that they are trashing one of Reagan’s policies… spend to pull the country out of a recession. Granted, Reagan didn’t CALL it a fiscal stimulus, but he was actually smart enough to know that that is what he was doing.
Chuck Butcher
So here comes the “reasonable” Martin with a load of entire hoseshit. Raised taxes, asswipe first he fostered supply side after every competent economist told his it was voodoo and then raised taxes when it blew up in his face and in case you missed it, raised FICA without raising the upper limit and hit the bottom half with a double whammy.
Maybe you’d like to try again? How about the part where he left Hamas intact after Beruit? After all, we do need enemies…
The Moar You Know
Reagan bribed the Ayatollah Khomeni to throw the election his way. His Contra death squads raped and shot nuns, children and priests for fun, and when that got old, kicked them out of helicopters for the lulz. His two-bit pet Colonel worked to undermine the Constitution of this country and to directly help our enemies.
He slept through Cabinet meetings. He laid the foundation of the destruction of the economy of this nation.
He’s the worst president this nation has ever had, including George W. Bush.
You have a “warm spot” for him? Never thought I’d find myself saying this, Cole, but screw you. Learn something about the monster that you worship so much. Caligula had nothing on Saint Ronnie.
Dr. Morpheus
@BTD:
Um, no he wasn’t. He was much, much better than his son. But anything is greater than zero.
chopper
shrug. i just don’t understand the willingness of small-c conservatives to really lionize the guy – he only represented ‘real’ conservatism on a few issues, and the rest was superficial. i mean, his record on constitutional rights blew, his foreign policy was brutal and expansive, he ran up the deficits like a kid with mommy’s mastercard, he expanded the size of government, etc etc.
yeah, he deregulated shit and cut taxes. and he spoke a lot about jesus and nuking moscow. i just don’t get this whole ‘he wouldn’t be allowed at the tea party shit’.
chopper
also, i wouldn’t go so far as to call my post an ‘immediate, visceral anti-reagan outlash’. my post was a full day after the thread started.
and i don’t hate reagan (at least not like many do), but i think the mythology conservatives and republicans have built around the guy gets out of control. he wasn’t a ‘real conservative’, he was a republican. he talked a big game on conservative principles but goldwater would have punched him in the neck if he could have.
toujoursdan
The only thing I didn’t see mentioned, which I think will in 100 years time be considered a turning point in modern civilization, is how Reagan disregarded Jimmy Carter’s warning about peak oil and energy conservation.
The U.S. had a collective memory of the oil shocks of 1973 and was on a road toward becoming much more energy efficient. The U.S. HAD a conservation programme in place and WAS investing in alternative fuel development in the late 1970s. There were ad campaigns telling people to turn down their thermostats, shut off lights and all the rest, and Americans were buying smaller, gas-efficient cars in droves.
Reagan blew all that off. Damn energy conservation. Damn reducing dependence on oil. Damn developing a vigorous programme of investment in energy alternatives so that we could transition to a post-oil future. Damn taking any steps that may send the message that we have to exercise a little discipline NOW in order to ensure a better future for our kids. No siree, go out and buy those SUVs. Build suburbs 50 miles from downtown (and away from those horrible welfare queens) and make that commute. You deserve it. Let’s party.
Because of Reagan we lost 40 years of alternative energy research, investment, development and (most importantly) implementation. We could have been in a much better place to cope with the coming oil scarcity and would have been able to tell Saudi Arabia, Iraq and all those other oppressive regimes to take a flying leap. We could have reduced carbon emissions and not been in the climate change predicament we are in now. Instead we are spending billions on a resource war to maintain our dependence on a fuel which is becoming harder and harder to find and bring to market in a cost effective manner, and will be spending trillions to deal with climate change soon.
Now I happen to believe that Jame Howard Kunstler is correct and we are headed towards a wall as a civilization because of overpopulation, climate change and peak oil. (And if you haven’t read The Long Emergency you should.) But I am willing to bet that in a hundred years time when this world will be unrecognizable, they will be pointing their fingers at Reagan whose policies made our current and future problems much worse than they could have been and calling him one of the worst political leaders of the 20th Century.
Dr. Morpheus
Respectfully John, you couldn’t be more wrong about Reagan. I was in my twenties while Reagan was president so I remember him quite well.
Reagan sucked, hard.
He was a coward, cut and ran after 400 Marines were killed and then followed that up with a bogus PR stunt invasion of Grenada.
He supported terrorists who murdered and raped in Central America and said that they were the “moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers”.
He ignored the AIDS crisis and the resulting suffering and deaths.
He ran up a monumental deficit and then casually dismissed it giving craven, power-hungry thieves a rational for the next thirty years for their thefts.
He was a racist who used racial dog whistles and started his presidential campaign in the town of the murdered three civil rights activists.
He was a loathsome, disgusting, hypocritical, empty headed, cowardly bastard who enabled the wholesale looting of the public treasury by the subsequent Republican Congresses and Administrations.
And I’m being kind.
I agree with this guy’s summary of Ronald Reagen 100%.
chopper
@Sentient Puddle:
the thing i’ll give HW the most credit for is pretty deftly handling the fall of communism, at least from an american point of view (especially given how we were caught asleep at the switch) – that could have been screwed up 10 different ways.
Cerberus
I’m sure it’s already been covered and I understand that Generation X has some weird fixation on the man being anything less than the moment the republican party had a choice between breaking away from Nixon or doubling down with a pint of psycho fundamentalist christianity and went for the doubling down, but I’m sorry, Reagan can burn in Hell.
Why?
First, AIDS Crisis. He gleefully denied its existence and prevented any aid whatsoever to suffering gay men at their lowest most vulnerable time because he agreed with his base that AIDS was the gay plague come to punish gays and blacks for their filthy ways.
Second, Apartheid. He didn’t just “support” it like it was some hand-wave and didn’t mean it. Ronald Reagan and the US under him was the single biggest defender of the apartheid regime in South Africa, providing direct material support, deflecting the criticism of a number of other nations, and blocking most attempts at international sanctions. He personally believed in the Apartheid cause and was one of the prime reasons they were able to extend themselves into some of the worst abuses of the latter years.
Third, treason. Oh yeah, treason. Reagan was the original Bush v Gore, extralegal elected official and gave himself his “sunny in America, good times are here” bullshit on the back of bloody treason. Yeah, Iran-Contra was bad, but no one seems to remember the reason for Iran-Contra. It wasn’t just because of his support of fascists in central America. It was to reward Iran for holding up their half of a deal to delay the release of the American hostages during the Iran hostage crisis until after his inauguration rather than before the election so that he could be elected over Jimmy Carter. When you further note that Jimmy Carter was the last president we’ve had who actually tried to fix systemic problems and Reagan birthed the cult of “tax cuts solve everything” and the general media narratives that posit that anything like being Jimmy Carter is the death knell of a presidency, one can see how vile this act was above and beyond its initial act of treason for short term profit.
Fourth, erasing the New Deal. Reagan was the start of the erasure of the New Deal. Sure, Nixon was a fucker and blocked many new potential New Deal positive social benefits for petty reasons (including a national health care system), but Reagan was the first president to set his eyes on actually dismantling what already exists. He bred a whole generation of Gen X libertarians and disciples who were pathologically devoted to the slow wasting away of and outright attempts to destroy positive social programs in order to prove that “government is always the problem”. He is the reason our cities are decaying, our public school systems have been collapsing and every agency seems close to crisis as well as the zombie “tax cut” crowd and an unnatural number of people in their 30s to 50s who even when they see the wreckage all around them will nonchalantly refer to themselves as fiscal conservatives. Also, the crisis today has direct roots to Reagan’s plan to loot the government to destroy it and the nihilism that has gripped the Republican Party. It is also worth noting that he is also the origin of the deficits don’t matter to Republicans only to Democrats hypocrisy seen in every fiscal conservative from John McCain to Ben Nelson as well as the notion that military doesn’t count, because he provided the prime example of radically increasing the military budget over worthless notions like Star Wars or needing even more nukes despite being able to single-handedly destroy the world.
