Since Ronald Reagan died nine years ago, I’ve watched him transmogrified into something of a saint. Even Democrats like Obama don’t dare say a bad word about this bigoted right-wing, demagogue. All he had going for him was a faux affability, which was a thin veneer on deeply dangerous ideas.
Two weeks ago Bob Dole, in a critique of the Republican Party on Fox News Sunday, argued that the GOP had moved so far right that Reagan couldn’t even make it as a Republican candidate were he to run today.
While it’s good that Dole points out how crazily conservative the GOP has become, I didn’t buy for a second his view that Reagan wouldn’t be a comfortable fit with today’s Republicans. Reagan was a right wing-nut, and his beatification is mystifying.
I see that Bill Maher agrees with me. Here’s a clip from a recent show in which he disassembles the Reagan myth, and does so in an extraordinarily serious way for Maher.
He once said trees produce more pollution than cars.
I think that was James Watt, undoubtedly Ronnie Raygun concurred
“Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do” Ronald Reagan, 1981
I won’t repeat what James G Watt is infamous for saying, but look up his name & “coal-leasing panel”
Glad you expanded there … Was wondering if Matthew Boulton was also involved ….
And that ketchup was a vegetable!
Surely tomato ketchup is a fruit? 😉
As a foreigner I was gobsmacked both times Reagan was elected. I couldn’t believe he would get in, but he did. Indeed it was the beginning of America’s decline as a fair country.
Indeed, and a British comedy show at the time, Not The Nine O’Clock News completely agreed with you!
Wonderful, thanks for that. Couldn’t figure out where that was going until the end.
Ooh, I’d forgotten about this one too! Same show.
More! More!!
Reagan was President when Canada had a Conservative Prime Minister and he worked with him to set free trade in place. This video is embarrassing to many Canadians:
http://bit.ly/11BwNwP
Lyin Brian Bullrooney
Fantastico!
Thanks for posting that.
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If you’ll excuse the expression, “Amen”.
That depends, are you amen in the gender sense or are you amen in that you prefer any other species? And for what purpose would we want to capitalize It?
I saw this Friday night on Real Time with Bill Maher. As is often the case, Maher is absolutely correct. Anyone that makes the choice to go beyond left/right politics and examine the actual history, they can trace many of current problems directly back to the policies of the 1980’s. The USA is facing many challenges today because of policies born in the simplistic notion that business or corporations can self regulate.
Agreed. That was the point I made about Thatcher during the recent eulogising. The removal of restraints on banks and traders started with Ronny and Margaret.
Wow … Bob Dole saying even Bonzo’s co-star wouldn’t make it into the party – that’s scary.
Of course Obama wouldn’t criticize Reagan; after all, he’s just Dubbyah in black-face. Reagan was probably far worse than Thatcher – I lost count of the wars we were fighting with Reagan in the White House. Regulatory institutes were handed over to corporate interests (anyone remember Nancy what’s-her-name who was appointed chief of the NTSB?) It was almost a Libertardian Paradise in that era; we were almost on par with Somalia – and things went down hill from there.
I suggest that Obama’s policy points-of-departure outnumber and outweigh the similarities with those of Bush, and to the good for Obama. Otherwise, I agree with your post.
You could tell Reagan was talking crap from his syntax; from the folksy demotic that his psephologist advisors encouraged. Cf. Tony Blair and his, “Look,…” at the start of every sentence, as if he could not believe that anyone could possibly disagree with him.
But, from across the pond, Reagan looked like something different. An almost unbelievable descent into stupidity, the 80s’ George Lucas to the 70s’ Martin Scorsese, the Tina Turner hell to Isaac Hayes’ heaven. Who was the Man? Simply the worst.
Reaganomics: Limited resources with unlimited access to those resources by a select group of entitled assholes.
Reagan was indeed a travesty. He was a pretty good carny though. Except for that skill set, he always struck me as being dumber than a box of rocks. That is a very dangerous combination to have in the leader of any nation let alone a nation with the throw weight of the US.
Say what you will about Bill Maher, but sometimes he is very accurate. The very real problem is that all those comments that Maher related that give insight into Reagan’s view point? A very sizable percentage of the population interpret those comments, that view point, favorably. Even though many of those people have been / would be unjustly negatively impacted by any legislation derived from those view points. They always think it is someone else who is the freeloader, not them. They deserve a little help when life gets rough.
