my blood pressure goes up when I hear about Reagan

[gabeana]

being a great president, last night I am reading an unfinished presidency about Jimmy Carter by Douglas Brinkley,
I burst out laughing when Brinkley tells the story of Carter leaving a meeting in the oval office with Reagan. Carter leaves the meeting basically shaking his head cannot believe someone so stupid can become president. After laughing I then became kind of sad thinking it is not funny, it is a sad blight on this country.

I looked up Reagan's legacy here are some things we can point to when we have to hear about the great communicator

"The AIDS crisis exploded (with 20,000 deaths) before Reagan could even bring himself to address the issue six years later. In his authorized biography he is quoted as saying that "maybe the Lord brought down this plague," because "illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments."

"All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk."
Ronald Reagan (Republican candidate for president), quoted in the Burlington (Vermont) Free Press, February 15, 1980

"We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry every night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet."
Ronald Reagan, TV speech, October 27, 1964

""They told stories about how inattentive and inept the President was.... They said he wouldn't come to work--all he wanted to do was to watch movies and television at the residence."
Jim Cannon (an aide to Howard Baker) reporting what Reagan's underlings told him, Landslide: The Unmaking of the President:
1984-88

just a few, a whole bunch of goodies at the link http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Ronald_Reagan/Ronald_Reagan_Myth.html

[Bluenorthwest]

1. This past week has been a strong reminder of the toxin that was Ronald Reagan

Makes a person wonder about those who voted for him especially the second time, with such a huge public health crisis going utterly unaddressed.

[Johonny]

3. The cold war was TV news king

and he had big cold war moments. It is hard to imagine today how much the cold war talk seemed to trump everything else in the news. We invades Grenada! Hurrah. oddly the raging Aids epidemic, the human toll that went with welfare reform, the fall of unionized labor, and the complete banking collapse were remember by the public but ignored by the press.

[TheCowsCameHome]

2. But his stays the same.

0/0

[AZ Progressive]

4. Reagan started the destruction of the progress that the two Roosevelts did to America economically

I mean there was movement even during the 70's for corporations and the 1% to gain influence in the Government but Reagan basically gave them the blueprint on how to takeover America.

[louis-t]

5. Wow, just read the whole thing.

It's helpful, at times, to remind ourselves what a dolt Reagan was.

[tabasco]

6. Just another figurehead president like AWOL Bush

Just another corporate stooge.

[jaysunb]

7. This

SAM SMITH - Ronald Regan has carried out his last con. The first occupant of the White House to make politics just another form of show business is being buried as a hero despite having been one of the worst presidents America ever had.

True, he was not as corrupt as Nixon or Clinton, nor as gleefully imperial as George Bush the Lesser, and the damage he did was largely unintentional, the fatal mischief of a small minded man granted too much power.

But the result was to begin the decline and fall of the first American republic by convincing its leaders, media, and citizens that the main thing they needed for happiness was a free, unfettered market accompanied by sufficient faux cowboy rhetoric. That there was never any empirical evidence for the absurd economic assumptions didn't matter; his charm sufficed where logic failed.

A quarter century later we are left with a middle class with substantially greater problems, a lower class far more ignored, an ecology far more damaged, a much larger gap between rich and poor and between CEO and employee, Medicare and Social Security in danger, and a culture of greed and narcissism that has buried ideals of democracy, community, and cooperation.

The nausea-inducing elevation of Reagan into someone he never was is another triumph of rightwing spin being swallowed whole by a media that not only doesn't know the facts, it doesn't even think it has to, for it, too, has become just another part of show business.

[gabeana]

8. another winner

"Reagan's only contribution [to the subject of the MX missile] throughout the entire hour and a half was to interrupt somewhere at midpoint to tell us he'd watched a movie the night before, and he gave us the plot from WarGames, the movie. That was his only contribution."
Lee Hamilton (Representative from Indiana) interviewed by Haynes Johnson, Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years