Fifth, Central and South America. It wasn’t the origin of the backing of fascist leaders, coups of democratically elected leaders, or financing brutal pogroms against socialistically or even Obama-style reform local leaders and nuns, but it was the most brutal years as well as the years where it went from side-hobbie of the CIA to prime directive of the CIA, forever disgracing the agency in the eyes of the world. It was also the most transparent and a direct precursor to our recent torture debate crisis. Reagan was able to use his somehow likable empty suit personality to aw-shucks and “don’t hit me I have Alzheimer’s” his way out financing assassinations, torture regimes, and open support for fascists even after the shit hit the fan in a big way thus opening the door for cutting out the middle man and just torture people ourselves as well as fund our own assassination rings under VP Cheney.
Sixth, and finally, perfecting the Southern Strategy and making racism hip again. Yes, every era is in effect a positive change forward for real relations, but the Reagan era was one that had lasting repercussions for blacks. The Southern Strategy was a bit in crisis following Nixon’s epic criminality. Indeed Jimmy Carter was presenting a direct means of breaking it apart by applying his southern evangelicism that had been the heart of the Southern Strategy towards positive progressive notions of class. Reagan with an awe shucks, made racism personable and perfected the dog whistles that are still used today to hide outright antipathy for women, gays, blacks, and jews. He is the reason we have a “liberal media” (full of jews), people are “pro-life” (pro-punishing sluts), and “urban areas are full of crime” (and black people). His most famous linguistic invention is “welfare queens” for god’s sake. But Reagan was uncannily personable, so the type of overt racism and powerful urge among poor whites to not care how much they got screwed as long as a black person got hit harder, was treated as personable, grandfatherly, just an aw shucks, peachy keen way to be. He dismantled the remains of the Great Society works and birthed the “rural” i.e. suburban/exurban-urban antipathy and hostility that is the result of things like the teabaggers and the crazy 27%.
Reagan presided over treason, rapturist christians in control of our environment and red button, the looting of our economy, and direct palpable evil that we’ve scoured from our memories. And yet somehow people who should know better have sanitized those years in their minds and have a black hole where no wrong can stick to a man who was arguably the most evil president we’ve ever had. I don’t understand it and I’ll probably never understand it.
Bush may have been a lot of things, but he was a shadow of Reagan’s horror. I shudder to imagine how much worse the torture crisis or America itself would have been in the 00s if Reagan was president. A competently evil master of perception given the greatest PR gift for Republicans the world ever saw? It wouldn’t have been wasted on George Bush’s daddy issues and some recreational torture. We would simply have no more elections ever.
I’d take the moose rapist over Reagan again.
bernard
how anyone could say anything good about Reagan proves the wackiness in America. he was the beginning of the end of the American dream, neatly packaged though.
now i know you haven’t a clue about politics, republicanism and America.
wow and you claim to be able to think. NOT!!
by the way, i voted for him, once. lol. i learned from my mistake here.
Cerberus
Arrgh, moderation, let me try again.
I’m sure it’s already been covered and I understand that Generation X has some weird fixation on the man being anything less than the moment the republican party had a choice between breaking away from Nixon or doubling down with a pint of psycho fundamentalist christianity and went for the doubling down, but I’m sorry, Reagan can burn in Hell.
Why?
First, AIDS Crisis. He gleefully denied its existence and prevented any aid whatsoever to suffering gay men at their lowest most vulnerable time because he agreed with his base that AIDS was the gay plague come to punish gays and blacks for their filthy ways.
Second, Apartheid. He didn’t just “support” it like it was some hand-wave and didn’t mean it. Ronald Reagan and the US under him was the single biggest defender of the apartheid regime in South Africa, providing direct material support, deflecting the criticism of a number of other nations, and blocking most attempts at international sanctions. He personally believed in the Apartheid cause and was one of the prime reasons they were able to extend themselves into some of the worst abuses of the latter years.
Third, treason. Oh yeah, treason. Reagan was the original Bush v Gore, extralegal elected official and gave himself his “sunny in America, good times are here” bullshit on the back of bloody treason. Yeah, Iran-Contra was bad, but no one seems to remember the reason for Iran-Contra. It wasn’t just because of his support of fascists in central America. It was to reward Iran for holding up their half of a deal to delay the release of the American hostages during the Iran hostage crisis until after his inauguration rather than before the election so that he could be elected over Jimmy Carter. When you further note that Jimmy Carter was the last president we’ve had who actually tried to fix systemic problems and Reagan birthed the cult of “tax cuts solve everything” and the general media narratives that posit that anything like being Jimmy Carter is the death knell of a presidency, one can see how vile this act was above and beyond its initial act of treason for short term profit.
Fourth, erasing the New Deal. Reagan was the start of the erasure of the New Deal. Sure, Nixon was a fucker and blocked many new potential New Deal positive social benefits for petty reasons (including a national health care system), but Reagan was the first president to set his eyes on actually dismantling what already exists. He bred a whole generation of Gen X libertarians and disciples who were pathologically devoted to the slow wasting away of and outright attempts to destroy positive social programs in order to prove that “government is always the problem”. He is the reason our cities are decaying, our public school systems have been collapsing and every agency seems close to crisis as well as the zombie “tax cut” crowd and an unnatural number of people in their 30s to 50s who even when they see the wreckage all around them will nonchalantly refer to themselves as fiscal conservatives. Also, the crisis today has direct roots to Reagan’s plan to loot the government to destroy it and the nihilism that has gripped the Republican Party. It is also worth noting that he is also the origin of the deficits don’t matter to Republicans only to Democrats hypocrisy seen in every fiscal conservative from John McCain to Ben Nelson as well as the notion that military doesn’t count, because he provided the prime example of radically increasing the military budget over worthless notions like Star Wars or needing even more nukes despite being able to single-handedly destroy the world.
Fifth, Central and South America. It wasn’t the origin of the backing of fascist leaders, coups of democratically elected leaders, or financing brutal pogroms against social.istically or even Obama-style reform local leaders and nuns, but it was the most brutal years as well as the years where it went from side-hobbie of the CIA to prime directive of the CIA, forever disgracing the agency in the eyes of the world. It was also the most transparent and a direct precursor to our recent torture debate crisis. Reagan was able to use his somehow likable empty suit personality to aw-shucks and “don’t hit me I have Alzheimer’s” his way out financing assassinations, torture regimes, and open support for fascists even after the shit hit the fan in a big way thus opening the door for cutting out the middle man and just torture people ourselves as well as fund our own assassination rings under VP Cheney.
Sixth, and finally, perfecting the Southern Strategy and making racism hip again. Yes, every era is in effect a positive change forward for real relations, but the Reagan era was one that had lasting repercussions for blacks. The Southern Strategy was a bit in crisis following Nixon’s epic criminality. Indeed Jimmy Carter was presenting a direct means of breaking it apart by applying his southern evangelicism that had been the heart of the Southern Strategy towards positive progressive notions of class. Reagan with an awe shucks, made racism personable and perfected the dog whistles that are still used today to hide outright antipathy for women, gays, blacks, and jews. He is the reason we have a “liberal media” (full of jews), people are “pro-life” (pro-punishing sluts), and “urban areas are full of crime” (and black people). His most famous linguistic invention is “welfare queens” for god’s sake. But Reagan was uncannily personable, so the type of overt racism and powerful urge among poor whites to not care how much they got screwed as long as a black person got hit harder, was treated as personable, grandfatherly, just an aw shucks, peachy keen way to be. He dismantled the remains of the Great Society works and birthed the “rural” i.e. suburban/exurban-urban antipathy and hostility that is the result of things like the teabaggers and the crazy 27%.
