On Reagan

[richardf8]

Reagan's death has had one positive consequence: A week in which congress will do nothing. It's a great blessing upon the nation, really.

Those of you who are condemning the media for rewriting history just because he's dead forget that this revision of the Reagan years has been well under way for over a decade.

I'm not going to say much about his administration, except to say that with Bush II in office, Reagan and Nixon are tied for second place on my personal list of worst presidents. And Reagan may be just a nose ahead of Nixon. It was with Reagan's presidency, it seems, that conservationism and conservatism became mutually exclusive.

I will also say that this flying of his corpse across the country so people can gawk at it is just a wee bit creepy.

Ah, and one other thing to remember: The arms race that ended the cold war was a race to see who could force whom to exhaust their credit first. We won, but we are still paying the bills, and now we're racking up new ones.

There's another phrase for "Tax and Spend" - it's called "Depositing the money before you write the check."

Comments

[kevinjdog.livejournal.com]

Those of you who are condemning the media for rewriting history just because he's dead forget that this revision of the Reagan years has been well under way for over a decade.

Yeah, exactly. It had been going on forever with dimes and Mount Rushmore and colleges and so on. I didn't expect any less than absolute slobbering from the press once he finally shuffled off his mortal coil. Polls prove he and Bill Clinton were on an even keel when it comes to popularity, but when Clinton dies many, many years hence (as Rain (http://www.idrewthis.org) pointed out) we're just not going to hear the same amount of sycophancy. We'll hear "Slick Willie" a lot....

Reagan and Nixon are tied for second place on my personal list of worst presidents.

Not gonna include those 19th century time-wasters, huh? ;)

I will also say that this flying of his corpse across the country so people can gawk at it is just a wee bit creepy.

Eh... they did it for Lincoln (on a train, that is, across the eastern part of the country). Whatever.

There's another phrase for "Tax and Spend" - it's called "Depositing the money before you write the check."

I grew up thinking heavy debt was a bad thing. Apparently it's not if it's on a national scale. "Reagan proved deficits don't matter"... because some Democrat will come along to try to fix the problem so we can screw it all up again later after we smear him to death in the process.

[lordrunningclam.livejournal.com]

During his presidency, I regarded Reagan the way I would regard a train wreck. His policies were almost uniformly awful. His appointments were straight out of the bizarro universe and even a lot of his supporters regarded him as somewhat befuddled.

I used to say that Nixon showed us we were all being lied to and Reagan made people like the idea. Reagan made a hero out of Oliver North, whose greatest accomplishment was shredding documents and then lying to Congress about what the documents said. It was OK to lie to that mean old democratic congress that blocked some of Reagan’s more insane appointees. Considering the ones that got through, I can't imagine what shape we'd be in if congress just rubber-stamped them.

Reagan was barely President at all. He was probably the least informed and worst critical thinker to ever occupy the White House until the current doofus. The same people running the country now were the ones running the country then - only now they're bolder, having gotten away with it once.

Still, death is always a tragedy for those close to the person. I do regard the degree of hyperbole to be silly, but we live in the Entertainment Tonight society so I'm used to things being hyped out of all reasonable proportion.

[deckardcanine.livejournal.com]

FWIW, I understand that around 1980, greed practically became a religion, openly worshipped by masses. I wonder if Reagan had anything to do with it.