Reagan’s reputation contra to his actions
By Tom Maertens
The Mankato Free Press
Fri Mar 18, 2011
A Gallup poll taken in 1992 found that Ronald Reagan was the most unpopular living president apart from Nixon, and ranked even below Jimmy Carter; just 46 percent of Americans had a favorable view of Reagan while Carter was viewed favorably by 63 percent of Americans.
This was before the Hollywood-style re-write of Reagan’s presidency that created the fictional character portrayed during Reagan’s 100th birthday celebration. The campaign was led by Grover Norquist and his “Ronald Reagan Legacy Project,” along with corporate-funded propaganda mills like Heritage and AEI that underwrote hundreds of flattering books to create a mythic hero and perpetual tax-cutter.
They singled out Reagan’s 1981 tax cut that lowered top marginal rates from 70 percent to 28 percent as the basis for the campaign, leaving out the inconvenient reality that he subsequently raised taxes 11 times, according to former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson who “was there.”
The plutocrats idolize Reagan because he cut taxes on the wealthy — on income, capital gains, interest, and dividends — and increased taxes on working people, including raising the self-employment (SECA) tax rate by 60 percent. Mark Hertsgaard (On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency) called it arguably the “single greatest government-led transfer of wealth in history, and in the direction of the top two percent.”
The result is an enduring, entitled class of individuals who believe that work should be taxed, but wealth should not. They control the Republican Party.
Their revisionist history makes Reagan into a small-government fiscal conservative, but he actually grew the government, increasing military expenditures by 27 percent and creating another new department, Veterans’ Affairs, according to Tony Judt’s book Postwar. He never submitted a balanced budget and ended up tripling the national debt to $3 trillion. His S&L bailout cost 2.4 times more to fix (relative to GDP) than Bush’s financial crisis, according to Lou Cannon, writing in the New York Times in April 2009.
Did Reagan end the Cold War? For that, credit 40 years of “Containment” by eight U.S. presidents. As Tony Judt’s Postwar concluded: “…Washington did not ‘bring down’ Communism — Communism imploded of its own accord.” I served in the USSR during perestroika and glasnost and later, in Russia after the breakup, and can attest to that; Gorbachev tried to reform a repressive, dysfunctional system and lost control of the process.
What is virtually unknown in this country is that Reagan’s bellicose rhetoric and saber-rattling led the U.S. to the brink of a hot war with the USSR in 1983 (Google “Abel Archer”).
Reagan publicly supported the South African apartheid regime, a policy that Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu declared to be “immoral, evil and totally un-Christian.” This sympathy for racists was not an anomaly: Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign was announced in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a city with no connection whatever to the governor of California but infamous for the murder of three civil rights workers.
His speech there lauding states’ rights was dog-whistle politics to die-hard anti-integrationists, a continuation of Nixon’s racist Southern Strategy. His 1980 campaign against a Cadillac-driving welfare queen from Chicago’s South Side (i.e., Black woman) was more of the same.
Never mentioned in the current hagiography is that he amnestied 2.4 million illegal aliens, according to The New York Times May 2006 article; that among his most important advisors was an astrologer (Joan Quigley) whom Nancy consulted daily about major decisions; and that he regularly fabricated stories, including about personally “ liberating” concentration camps (he never left California), according to a report by Sidney Blumenthal in Salon.com.
Other inconvenient facts about Reagan have disappeared into the memory hole: He provided aid to Saddam Hussein after his unprovoked attacked on Iran and despite Saddam’s known use of chemical weapons, according to a report cited in commondreams.org; he funneled money and arms to the Islamist mujahidin fighters in Afghanistan who later morphed into al Qaeda; his sending Marines ashore in Lebanon led to the deaths of 241 Marines; and, he invaded tiny Grenada on the flimsiest of pretenses.
Reagan illegally traded weapons to Iran for American hostages (which led to more Americans being kidnapped) and repeatedly lied about it. On March 4, 1987 he finally admitted he had lied in a public statement. He diverted the profits of this criminal trade to illegally fund the murderous, drug-running Contras in Nicaragua and lied about that, too, according to Christopher Hitchens in Slate.com.
Eleven of his co-conspirators were nonetheless convicted, making a total of 138 Reagan administration officials indicted for various offenses, according to Richard Reeves, making it the most corrupt administration ever.
The public gave Reagan a pass, however, probably because they thought he was too dense to connect the dots between two impeachable offenses; even his official biographer Edmund Morris calls him an “apparent airhead.” No corporate-funded whitewash of Reagan’s presidency can change those historical facts.
The Mankato Free Press
Fri Mar 18, 2011
A Gallup poll taken in 1992 found that Ronald Reagan was the most unpopular living president apart from Nixon, and ranked even below Jimmy Carter; just 46 percent of Americans had a favorable view of Reagan while Carter was viewed favorably by 63 percent of Americans.