Reagan presided over treason, rapturist christians in control of our environment and red button, the looting of our economy, and direct palpable evil that we’ve scoured from our memories. And yet somehow people who should know better have sanitized those years in their minds and have a black hole where no wrong can stick to a man who was arguably the most evil president we’ve ever had. I don’t understand it and I’ll probably never understand it.
Bush may have been a lot of things, but he was a shadow of Reagan’s horror. I shudder to imagine how much worse the torture crisis or America itself would have been in the 00s if Reagan was president. A competently evil master of perception given the greatest PR gift for Republicans the world ever saw? It wouldn’t have been wasted on George Bush’s daddy issues and some recreational torture. We would simply have no more elections ever.
I’d take the moose rapist over Reagan again.
Dr. Morpheus
Oh, and let’s not forget his laying a wreath at the graves of SS Nazi scum at Bitberg.
And claiming that, “they were victims too”.
The man was indeed a monster.
iLarynx
@ Svensker (79)
Well, there you go again with more Reagan mythology. In reality, Reagan stupidly put the Marines in Beirut despite strong advice against doing that (and basic logic).
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,183262,00.html
Reagan realized that the Marines shouldn’t be there ONLY after hundreds of US servicemen were killed in “the deadliest single-day death toll for the United States Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima of World War II, the deadliest single-day death toll for the United States military since the first day of the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War, and the deadliest single attack on Americans overseas since World War II.”
Reagan and his administration eventually, and begrudgingly backed out of Beirut after initially implying that it would be cowardly to do so:
Reagan may have given a lot of people the warm fuzzies by reminding them of their ol’ grandpa, but he was an awful president.
leo
I think Reagan was the appealing face to the same ideology that informs current rightwingers.
That said, if you tell me you still like the guy, I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.
Raenelle
He was the original hippie puncher. Fuck him.
darryl
Fixed.
Dr. Morpheus
@John Cole:
Uh, no, it’s counter-productive to bolster the mythology around Reagan.
Let the scales fall from the eyes of converts. Reagan was a monster.
I ain’t backing off from that no matter whose feelings get hurt.
It’s time for some fucking Yuppy punching.
CS Lewis Jr.
I have to agree with Roy Blount, Jr. when it comes to Reagan “I never had any use for the son of a bitch.” He did horrible damage to this country that we never recovered from.
His administration was a nightmare, and anyone who has a “warm spot” for him or found him charismatic is either a poltroon or has a massive blind spot where their political judgment should be (sorry, John, but seriously … Ronald fucking Reagan??????? Are you from the Alternate Earth where the man wasn’t a reactionary imbecile?). The fact that he is not considered a national disgrace is staggering. It is one of the most powerful examples of two facts: The U.S. electorate is barely sentient, and we have no historical memory.
Of course I’m a terrible elitist for pointing this out. And George W. Bush is Winston Churchill.
Cerberus
And as others mentioned, he also openly sympathized with the SS, opened his campaign talking about state’s rights at the site where Freedom Riders were lynched, oh yeah, and probably destroyed the planet. We were actually starting to fix global warming in the late 70s. The gas crisis and some positive press for the green movement was starting to win over the middle class to the notion of greener vehicles, investment in green energy, lowered dependence on fossil fuels, and cleaning up the factories before crises like Los Angeles spread (people actually cared about cities being engulfed in pollution). But as others noted, President Ray-gun put a stop to that right quick, birthing the yuppie/fundamentalist movement of “let’s exploit the fuck out of the planet, yeehaw” that has successfully blocked movement in that direction for 30 years, 30 years that some scientists say were our only chance to avoid the catastrophic effects of climate change.
One thing I’m proud and glad to see is that Gen Xers seem to be the only people carrying around a rosy picture of the man. History is already beginning to sour over what he actually did and try as they might, I imagine future historians, if any survive the environmental crises will point to Reagan as the exact moment the American empire collapsed and was unsalvageable. Because as “personable” as his speeches may have been if you tuned out the actual words, his actions were those of sociopath. And history will eventually wash out the defenders to the point that it will be a curiosity like how was McCarthy ever so popular.
JoJo
Reagan wasn’t a hater? Are you kidding me? He constantly railed about Welfare Queens and quotas, and don’t forget, he kicked off his 1980 compaign in Meridian, Mississippi, the town where the civil rights workers were murdered.
FormerSwingVoter
I hate to say it, but there’s a lot of (misguided) affection for Reagan out there, and not just among hardcore Republicans. When we rant about the evils of Saint Ronnie, it makes us look like lunatics to every undecided voter out there.
I think it has something to do with the man being dead and having been out of office for a while – most people can’t name a single thing he did other than cut taxes and talk tough to the Soviets. But still. There’s plenty of thugs we can mock and insult without alienating every moderate voter in the country.
liberal
@res ipsa loquitur:
Exactly. Dude was racist scum. Hope he’s having fun burning in hell.
Cerberus
@Dr. Morpheus:
This. We’ve coddled Reagan for decades, allowed his myth to be unsullied by his actual actions and otherwise coddle what are the 80s equivalent of the “return to the 50s” nostalgia. Basically people wanting to relive the simplicity of childhood and young adulthood where life was Transformers and getting laid and life seemed so much easier. Sorry, but your childhood wasn’t a sunny new wave saturday morning cartoon.
Basically,
It’s time for some fucking Yuppy punching
This.
Why do we continually let everyone punch the hippies who were at least trying in the limited way any group of stoners can be while leaving alone the proud to be a white male fucktards who have and continue to this day fuck up all of our shit.
Wile E. Quixote
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford:
I don’t know, how many did he fuck in the ass or share needles with? What the fuck is it with the whole “Reagan killed people with AIDS” shit? What was he supposed to do, send the 82nd Airborne into San Francisco burn every bathhouse to the ground and shoot the owners? Seriously, what the fuck was Reagan supposed to do about AIDS? Go on national TV and say “Well, having lots and lots of unprotected sex and shooting smack are bad ideas, you should all use condoms and not shoot up?”
Newsflash. Despite what Larry Kramer would like you to believe shooting smack and having lots and lots of unprotected sex were not consequence free activities before the 20th of January, 1981.
liberal
@Martin:
That’s true. One other good thing is the 1986 tax reforms, which closed a bunch of loopholes and treated various forms of income more equally.
Of course, that’s all been undone now by his Republican descendents.
CobbleHillCurmudgeon
I second toujoursdan’s recommendation for Kunstler’s “Long Emergency”. Just have some anti-depressants handy.
FormerSwingVoter
@John Cole:
Shit, it’s a little off-putting for me, and I know he was much worse than people want to believe. People in a certain age bracket just can’t seem to judge him objectively, myself included.
It’d be like… like if Repubs talked shit about JFK every time his name was mentioned, I guess. Ronnie was the JFK of the right, or the JFK of the eighties, or something.
Hob
No one has posted the obligatory Tim Kreider Reagan head?
John, I guess I understand what you’re trying to say here:
…but I don’t see the point of saying it. It’s not like there are Democrats out in the streets or on TV saying bad things about Reagan. You’re asking a bunch of blog commenters to watch what they say in blog comments. Because…? A recently converted Republican might read Balloon Juice and decide that the commenters are not nice people?
