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Where have you been?
06-13-2004 01:59:42
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Re: Re: Re: Ronald Reagan in reply to Lamont, 06-11-2004 21:40:06
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Ronald Reagen is dead now, and everyone is being nice to him. In every aspect, this is appropriate. But were you around when ron was president? Boy how quick people forget! Ronald Reagan was, and will always be, the undisputed heavyweight champion of salesmenship we are ever likely to see. Union busting legislation and Deregulation policies of the Reagan administration handed virtually every facet of our lives into the hands of a privileged few. Our leaders are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the corportations that were made all-powerful by Reagan's deregulation craze. The Savings and Loan scandal of Reagan's time, which cost the American people hundereds of billions of dolloars, is but one example of Reagan's decision that the foxes would be fine guards in the henhouse. His legacy seldom mentions the Iran/Contra scandal. This sin of omission is vast! By the end of his term in office, some 138 Reagan administration officials had been convicted, indicted or investigated for misconduct and/or criminal activities. Reagan supported the regimes of the worst people ever to walk the earth. Names like Marcos, Duarte, Rios Mont and Duvalier reek of blood and corruption, yet were embraced by the Reagan administration with passionate intensity. Reagan sent an emissary named Donald Rumsfeld to Iraq to shakie Saddam Hussein's hand and give him intelligence information. Throughout the entirety of Reagan's term, bin Laden and his people were armed, funded and trained by the United States to fight the Soviets. Today, there are 827+ American soldiers and over 10,000 civilians who have died in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, a war that came to be because Reagan helped manufacture both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. How much of this can be truthfully laid at the feet of Ronald Reagan? It depends on who you ask. Those who worship Reagan see him as the man in charge, the man who defeated Soviet communism, the man whose vision and charisma made Americans feel good about themselves after Vietnam and the malaise of the 1970's. Those who despise Reagan see him as nothing more than a pitch-man for corporate raiders, the man who allowed greed to become a virture, the man who smiled vapidly while allowing his officials to run the government for him. His famous question, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" is easy to answer. We are not better off than we were four years ago, or eight, or twelve, or twenty. We are a badly damaged state, ruled today by a man who subsists off Reagan's most corrosive final gift to us all: It is the image that matterts, and be damned to the truth!
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