It always struck me as funny that the people who most loudly proclaim that the US is the greatest county on earth seem to also think that the greatest country on earth isn’t capable of investing in its citizens to the same degree, or more, as some of those more socialized countries that routinely beat the US on most all indices used to evaluate quality of life. It almost seems that they do think it would be possible for the US to do so, but that it would be immoral to do so. I quickly get disgusted thinking about this.
Then we add on welfare for the wealthy and companies are too big to fail handouts. Plus, the mantra of jobs, jobs, jobs is what they handout to the middle class, such that the government gives business the tax revenue from the middle class to “create” jobs for the middle class while the business is creating wealth for themselves by adding more workers. It all has a slight kinship to slavery.
Reblogged this on Under the Maple Canopy.
I have despised everything Reagan stood for since before he was California governor. His demeanor was always transparent to me and I think Maher got it 100% correct.
I was a 13 when Reagan became president but even at that age, I can remember what a far right nut job he was. He was obsessed with the spectre of Communism and spent huge sums on Defense (e.g. Star Wars) as if our foreign policy was perenially trapped in the 1950s. Anyone remember his Secretary of the Interior, James Watt? Watt was the most anti-environmental politician I’ve ever seen. His proposed exploitation of domestic natural resources on public lands was nothing short of the Lorax. He was the original “drill, baby, drill!”
Watt was an apocalyptic Christian in a powerful position. His environmental policy was based on his end-times beliefs. This is what happens when the Christian right gets into power. It is truly something to fear.
And Maher doesn’t even mention what was going on in Central and South America.
Or that he sold weapons to Iran to finance his death squad pals. Or that his administration sat on its hands for years and blamed gays while an AIDS epidemic unfolded.
His “contras” in Nicaragua were pure terrorists. His CIA may have financed his (actually George Bush Sr’s) terrorist projects partly by smuggling drugs. I was in Costa Rica then, and remember a mysterious plane crash there with drugs and CIA connections.
It may have been my naiveté at the time, but it was when Reagan was president that I first heard someone proclaim it treasonous to criticize the president. The cult seems to have started pretty early.
I, and 18 others, lost our jobs with the US Army Corps of Engineers when President Reagan canceled the hydropower project we were working on. We were told only that President Reagan was taking the Corps out of the hydropower business. Too bad, because it was a really neat project. Needless to say, I am not a fan.
I still remember the exact moment that the election was called in favor of Reagan over Carter. The only election result ever that brought me to tears for my home country. I could not believe he got elected. It really was the beginning of the downward spiral.
I remember laughing after the debate in which Reagan talked about the :shining city on the hill”; I thought it was all over for him. Sadly, I learned the lesson: there’s an [American] sucker born every minute! Anyone else remember the Reagan Countdown Calendar, a compilation of the worst hits of his administration?
Reagan. The name still makes my stomach turn. I was here when California most unfortunately elected the idiot. I remember well his closing of mental institutions across the state. It put a lot of sick people on the street. One of my relatives was among them.
I think that Mayer was channeling Greg Palast. Palast has for years been saying, “Reagan was a con-man. Reagan was a coward. Reagan was a killer.”
And this,
As the saying goes, “Good riddance to bad rubish.”
Fuck Reagan.
I had just graduated from my college and started working in the college book store. I had to get food stamps a couple of times because I was the first to get my hours cut when things were slow. Meanwhile, living in Appleton, Wisconsin (home of Joseph McCarthy) I got to meet some true racists, all of whom were big fans of Reagan. In the time since then, I have never met a racist that didn’t vote Republican. That is reason enough for me to be a lifelong Democrat even though I get annoyed with some of the Dems.
I thought I could never hate any politician more than I hated Reagan, but then we got Dubya and I realized you can never say ‘never.’
OTOH, he did perform a miracle, turning ketchup into school lunch vegetables.
Jon Stewart ripped on Peggy Noonan’s adoration of the Saint:
“The battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I: never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.” – Peggy Noonan
The beatification of Reagan isn’t mystifying really. He jump-started the growing American plutocracy and the plutocrats heap praise on him – mystery solved. The mystery is how, with the stagnation (or worse) of living standards for 95% of the people in the US, that the Bill Maher calling bullshit is even necessary.
No mystery there, the culprit is christianity.