We know we’re not supposed to talk shit about Reagan. The myth has entirely taken over in the mainstream; Democrats, liberals, everyone’s supposed to love the guy. That’s why it’s hard to resist talking shit about him here. We’re bitching about the irritating bullshit we’ve been hearing our entire lives, which we know we will continue to hear until we die, about a guy who personally affected many of our lives for the worse. If we can’t do it here, then where?? (Besides our secret blasphemy meetings at the abandoned lard factory, I mean.)
SB Jules
Reagan was governor of CA when I was in college. He demonized UC students and began the destruction of the wonderful university system that Clark Kerr and Pat Brown set up. The only good thing he did as governor was legalize abortion in the state.
As far as I’m concerned, he continued his war on ordinary citizens as President. And of course he traded arms for hostages and arranged with Iran NOT to release the hostages until after the 1980 election. He was a charasmatic, evil guy.
Bender
Give it up, John. These guys think that Minnesota and Washington, DC, were the only sensible results. “Everyone else was delusional, we didn’t know how good we had it under Jimmah Arafat! And Reagan personally killed people with AIDS! And he ballooned the deficit, but not like Obama! The bad way!”
We know from polls that more Democrats approve of Reagan in retrospect than disapprove…just not the Marxists that you hang with here.
Reagan is to neoBolsheviks what Obama is to Real Americans. A dimwitted, untrustworthy, out-of-his-depth sockpuppet for his unseen masters.
MobiusKlein
@Cerberus:
Hey, don’t insult us GenXers.
Screw him – Arm’s for Hostages – and the rest – James Watt
Sarah would be worse though.
liberal
@LGRooney:
Very interesting.
Let’s grant, however, for sake of argument, that he hastened the fall of the USSR (maybe by a decade or two). As with any “benefit,” we should ask what the cost was.
One thing Reagan did was place Pershing missiles in Europe. AFAICT the Pershing was a true first strike weapon—IIRC it could use radar for flight correction, and was hence extremely accurate.
That meant, of course, that the Soviets (with their crap computers) were that much more hair-trigger.
The point? That you should always compute on a risk-adjusted basis. That St. Ronnie might have hastened the fall of the USSR by a few years, at the cost of increasing the chance the entire world could be fried, is a pretty piss-poor bargain.
Fergus Wooster
@FormerSwingVoter:
I kind of think of him as similar to Pope John Paul II. A friendly, genial face that nobody can dislike, pushing sociopathic policies that cause decades of untold suffering and ultimately accelerate the decline of his institution.
When his Cheney, Ratzinger, became Pope the mask fell.
Cerberus
@FormerSwingVoter:
Well, I’ll remember that when I run for political office, but while I remain a citizen, I have learned the hard way that self-censorship never works. Self-censorship keeps lies alive, trains the idea that truth is dangerous and allows a status quo to exist that is based on those lies.
The fact that “moderates”, a group I despise by the way, like Reagan is exactly why “moderates” still promote his policies even when they are proven failures. Why we see republicans buckle down on “starve the government” tactics and “moderates” coming to their defense and susceptible to their frames of “fiscal conservatism”.
Until we defeat the allure of Reagan, those “moderates” we would “alienate” with our hippieness, will always be one tax cut speech or one “tough talk” speech or one “we need bipartisanship” speech from running right back to the republican party.
Now, we can certainly blame that on any nearby hippies (you there, you must have startled him by mentioning a non-white man or saying disparaging things about a conservative icon) or we can do what liberals do best, maximize a variety of strategies where some do the soft sell, some do the shock treatment or the rude awakening, and some try and educate and radicalize.
And frankly, if they can’t stand reality in regards to Reagan, how susceptible are they going to be to reality in regards to other cultural myths like the sexist view of the world, the racist view of the world, the homophobic view of the world, the infinite resources view of the world, the magic of tax cuts, or bipartisanship?
Or should we also soft sell those? Cause frankly, I’ve seen where this path leads, it’s called the Democratic Party.
liberal
@Bender:
Well, yeah, if “the bad way” means “while the economy is expanding, as opposed to during the greatest contraction the economy has seen since the Great Depression,” then yes.
Of course, right-wingers like yourself know jack about economics.
toujoursdan
@Bender:
Learn a little Keynesian economics. Governments are supposed to run surpluses during economic expansions and deficits to stimulate the economy during recessions/depressions.
Reagan didn’t get the memo, evidently.
FormerSwingVoter
@Bender: “Real Americans” is not a synonym for teabaggers. We were born here too, fuckwit.
This is not your country. It is our country. All of us. And there are many fewer of you than your radio tells you there is. Otherwise, Dems wouldn’t win elections.
toujoursdan
@Wile E. Quixote:
Do you even remember the AIDS crisis?
First of all not everyone who got AIDs did so through unprotected sex and sharing needles. A public education campaign to alert not only gay men and drug users, but haemophillics, blood product recipients, hospital workers, pregnant mothers and the partners of people in all these groups could have done much to reduce the transmission of AIDS. He could have set up hospices and other care facilities for people with AIDS and funded more research (which could have led to the development of a workable AIDS test sooner.)
Instead Reagan did nothing while his supporters were calling for the mass roundup of HIV+ people for tattooing and internment in concentration camps.
Dr. Morpheus
@Wile E. Quixote:
1. He could have alerted the nation about the epidemic.
2. He could have been a voice railing against the hatred and bigotry against gay men and women.
3. He could have started providing condoms and needle exchanges.
4. He could have pushed for Federal funding for AIDS treatment.
5. He could have provided hospice services for terminal AIDS victims who were bankrupt from hospital bills or were too poor to pay for it themselves.
6. He could have, at the very least, gave a shit.
Cerberus
@Hob:
Shh, we’re not supposed to mention those.
But, this.
It’s kind of sick to get smacked around for “constantly badmouthing him every time his name is mentioned” when the surrounding culture is so deferential. If there is literally no place, no area where his name can be sullied, where we are supposed to keep his name hollowed both in public, but also “with family” among ideological peers, where exactly are we allowed to speak truth to power?
It is very reminiscent of the advice feminists get to avoid speaking up about the overwhelming rape culture or the right to abortion because it might alienate men to the point where it becomes rude to even mention it in the company of other women or feminists.
But how are the Reagan worshippers ever going to let go of their false idol if we don’t point out the truth? Do we just kindly pretend your childhood icons were the golden towers they were until the last member of Generation X is dead and buried?
Or do we do the same slow work present in deflating every cultural myth?
The founding fathers owned slaves, Reagan was an asshole, there is no Santa Claus, and JFK was a serial adulterer. Also, the tooth fairy and the easter bunny are your parents.
Hob
@Redshirt: I don’t understand your point about Watchmen. Reagan wasn’t “replaced” with Nixon — Nixon just never left. The whole point was that if we had the ability to back up our foreign policy with a 500-foot-tall invincible god-man, then militarism and right-wing bullshit would face even less of a reality check than they have now. In both the comic and the movie, a constitutional amendment made it possible for Nixon to be re-elected indefinitely, after we won in Vietnam. It’s also strongly suggested that Nixon’s domestic political opponents were removed via superhero assassin.
Alan Moore hated Reagan with a burning passion, but his use of Nixon in Watchmen is appropriate to the timeline of the story– and works pretty well as a comment on real ’80s politics too, because it’s basically saying that Nixon’s evil spirit really never did leave us.
liberty60
Reagan transitioned from a New Deal Democrat to a conservative Republican.
I wonder how many pissing matches he got in with his new Republican buddies, over his warm spot for FDR?
None. Because he- and they- were savvy enough not to get sucked into pissing matches with each other over historical grudges, when they had DFH’s to fight.
Like John, I am a former Reagan Republican turned DFH. I won’t bother to argue with anyone over what coulda/shoulda/woulda been 35 years ago.
Not when we have a common enemy in the Teabaggers.
