No Praise for Reagan
The Progressive

Spare me the heapings of praise for Ronald Reagan.

He was one of the worst presidents we've ever had.

In fact, he should have been impeached for the Iran-Contra scandal, and he might have been had Congress and the media just done their jobs. Reagan misappropriated funds, and then he lied about it. He traded with Iran, an enemy of the United States, and he lied about that, too.

But Congress went weak in the knees when Ollie North showed up strutting in his uniform.

And the media fell down, too. Katherine Graham, owner of The Washington Post, said the country couldn't handle another impeachment crisis, and so the Post downplayed it.

Let's be clear on Reagan's record.

Reagan was responsible for killing tens of thousands of innocent people in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras as he waged illegal wars and funded brutal militaries. The truth commission of El Salvador investigated the murders of 75,000 people during the civil war in the 1980s, and it found that the Salvadoran military, or death squads connected to the military, had committed the bulk of those crimes. At the time, Bush was lavishing hundreds of millions of dollars on the Salvadoran government, and his CIA was working with the death squads.

Reagan was responsible, as Christopher Hitchens has noted, for approving Israel's invasion of Lebanon, which killed about 18,000 civilians.

Reagan was responsible for his own unilateral invasion of that huge threat to the United States called Grenada. (Oh, the great liberator!)

Reagan was responsible for inciting a racist backlash. He kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign in--of all places--Philadelphia, Mississippi, where Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Cheney were murdered in 1964. Reagan also fueled racism with his stories about "welfare queens" and his defense of the apartheid regime of South Africa.

Reagan was responsible for attacking women's rights, as he tried to legitimate the backlash against feminism. He appointed the far right justice Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court, and he loaded the lower court benches with anti-choice ideologues.

Reagan was responsible for a woeful response to the AIDS epidemic, which needlessly jeopardized the lives of millions of people. He also consorted with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who called AIDS divine revenge on homosexuals.

Reagan was responsible for shredding the social contract between labor and management, and he declared open season on trade unions when he fired the air traffic controllers.

Reagan was responsible for flattening out the progressive income tax and for giving huge tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans and to corporations. His economic policies, as Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic Policy and Research has noted, dramatically redistributed income--to the rich.

Reagan was responsible for hooking millions of people overseas on tobacco, as he turned the Commerce Department into the advance team for Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds.

Reagan ("We begin bombing in five minutes") was responsible for the multi-billion dollar boondoggle that goes by the name of missile defense.

Reagan was responsible for launching an assault on our environment (remember James Watt!) that is now reaching its apotheosis under George W.

In a way, Reagan was W's father. The macho swagger, the studied anti-intellectualism, the infatuation with military spending, and the overriding concern for corporations and the rich--all these Bush has inherited from Reagan.

And while Reagan consulted Nancy's astrologer for advice, Bush does him one better by consulting the Lord Himself.

The only difference is that Reagan knew how to read his lines.

- Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive

You're not going to like this. You shouldn't speak ill of the dead. But in this case, someone's got to.

Ronald Reagan was a conman. Reagan was a coward. Reagan was a killer.

In 1987, I found myself stuck in a crappy little town in Nicaragua named Chaguitillo. The people were kind enough, though hungry, except for one surly young man. His wife had just died of tuberculosis.

People don't die of TB if they get some antibiotics. But Ronald Reagan, big hearted guy that he was, had put a lock-down embargo on medicine to Nicaragua because he didn't like the government that the people there had elected.

Ronnie grinned and cracked jokes while the young woman's lungs filled up and she stopped breathing. Reagan flashed that B-movie grin while they buried the mother of three.

And when Hezbollah terrorists struck and murdered hundreds of American marines in their sleep in Lebanon, the TV warrior ran away like a whipped dog ... then turned around and invaded Grenada. That little Club Med war was a murderous PR stunt so Ronnie could hold parades for gunning down Cubans building an airport.

I remember Nancy, a skull and crossbones prancing around in designer dresses, some of the "gifts" that flowed to the Reagans -- from hats to million-dollar homes -- from cronies well compensated with government loot. It used to be called bribery.

And all the while, Grandpa grinned, the grandfather who bleated on about "family values" but didn't bother to see his own grandchildren.

The New York Times today, in its canned obit, wrote that Reagan projected, "faith in small town America" and "old-time values." "Values" my ass. It was union busting and a declaration of war on the poor and anyone who couldn't buy designer dresses. It was the New Meanness, bringing starvation back to America so that every millionaire could get another million.

"Small town" values? From the movie star of the Pacific Palisades, the Malibu mogul? I want to throw up.

And all the while, in the White House basement, as his brain boiled away, his last conscious act was to condone a coup d'etat against our elected Congress. Reagan's Defense Secretary Casper the Ghost Weinberger with the crazed Colonel, Ollie North, plotted to give guns to the Monster of the Mideast, Ayatolla Khomeini.

Reagan's boys called Jimmy Carter a weanie and a wuss although Carter wouldn't give an inch to the Ayatolla. Reagan, with that film-fantasy tough-guy con in front of cameras, went begging like a coward cockroach to Khomeini pleading on bended knee for the release of our hostages.

Ollie North flew into Iran with a birthday cake for the maniac mullah -- no kidding --in the shape of a key. The key to Ronnie's heart.

Then the Reagan roaches mixed their cowardice with crime: taking cash from the hostage-takers to buy guns for the "contras" - the drug-runners of Nicaragua posing as freedom fighters.

I remember as a student in Berkeley the words screeching out of the bullhorn, "The Governor of the State of California, Ronald Reagan, hereby orders this demonstration to disburse" ... and then came the teargas and the truncheons. And all the while, that fang-hiding grin from the Gipper.

In Chaguitillo, all night long, the farmers stayed awake to guard their kids from attack from Reagan's Contra terrorists. The farmers weren't even Sandinistas, those 'Commies' that our cracked-brained President told us were 'only a 48-hour drive from Texas.' What the hell would they want with Texas, anyway?

Nevertheless, the farmers, and their families, were Ronnie's targets.

In the deserted darkness of Chaguitillo, a TV blared. Weirdly, it was that third-rate gangster movie, "Brother Rat." Starring Ronald Reagan.

Well, my friends, you can rest easier tonight: the Rat is dead.

Killer, coward, conman. Ronald Reagan, good-bye and good riddance.