This was before the Hollywood-style re-write of Reagan’s presidency that created the fictional character portrayed during Reagan’s 100th birthday celebration. The campaign was led by Grover Norquist and his “Ronald Reagan Legacy Project,” along with corporate-funded propaganda mills like Heritage and AEI that underwrote hundreds of flattering books to create a mythic hero and perpetual tax-cutter.
They singled out Reagan’s 1981 tax cut that lowered top marginal rates from 70 percent to 28 percent as the basis for the campaign, leaving out the inconvenient reality that he subsequently raised taxes 11 times, according to former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson who “was there.”
The plutocrats idolize Reagan because he cut taxes on the wealthy — on income, capital gains, interest, and dividends — and increased taxes on working people, including raising the self-employment (SECA) tax rate by 60 percent. Mark Hertsgaard (On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency) called it arguably the “single greatest government-led transfer of wealth in history, and in the direction of the top two percent.”
The result is an enduring, entitled class of individuals who believe that work should be taxed, but wealth should not. They control the Republican Party.
Their revisionist history makes Reagan into a small-government fiscal conservative, but he actually grew the government, increasing military expenditures by 27 percent and creating another new department, Veterans’ Affairs, according to Tony Judt’s book Postwar. He never submitted a balanced budget and ended up tripling the national debt to $3 trillion. His S&L bailout cost 2.4 times more to fix (relative to GDP) than Bush’s financial crisis, according to Lou Cannon, writing in the New York Times in April 2009.
Did Reagan end the Cold War? For that, credit 40 years of “Containment” by eight U.S. presidents. As Tony Judt’s Postwar concluded: “…Washington did not ‘bring down’ Communism — Communism imploded of its own accord.” I served in the USSR during perestroika and glasnost and later, in Russia after the breakup, and can attest to that; Gorbachev tried to reform a repressive, dysfunctional system and lost control of the process.
What is virtually unknown in this country is that Reagan’s bellicose rhetoric and saber-rattling led the U.S. to the brink of a hot war with the USSR in 1983 (Google “Abel Archer”).
Reagan publicly supported the South African apartheid regime, a policy that Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu declared to be “immoral, evil and totally un-Christian.” This sympathy for racists was not an anomaly: Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign was announced in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a city with no connection whatever to the governor of California but infamous for the murder of three civil rights workers.
His speech there lauding states’ rights was dog-whistle politics to die-hard anti-integrationists, a continuation of Nixon’s racist Southern Strategy. His 1980 campaign against a Cadillac-driving welfare queen from Chicago’s South Side (i.e., Black woman) was more of the same.
Never mentioned in the current hagiography is that he amnestied 2.4 million illegal aliens, according to The New York Times May 2006 article; that among his most important advisors was an astrologer (Joan Quigley) whom Nancy consulted daily about major decisions; and that he regularly fabricated stories, including about personally “ liberating” concentration camps (he never left California), according to a report by Sidney Blumenthal in Salon.com.
Other inconvenient facts about Reagan have disappeared into the memory hole: He provided aid to Saddam Hussein after his unprovoked attacked on Iran and despite Saddam’s known use of chemical weapons, according to a report cited in commondreams.org; he funneled money and arms to the Islamist mujahidin fighters in Afghanistan who later morphed into al Qaeda; his sending Marines ashore in Lebanon led to the deaths of 241 Marines; and, he invaded tiny Grenada on the flimsiest of pretenses.
Reagan illegally traded weapons to Iran for American hostages (which led to more Americans being kidnapped) and repeatedly lied about it. On March 4, 1987 he finally admitted he had lied in a public statement. He diverted the profits of this criminal trade to illegally fund the murderous, drug-running Contras in Nicaragua and lied about that, too, according to Christopher Hitchens in Slate.com.
Eleven of his co-conspirators were nonetheless convicted, making a total of 138 Reagan administration officials indicted for various offenses, according to Richard Reeves, making it the most corrupt administration ever.
The public gave Reagan a pass, however, probably because they thought he was too dense to connect the dots between two impeachable offenses; even his official biographer Edmund Morris calls him an “apparent airhead.” No corporate-funded whitewash of Reagan’s presidency can change those historical facts.
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2 Comments:
Liberals should focus on writing about great liberal presidents. Wait... I suppose that would be a difficult assignement.
The campaign was led by Grover Norquist and his “Ronald Reagan Legacy Project,” along with corporate-funded propaganda mills like Heritage and AEI that underwrote hundreds of flattering books to create a mythic hero and perpetual tax-cutter.
Although it may be true that these may be corporate-funded organizations, I believe a better point is that the Heritage Foundation is a tax-exempt organization solicating tax-deductible donations for educational purposes. The "educational" purpose includes such programs as the “Ronald Reagan Legacy Project” ... thus there is a tax incentive to promote a slanted version of history.
It's long past time that the tax-exempt status of some of these organizations be removed ... remember that Virgina Thomas was paid mega-bucks to be a writer for the Heritage Foundation.
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