SGEW
Lord love me, I can’t read this whole thread right now (tho’ I want to).
All I can add is that, as a child, I thought that Reagan’s bon mot about Desmond Tutu was pretty funny.
Stefan
He was a charismatic guy, and for a lot of people like me, even though we know his policies may not have worked out for the best in the long term in every situation and in some cases were criminal, we still have a fondness for him.
Franz Liebkind: Not many people know it, but the Fuehrer was a terrific dancer.
eemom
@Stefan:
he liked dogs too. As did Stalin.
Batocchio
Reagan could be an affable fellow, also rather distant to even his close circle, by most accounts. I don’t have a big problem with someone liking him or his persona on a personal level.
But Reagan was always the triumph of personality over substance. His actual policies were mostly horrible. Give him some credit for talking to the Soviet Union, but his economic policies were horrendous, we’re still living with the consequences, and the current crop are pushing even more reckless policies. He tried to eliminate the NEA and other agencies, classify ketchup and relish as vegetables, race-baited and screwed over the poor. While not a dunce, he would settle on a notion, and most of the time, after that facts would not sway him from his fantasies.
Norquist and the rest have been selling a cartoon Saint Ronnie, and Reagan himself would fail their purity tests. Reagan was practical enough not to believe his own bullshit on not raising taxes and some other matters when necessary. If you want to like Reagan the person, fine, but as Will Bunch points out, the Reagan myth needs to be torn down for the good of the country. At the very least, the current zealots need to be challenged.
Jody
Whoa. A bit late to the game, I see. But I wanna throw in my two cents.
I understand where you’re coming from completely in regard to Reagan, John. I’m well over 30, and was a republican for a time.
FUCK Reagan. He was a hater in nice guy’s clothing.
This. Dear god, all of it. Just fuck Reagan. He did so much fucking evil and so many people STILL look back ‘fondly’ at him. His biggest accomplishment was disguising his evil so well people STILL look back on him with wistful nostalgia.
This is how I know we’re fucked. People will idolize monsters so long as they’re packaged properly.
Wile E. Quixote
Oh, and do you want to know why Reagan won? It’s because during the 1970s and 1980s the Democratic party was completely and totally fucking worthless. Remember Walter Mondale? What a total piece of shit. Walter Mondale was a worthless, insignificant, glad-handing piece of shit who never accomplished anything in the Senate other than funneling massive quantities of dairy subsidy cash to his idiot constituents in Minnesota. He was a hack who completely lacked anything even remotely resembling charisma, but despite that he ended up being the Democratic candidate against Reagan in 1984. Why? Well because he had been Jimmy Carter’s VP (yeah, that’s a brilliant strategy, pick the VP of the guy who lost the last election as your candidate) and because the Democratic Party leadership was as sclerotic as the Politburo. And who did Wally the Winner select as his VP? Geraldine Ferraro, who, if a contest was held for “biggest and most completely unqualified token minority political pick of the 20th century” were held would be neck and neck with Clarence Thomas for the title. And lo and behold, in November of 1984 this dynamic duo got their asses handed to them in one of the biggest landslides in history.
Liberals love to complain about how evil Reagan was, well maybe he was, but it’s not as if the Democratic party did anything effective from 1964 until 1992. You had Jimmy Carter narrowly eking out a victory over the hugely unpopular Gerry Ford who barely received his party’s nomination in 1976, presided over a terrible economy and pardoned Richard Nixon. You had Carter losing to Reagan in 1980 by a landslide. You had Mondale’s pathetic 1984 candidacy. You had Gary Hart daring the press to find out if he was cheating on his wife. You had Alan Cranston campaigning for a nuclear freeze while simultaneously pushing for more B-1 bombers and the pathetic candidacy of Michael Dukakis.
Hell, the only reason that Clinton won in 1992 was because the economy sucked and H. Ross Perot siphoned votes away from Bush. For the generation of Americans that came of age in the 1970s and 1980s Democratic party proved itself to be a political party of complete and utter ineptitude and they’re still completely and totally incompetent. Look at Gore’s campaign in 2000 or Kerry’s campaign in 2004. Either one of them should have mopped the floor with Bush, neither one of them did. Look at the way the Democrats handled Joe Lieberman. The man stabbed them in the back in 2008 and endorsed the other party’s presidential candidate, an act of political treason, and what happened to him? Absolutely nothing, the Democratic “leadership” just clutched the viper more tightly to their bosoms. Look at the incompetence of the Clinton campaign in 2008.
The Republican party is evil, but the Democratic party is an ineffective joke. The people who brag about how they’ve been lifelong Democrats remind me of a lyric in Tom Lehrer’s song The Folk Song Army
Is our Democrats learning yet?
Redshirt
@Hob: I stand corrected, Hob. Thank you. It has been sometime since I read Watchmen, and I think I’ve mixed up my memory of it with Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns”, which (SPOILER!) features a Reagan looking president using Superman for all sorts of dirty business.
Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
@Jody: This.
Reagan was evil. He was the fountainhead of the vast wave of corruption that has destroyed representative democracy in this country. That racist, misogynist, homophobic motherfucker deserves to burn in hell a billion times over for all of eternity. And for the record, any of you zombie-ass-kissing motherfuckers who want to tell me what a saint that millennial, globular asshole was is welcome to come talk to me about it. Maybe we can have a drink over the graves of the friends and lovers of mine who died like animals in the fucking street while that piece of pious, glad-handing shit stood around mouthing platitudes about morning in America. Fuck him. And fuck anyone who who thinks he was anything other than a monster.
FormerSwingVoter
@liberty60: THIS. This. Thisthisthisthisthis.
PTirebiter
@Dr. Morpheus:
The Reagan myth has been entrenched for twenty years and is just now starting to show cracks. Previously unavailable Soviet files and new books like Hoffman’s, The Dead Hand are beginning to peel away the spin. Anyone who can be easily dismissed as a “hater” will only add noise and delay the process. I lived under Reagan as my Governor and President, no one wants the myth and his destructive legacy exposed more than me.
eyelessgame
@Evinfuilt:
<grateful>Hm, placing those around this text doesn’t appear to have any interesting effect. Ah, well. Blog software.</grateful>
gwangung
Well, personally, I think Reagan was a likeable politician, but strucutrally was quite counter productive. If folks are interested, I can tell ’em why, and show where they’re mistaken, but if they don’t want to listen, I won’t smack ’em in the face. That just annoys them and wastes my time.
Cerberus
@Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion:
(Gives a flower and big hug) I’m from the later generation of LGBT, grew up in a time where the scars from that ugly time have been bandaged over.
Reading the history, listening to the oral testimonies from that time, it’s like something out of a nightmare. The strength and fortitude of the community at that time, gay and bisexual men watching friends and lovers die, LBT stepping up to the plate and trying to make a gleeful world actually step up and help rather than getting out their sick desire to see gay men die.
You were heroes all and you have my eternal praise and sympathies.
John
@BTD:
That ignores Bush 1’s most important accomplishment, which was that he negotiated the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany without incident. It all happened so smoothly that we forget about how much of a disaster it could have been, and that it wasn’t owes a lot to Bush. German reunification and the anti-Gorbachev coup in 1991 were probably the two most important moments for American foreign policy for a generation, and Bush handled both just about perfectly.
I’d add that Reagan does deserve some credit for the way the Cold War turned out, not for his first term hawkery, but for his second term dovery, which gave Gorbachev the space he needed to try to reform the Soviet system.
scudbucket
One thing not mentioned here is how Reagan began his political career as a die-hard New Deal, Economic Bill of Rights type Democrat. In the early 50s he began moving to the right, and ended up advocating for tax burdens to be redistributed upwards, dissolution of unions, etc. Here’s an example of his earlier political views:
kindness
I voted for Jimmy Carter, twice. I thought during the 8 years of Hell the Reagan presidency ran, that I would never see another Administration in my life that was built upon lies and false facades. Then I had to live through dubya’s reign.