This is still the greatest takedown of Reagan ever put to pen:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard60.html
That article starts off well, until you start noticing “libertarian” pop up with increasing frequency and eventually realize that Rothbard is a right-wing nutball who apparently thinks Reagan’s fundamental failures were in things like not stripping federal land of enough of its resources, not abolishing OSHA or the Department of Education, not doing enough to help the rich screw the rest of us, not deregulating industry enough, trying to take down stock market crooks, etc. Apparently, Ronald Reagan was a hopeless liberal, who didn’t do nearly enough to sell off every last part of our society off to the highest bidder.
I come away from that article confirmed in my belief that Reagan was a demented half-wit, but even more certain that Rothbard–who I had not heard of before–is likewise a demented half-wit.
Ever see the pictures of our Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld in Iraq with Saddam Hussein, in the early 1980s? With the idea of “the enemy of our enemy is our friend”, Reagan managed to bolster this tinpot bastard into a large military force, simply to engage Iran in a war of punishment. Hundreds of thousands of men, Iraqis and Iranians, died in a war of absolutely no consequence, fueled by Reagan and his minions determined to punish Iran. Then Saddam went out of control, and more useless war was the result.
Apropos the WEIT thread, Reagan as President said that “evolution is only a theory”.
Publically. Saw it.
In an outsider’s eye, Ronald Reagan’s main accomplishment was starting the on-going process of the US losing the respect of its European friends and turning the word “American” into a colloquial synonym for amusing anti-intellectualism. Nowadays I have to spend extra time and throw in words like NASA, Yale and Harvard to bring credibility to any quote or any piece of wisdom I’ve learned from my American friends. Sadly, a typical sentence in an educated conversation would be “this guy is American, but he’s really, really smart…” — a silly defense you would never have to say about say, a French, a German, a Japanese or an Indian person.
When I trace back to where this prejudice started from, it was Reagan and his idiotic pre-Dubbya statements.
The fact that Reagan is considered a hero in the US is very similar to the way the Chinese, against all evidence to the contrary, consider Mao a hero.
Already in 1991 I saw taxidrivers hanging pendants with Mao’s portrait in their vehicles, invoking him as a god of wealth. That was the result of so many years of Communist rule, I thought: having your party leader turned into a Caishen (then again, look at what happened to Kim Il Sung in North Korea).
See also:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/mar/07/china.features11
For an entertaining rant from someone who really didn’t like Ronald Reagan, check out Tim Kreider’s pages:
http://www.thepaincomics.com/weekly040609a.htm
and be sure to read the Artist’s Statement…
Reagan was like St. John the Baptist, he paved the way for Bushlet.
Enough Americans freely not only electing Reagan, but re-electing this POS was my own emotional turning point, and I soon left America for Europe.
I haven’t watched the vid yet, so perhaps this has been covered, but Reagan encouraged the politicising of religion, and America has never been the same. Before Reagan, most politicians kept their religious nonsense to themselves.
And he wasn’t even religious! He just saw a voting bloc and went after it. They have been pawns ever since.
Well, Jimmy Carter was pretty upfront
about his own religious beliefs. Maybe
one difference was that Carter confessed
that he himself was a sinner, in need of
redemption. Think Ronnie would have ever
said such a thing?
As President, Ronald Reagan never accomplished one thing the Democrat’s didn’t let him do.
Cut taxes on the rich? Run up the deficit? Cut aid to the poor? Throw money at the military? Every single one of those things, the so-called “Reagan Revolution,” made it through Congress with Democratic Party support. Without Democratic Party collusion, Reagan couldn’t have accomplished one damn thing.
The collusion culminated in 1984, when the Democrats dumped the presidential election.
By 1984, Reagan had become extremely unpopular. His assaults on the poor, his bloated military budgets, his threats to the Soviets, his constant public lying. All the Democrats had to do to win in ’84 was nominate a candidate to run against all of this.
So who’d they nominate? Walter Mondale, who ran a platform identical to Reagan’s, except promising to raise taxes to pay for it. Predictably, he managed to lose every state but one, and with Reagan safely back in the White House, the collusion between the two parties could continue unimpeded. The Democrats voted funds for the MX missile, continued the military buildup, allowed the contra war in Nicaragua to continue, and gave Reagan a complete pass when he was found selling weapons to Iran to pay for that war.
Further examples of collusion would fill an encyclopedia. Surveying it all, the journalist Walter Karp observed, “Such is the Reagan magic. Pull back the curtain and you find Democrats working all the levers.”