It’s OK if you have the warm & fuzzies for Alzenheimer Ronnie. Please don’t act like we should humor or respect you for it.
More critter pictures!
MagicPanda
Hm. I like how John’s call for moderation on the Reagan hate ended up with a 250+ comment thread of… this.
Either proves that John was right or John was wrong. Not sure which.
JGabriel
Hob:
This.
.
frankdawg
it just hit me where I heard this rant before:
“Now you fellas have said some pretty mean things. Some of which *were* true under that fiend, Boss Grissom. He *was* a thief, and a terrorist. On the other hand he had a tremendous singing voice.”
jenniebee
Reagan was a man who loved his country – and it showed, and it made people love him for it – but he loved it because he thought it was one in which everybody who wanted to could live just like he did. And that’s not true. It is necessary in a capitalist system for there to be losers. What Reagan very forthrightly advocated was the idea that if there wasn’t the very real possibility for people of not being able to afford decent space to live in or to see a doctor or to feed their children nutritious food, then those people wouldn’t be properly incentivized to do any work at any wage. He convinced a lot of middle class people that the reason the middle class wasn’t living better was that the working poor weren’t working as hard as the middle class was. And while he was president, his domestic policies were all about heightening the incentives to work. And the 99% of us who really do work for a living slid right down with the poor and blamed the poor for it the whole way down.
I get it that he seemed like a really nice guy, and that he was always about optimism and always telling you that it wasn’t your fault and that the reason problems existed in the country was that other people who didn’t know better weren’t playing by the rules. But I’m never going to be able to look at disenchanted Republicans who are full of Reagan love as anything but the political equivalent of battered wives. What you see now is the end result of what Reagan wrought.
gwangung
@kindness:
Like the way you put it.
@Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion:
Your passion is nothing to apologize for; wear it proudly.
geg6
@Wile E. Quixote:
Wow, either you weren’t alive during the start of the AIDS crisis, were too young to know anything at all, or are a real asshole.
Since you seem to have missed it and have some sort of grudge against ACTUP and Larry Kramer, perhaps you might have missed the whole part about Reagan refusing to acknowledge the entire epidemic, his lack of action on protecting the blood supply, and his love for blaming the victims, whether they were IV drug users, gays, or recipients of blood transfusions. The whole fucking epidemic BECAME an epidemic in this country because this dickhead refused to act.
But what’s a few tens of thousands of dead and infected people when you can punch a hippie or a gay on a blog?
licensed to kill time
Meh. Reagan was the first politician that made me swear to leave the country if he was elected president. He was, and I did. W was the second, and (dare I say?) ditto. I’m not saying they were the entire reason but it just worked out that way, which was a good thing because I’d hate to look like I don’t follow through on my threats. They can both go to hell, or in Reagan’s case maybe stay there and W can giddy-up and go anytime now thankyouverymuch.
Ash Can
Bullshit. It’s about goddamned time they woke the goddamned hell up and figured out just how much damage Ronald Reagan did to both the Republican Party and the United States in general. Like CS Lewis Jr. says above, we still haven’t completely recovered from his years in national office. Choose between him and the current crop of Republican assholes? Moot point. They’re all his legacy, every last insufferable one of them. He and his administration started this country down the slippery slope to every major problem we have today, beginning with the thoroughly fucked-up — evil, even — idea that government should exist basically as nothing other than a military force. Was he likeable? Sure. He was affable, he had a good sense of humor, he was a good speaker (he had to be, since he was an actor), and I’m convinced that if I sat next to him in the Wrigley Field grandstand and watched a ballgame with him I’d have a hell of a good time with him. But when it comes to what he did to this country, I’ll be sore at him for a long, long time. As renato here once said, Reagan made Americans feel better about being American like getting drunk makes people feel better about being broke and unemployed. Seriously, what the hell good was he?
Spiffy McBang
Can’t read all these comments, so something similar may have been said, but since my comment was almost identical to the quoted one: The point, at least to me, is not to bash Reagan. Reagan left office when I was 11, so I don’t have any real concept of him except as a fairly charismatic guy. It’s that when people make posts like Edwards’, it’s as if they’re trying to prove their points have merit because they can argue how Reaganesque they are, rather than letting their arguments stand or fall on their own.
This, incidentally, helps explain why I read Larison. He might have warm fuzzies for Reagan too, I don’t know. But that’s the point- whether he does or not, it isn’t relevant to his comments and critiques, so there’s no reason to bring it up.
Will
On the point of choosing, I’d pick the modern Republicans every time.
Rather an incompetent monster than a competent one. It’s still painful, but the pain doesn’t last for decades.
And as I say this, I’m mentally imagining John Cole’s future doppelganger hating on a group of liberals for not understanding his love for G.W. Bush.
Jody
Ash Can:
Bingo. If people don’t speak up about just what a fucking train wreck Reagan actually was for the nation, the myth will never cease.
Call it a pissing match if you want. It’s a reaction to thirty years of republican whitewashing of an awful man.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@liberal:
That isn’t true. His ballooning of the deficit started when we were IN a recession in the early 80’s. It WAS fiscal stimulus. The big issue with Reagan is that once we pulled out of the recession he made no move toward bringing the budget back into balance.
Corner Stone
@Ash Can:
But that’s the whole point of his pity party trolling on this issue – he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to be disabused of the warm fuzzies he has for something that never existed. Reagan was never any of the things he so fondly remembers.
Tax Analyst
Reagan? Meh.
Wile E. Quixote
@geg6:
Well I’m an asshole, because I was alive back then. But unlike you I’ve read And the Band Played On which revealed that during the early years of the AIDS crisis much of the gay community behaved as stupidly and ignorantly as Reagan did. But to the gay community they’re sainted martyrs while Ronald Reagan is evil incarnate.
Oh, and remember the 1984 election? I do, because I was alive back then. Do you know how many times Walter Mondale made an issue of Reagan’s handling of the AIDS crisis? Why that would be a big, fat fucking zero, because Wally and the Democrats didn’t give any more of a fuck about AIDS victims than Ronnie and the Republicans did. And then, four years later, how much of an issue did Dukakis make about the Reagan administration’s handling of the AIDS crisis. Why that would be the same dynamic response that Wally Mondale did, which was zip, nada, fuck-all, jack-fucking-shit.
So continue to bitch about Reagan all you want, but bear in mind that the Democrats who were running against him at the time, with the exception of Jesse Jackson, didn’t give any more of a fuck about AIDS victims than Strom fucking Thurmond did and based upon their campaigns probably wouldn’t have done any more than Reagan did.
asiangrrlMN
@Ash Can: I agree with this. I knew from the moment I laid eyes on Reagan (and I am your age, too, Cole) that he was a fraud and should not be president. In fact, he’s probably what made me become so firmly a Democrat. I think that much of the current crop of ills stem directly from Reagan and his policies (starting with throwing mentally-ill people out of hospitals and his blasted trickle-down economics).
In addition, your question is disingenuous because I wouldn’t want either Reagan or the current crop of Republicans as president.
@Keith: I agree with this, too. The Reagan that is so beloved today never existed.
P.S. I, too, did not read all the comments, so my apologies for the repeat of thought.
Hob
@Wile E. Quixote: Besides what toujoursdan, Dr. Morpheus and geg6 already said– your name-dropping of Larry Kramer makes me think you just don’t know the history.
Kramer did a huge amount of good as an AIDS activist– ACT UP wasn’t just about railing at the government, it was about health education and treatment and community support. And in Kramer’s case (and he got a lot of shit for this) it was also about trying to scare people out into changing their ways. Even before HIV transmission was well understood, Larry Kramer was screaming at gay men to get out of the bathhouses and stop fucking around– “the party’s over” as he put it.
As for your snide remarks about people thinking unsafe sex and dirty needles were “consequence-free” before AIDS… first, that’s real classy to lump in gay men with junkies right off the bat, as if most junkies have ever paid much attention to health warnings, and as if straight people hadn’t been screwing like minks with no rubber ever since the Pill. People do what they can with the risks they know about. Bacterial STDs were all curable, herpes was something everyone was unfortunately blase about. You don’t think eating a hamburger is consequence-free – you might get high cholesterol, you might get salmonella – but if all those burgers had ended up giving everyone mad cow disease, only the most crazed PETA asshole would blame the victim like you just did.
Second, to the degree that people *did* understand those disease risks, it makes Reagan look even worse. Right at the beginning of AIDS, before anyone knew what it was, epidemiologists who had studied hepatitis B — which spreads in exactly the same ways, and was showing up in the same populations – started trying to raise the alarm that this was probably a blood-borne virus, and that there was no reason to think it would stay confined to any small subculture, and that we needed to be worrying about blood transfusions and developing an antibody test. If the federal government had gotten behind AIDS research and prevention in any serious way in the early ’80s — and they were the ones who had to do it, because the cultural stigma on the victims meant it wasn’t going to be a popular cause that would attract money — then we would’ve made progress sooner and saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Period.
birthmarker
All of the above. I was about 30 when he was first elected, and it was a long miserable 8 years. He promoted “trickle down” economics, famously called “tinkle on” economics by Archie Bunker. He began the systematic dismantling of our American dream, IMO. And Bush II was the transitional president who put the cherry on the cupcake of it all.
Also, in my recall, ( I haven’t looked it up) the vast “stimulus” under Reagan was mostly a huge increase in military spending.
I hope I live long enough for historians to begin to assign some credit to Carter. He wasn’t perfect, but the comments here about him, I deem pretty accurate.
HyperIon
well, let them clutch their fucking pearls.
Hob
WEQ – well now I see that you have read And the Band Played On, so all I can say is what the fuck.
As for the “a Democratic president wouldn’t have been any better” thing– I think that’s an irrelevant and pointlessly snide thing to say in the context of defending your previous bullshit remarks, but also I don’t think it’s even arguably true. Reagan owed a lot more to the religious right and social ultra-conservatives than any other president ever had, or (until W) ever would. Jerry Falwell had his ear, and Pat Buchanan had his back– Buchanan who had no trouble flat-out saying on TV that AIDS was God’s revenge on the gays. Reagan broke with the right on economic and military orthodoxy, sometimes; on “morality”, never. If you want to convince me that Carter or Mondale wouldn’t have done any better, you’ll have to do better than “they were wimpy and I don’t like them.”
Kay Shawn
John–You’re taking painkillers today, is that it?
EconWatcher
This thread seems to be over, but I’ll say it anyway: I’m with you, John. And I think many of Reagan’s policies were appropriate in their time and place. Marginal tax rates were too high and needed to come down. The regulatory burden on business needed to be ratcheted back a bit. While I don’t think Reagan was primarily responsible for the downfall of the Soviet Union, as wingnuts claim, I think he handled the situation well by pushing them hard and then softening when he could see Gorbachev was for real. There were many things I disagreed with, including his Central America policy. But overall, he responded pretty well to the problems of his time.
I voted for Obama because I think he will address the problems of our time better than the other guys. Our big problems now are not high taxes and too much regulation; they’re climate change and a financial sector out of control. Let’s hope that O does the job.
birthmarker
Read this and weep. And I’ll betcha there will be the same thing for W.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ronald_Reagan_Legacy_Project
DPirate
I don’t care if they adulate Reagon. I don’t care if they adulate Lincoln. I don’t care if they adulate Nixon. I don’t care if they adulate Bush. None of those people are ever going to be president again. Neither will Roosevelt or Clinton or Carter or Truman, etc. It makes no difference.
EconWatcher
By the way, I call b.s. on those of you above who called Reagan a coward for pulling out of Beirut after 250 marines were lost. Isn’t our beef with W precisely that he was a stubborn, ignorant jerk who did not consider or respond to facts?
Now you rip on Reagan because he quickly decided that Beirut was a fool’s errand–based on what happened–and cut our losses. That’s called pragmatism.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@birthmarker:
Also, in my recall, ( I haven’t looked it up) the vast “stimulus” under Reagan was mostly a huge increase in military spending.
It was, and most military spending is on personnel, aka jobs. The stimulus worked, too.
When the Reagan worshippers scream about how how evil the stimuls bill was, shove that down their collective throats.
birthmarker
I can’t link worth a …Google Reagan Legacy Project and then click on the Source Watch link. Be sure to read the Rogue’s Gallery of the Advisory Board. The same usual suspects.
fasteddie9318
@scudbucket
That’s easily explained: once the Democrats started sticking up for “them” (and you know who I mean), St. Ronnie was more than willing to toss his economic populism overboard to get back on the
whiteright side.kindness
uhh EconWatcher? That’s a whole load of shit. Reagan was only better than dubya because he had a better public relations gambit. Where as dubya was proud to shove the middle class & poor under the ‘give the already super wealthy all our money’ Reagan was discrete about it.
Did you forget that Reagan got the Ayatollah to hold off releasing the hostages till he was sworn in? Did you forget that Reagan armed a right wing militia in Central America with profits he made from selling Iran missile & military jet parts? Did you forget that Reagan is and was a Hollywood fraud? I guess you did. Screw your views.
jaxtra
he, and his minions ruined america, what we see today is a direct result of this man. so sue me if i say may he burn in hell for eternity
birthmarker
Oh, Oh!! The Savings and Loan Crisis!! Go read about it at wikipedia.
Tax Analyst
I still remember an occasion from the 80’s…it must have been right before the ’84 election. I was sitting on the can in the house I was renting at the time. Now just on the other side of a wire fence alongside the house was a business – “Beiber Lighting” I think it was. Anyway, two men were talking and one said he went to some club meeting the night before and everyone was talking up Reagan and the one guy says he tried to counter them by pointing out that Reagan was “not very compassionate” and lamenting that everyone just brushed that off. Then with a pause he goes, “I shoulda just told ’em he was a fucking lying sonofabitch”.
I don’t know if they could hear my laughter from their side of the fence, but I was nearly busting my guts out.
But I guess the joke was really on me (and all of us).
2liberal
reagan would have been more dangerous. He might succeed in getting rid of social security.
keestadoll
What is the record for most comments generated from a post on this site? Could this be some sort of test?
I’m wondering why John wasted so many characters in his post. All he had to say was “Ronald Reagan: not so bad? Go!”
2liberal
@Cerberus:
THIS. I think the point about releasing the Iranian hostages is questionable at best. Otherwise a very good analysis.
Nellcote
Just because it’s not been mentioned yet…union-busting! Firing the air traffic controlers.
And where did all that crack come from?
Cerberus
One more thing worth mentioning, he is also the politician directly responsible for birthing our inane “real america” obsessed modern media. Besides utterly decimating the anti-trust laws on media and birthing corporate owned media like we’ve never seen as well as stripping away the laws allowing something like Fox News or Clear Channel to rise up, he also did something much worse.
He got elected, he was super popular and he won where it matters by one of the largest margins ever. To the hard-working media hands of the old generation, Reagan was a laughably obvious empty-suit whose ideas were bankrupt and his history obscene (like Nixon, he got his political start being part of the McCarthy witch hunts in Hollywood). They couldn’t believe a moron and a shyster like him would amount to anything.