I just want to remind people that although Bill Maher is very good and funny here, he does have a blind spot when it comes to some other issues. One should be aware that he has come out as anti-vaccination.
Because if someone does not think exactly 100% the way you do on all issues then none of their opinions have any merit ?
Hehe. If that were the norm, then no one would have agreed with Hitchens.
In the anti-vaccination case it is an unjustifiable opinion that is significantly harmful. Being wrong is something all humans do with regularity so, although I wouldn’t cast anti-vaccination aside easily Maher makes good points on other issues.
I disagree completely with Bill Maher on his stance on vaccination and when the topic of vaccination and Bill Maher comes up I make this known.
As well there seems to be an undercurrent of misogyny to his act that has nothing to do with forcing people to become uncomfortable with and re-examine their prejudices.
To that extent he has not earned the level trust that I accord to other participants in the struggle against religious incursions into the secular sphere, like our host Jerry Coyne, PZ Myers, Greta Christina, Ophelia Benson, Sam Harris, Eric MacDonald etc.
In fact there is no person in the above list with whom I am in complete agreement when it comes to issues like free will, determinism, other ways of knowing, scientism and so on but this would never cause me to reject their opinions out of hand.
Thanks but, you are a couple of years late with that. Old news.
Most of us know that. But what is your point here? We’re not discussing vaccination but Reagan.
I think the short-hand point that Dole made was that Reagan did things that would get him kicked out of the Republican party. It’s not that Maher is wrong in what he says, but I don’t he actually understood what Dole was saying.
Now, if your’re a Repubican and you go moderate on any issue at any time and make any compromise, you’re going to be tea-bagged by the extremists in the Republican party.
As for the tax cut arguments… I really wish people would STFU about it already…
This is a complex area and most CPAs, never mind Maher don’t understand what happened with Reagans various tax reforms including TRA’ 86.
You really need to have gone to graduate school and have been a tax-specialist to really understand the scope of the changes. One four-unit class in individual taxation doesn’t cut it in the slightest.
It’d be like… Oh… Trying to become an expert on evolutionary biologiy on the strength of one “Survey of Evolutionary Biology” course.
So, yes, it’s true, rates were lowered (everyone notes) and loopholes (General Utilities repealed, zero-basis partnerships gutted, Section 469 (passive income/losses) added, AMT revised, S-Corp basis & activity rules) were closed/added/strengthened (nobody talks about).
Actually, how many of you remember the commercial real-estate collapse of the late 1980s’? Started in 1986 and bottomed in 1987.
That was because of the basis-change rules of TRA 86. You could no longer deduct paper losses. On money actually lost (basis). Killed the entire commercial-property real-estate tax-shelter industry (in which I had friends working). And all those rich people had to recapture all those paper losses… Either on termination of the partnership or on death.
Anyway, Reagan deserves a lot of criticism. But the rates thing isn’t the problem. In fact, I’d argue that the real problem with the negative effects of wealth distribution has nothing to do with the tax code.
It has to do with how modern corporate management operates. And that goes back to the worship of free markets and the lowering of trade barriers. Consumers and the public are no longer considered ‘stakeholders’ in the business and it’s products and services. Now they’re just a labor pool and resource to be gathered and exploited.
And that attitude came from business schools. That’s what we were taught to do, and that’s how so many do it.
These things are mutually exclusive?
Yeah, that “nothing to do with the tax code” isn’t true. The tax code is a tool that leans in favor of wealth, including corporations.
I think you make some valid, important points here. Enjoy the info
A Polish guy in my department tells me that, in Poland, Reagan and Thatcher are very highly regarded because of their perceived role in bringing down Russian communism.
I’ve pointed out that Poles only like Reagan and Thatcher because they weren’t living in the countries that were ruled by them…..
Tying this back to the Oprah thread, Harvard seriously considered conferring an honorary degree on Reagan in 1986 as part of their 350th anniversary celebration. They changed their minds when outraged students, faculty, and alumni reminded them that they’d spent the previous five years lobbying against Reagan’s draconian policies on education, academic freedom, and international cooperation in science.
My favorite photo of Reagan was on the cover or Time (or maybe Newsweek). He’s standing there in a lumberjack shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His arms are folded across his chest and he’s stuck his hands in behind his biceps so they stick out — the way professional wrestlers do.
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Reagan set the stage for China to buy the USA…