But he won where it counted and it birthed this sudden media self-examination that perhaps they really were out of touch with what “real america” thought and they should defer to the wise opinions of the ill-informed Rapturists on the 700 Club and John Birch Society lunatics. Perhaps they had gone wrong focusing on actual facts and they needed like Reagan just focus on the optics and whether something will play well politically.
His success as well as his legislation basically created the shallow news media swamp we have today and the willingness of the Villagers to cave to the liberal bias claim again and again.
In short, Reagan really is the source of hatred that keeps on giving.
I weep that my state produced both him and Nixon.
Gus
I’m late to this party, but I’m happy to say my first Presidential vote was cast in 1984 for Fritz Mondale. If you were 10 at the time, it’s kind of hard to remember just how bad Reagan was. Yes, I’d still take him over the current crop, but that says everything about today’s Republican party and nothing about Reagan.
bernard
the whole concept that there was anything good to come from Reagan is proof of the scam and how well it worked. The essence of evil, or axis of evil really coalesced with Reagan.
Just say No! was the perfect example of how we got to where we are now.
Evil triumphs when good men do nothing. to allow this example of unspeakable evil to humanized is a crime in and of itself.
such concepts of good and Reagan in the same universe are signs of the void. spew such lies to the Right where Reagan is the moral avatar.
gosh i just can’t imagine anyone who lived through those dark foreboding times could find anything positive about.
the beginning of the end of American morals.
wow. just the thought of praising anything Reaganesque is so twisted and ignorant.
chris
John, you have fond memories of a man who sponsored terrorism and genocide. I think maybe you have fond memories of his image. But if you mean to participate in the reality-based community, you need to take a realistic inventory of the suffering he inflicted on millions of innocents in Central America. Your wishing that away is no better than the John Cole of 2030 wishing away the sins of George W. Bush.
very reverend crimson fire of compassion
@Wile E. Quixote: You’re a fucking stupid bigot who doesn’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, and if anyone who died from infection from HIV “deserved” what they got as a natural consequence of sharing needles or having unprotected sex, then you deserve to die slowly, in terror and infinite pain, and to wake up in hell every morning to start the whole process all over again. They, after all, just had unprotected sex (in an era, btw, when fucking EVERYONE was having unprotected sex, ’cause there weren’t a lot of reasons not to, you historically illiterate fucktard) or shared needles, whereas you are a spiritually and emotionally bankrupt smug fuck who’s willing to justify the agonizing death of millions of better human beings than you will ever grow into for the sake of a moment of a wholly illusory sensation of moral superiority. Being an asshole has consequences too, and I hope you spend the rest of your existence figuring that out. Maybe I can write THAT in the flyleaf of your Larry Kramer, you loathsome bitch. DIAF.
And I mean that with all the love of Jesus, I swear.
M.T. Head
Yeah that Reagan, not a hater. Just a war criminal, mass murderer and traitor. Just one of the guys.
Lisa K.
From a lifelong progressive:
FUCK RONALD REAGAN.
We have him to thank for what has finally culminated in Sarah Palin and the teabaggers. One of the happiest days of my life was the day he died. I hate him more than I hate George Bush because, while he may have spent his entire second term in an Alzheimic haze, he damned well knew what he was doing up until then.
“More importantly, it is worthwhile to examine how much worse the current GOP is.”
The GOP as a whole, maybe. But the current GOP is the direct spawn of the one man you are mooning over. That bastard would have 100% completely approved of everything his party has become.
I am sorry, John, but IMO anybody who still has a “warm spot” for that evil, divisive class warrior and murderer still does not quite get what it means to be progressive. I won’t sue you, but I surely can’t respect your pining for the original Dick Cheney with a goony smile, either. The man was and is poison.
Lisa K.
@M.T. Head:
This.
Rick
You wouldn’t like Reagan today because his starting point would be so much further to the right. You think he’d be nearly as moderate as he was in the 80’s? The man was the greatest single contributer to the moving of the goal-posts in America.
chopper
@Wile E. Quixote:
i thought this thread was about reagan.
The Fool
Reagan was just as bad. Get over your childhood, bro.
west coast
I’m a bunch older than 30, a conservative who left the GOP upon Reagan’s nomination. Reagan was affable, and was smarter than many thought.
He was massively popular because he told America that it was our destiny to both have and eat our cake. He talked about balanced budgets, then cut taxes while massively increasing government spending. He talked tough on national security while he negotiated with and rewarded terrorists from Beirut to Tehran. He talked about family values while “revamping” the American economy to destroy actual families.
And he played the anti-abortion crowd for the chumps they’ve always been, telling them what they wanted to hear to get their votes and then ignoring them. And they loved him for treating them like crap, which is also a hallmark of the anti-abortion crowd…
Reagan will appear more-and-more like JFK as time goes on, an inspirational leader who did some big things right but many smaller things that undermined America and its citizens.
Svensker
@iLarynx:
I know that. But he did have the guts to take them out again. Did Bush have the guts to pull our guys out of Iraq when it became obvious it was a huge clusterfuck? No.
At the time, I was a Reagan libertarian. Looking back, I think that Ronnie was one of the chief reasons we’re in the pickle we’re in now and a lot of things he did are absolutely horrifying. But he did two things that pissed off the neocons then and now — pulled out of Lebanon, which was absolutely the right thing to do. And talked to Gorbie.
Mike
Tear Down This Myth!
http://harpers.org/archive/2010/02/hbc-90006567
By Scott Horton
“Will Bunch is an award-winning senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily News and a senior fellow with Media Matters for America. His latest book, Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy, just out in paperback, examines the process by which Ronald Reagan was subjected to a makeover after his death. I put six questions to Will Bunch about the book….”
Reagan was as big an asshole as Nixon, only more personable.
His administration was, until Bush, Jr, one of the most corrupt in Washington since Harding. His policies were loathsome and did untold damage to the lives of ordinary Americans.
I despise Ronald Raygun, everything he stands for and everyone who reveres him.
Svensker
@John:
What you said. Bush I was not a great prez and certainly did lots of bad things — but then, what president hasn’t? Neither Jimmy Carter nor JFK can survive a Quaker purity test, by any means. Bush I was a typical centrist corporatist big government Republican, not a lot different than Obama. You don’t see any teaparty types yearning for the Bush I era, and you never will.
Mike D.
We need Republicans to suck as much as possible. Give me President Romney, followed by Pawlenty, Jindal, Palin, whoever — interspersed with Democrats — which is what we’ll get. America will learn a valuable lesson. The only thing they liked about Reagan was he made them feel like it was always Sunday dinner at Grandpa’s. his policies ushered in oblivion.
Dr.BDH
Ronald Reagan was the worst President of my lifetime or the 20th century. He gave us “government is the problem” and “tax cuts are the answer” and put the country on the road to economic ruin and political stalemate. His administration was filled with criminal lawbreakers. He was senile long before he left office or stopped dying his hair. He spawned the worthless but endlessly expensive missile defense system that typifies our worthless but expensive technological “defense” system. He denigrated great Americans who cared about humanity and justice (e.g., Jimmy Carter) and exalted mean-spirited, hateful misanthropes (e.g., Ed Meese, Dick Cheney, Ollie North, et al). Reagan worshippers are everything that is wrong with our country, the opposite of everything that could be right. Read Lou Cannon, John Cole, and reflect on just how fucked your life really is until you renounce Ronald Fucking Reagan.
brantl
When are we going to get rid of the catastrophic, disastrous, but likeable, personable mulligan for shitwads like Reagan. “Government is the problem!”?
If we have to have people in politics that say shit like this, can we cut out years of indoctrinations and just shorten it up to hitting them in the head with sledgehammers to make them this dumb? GODDAM.