I was writing down all the words I hadn't heard during the wall-to-wall Reagan lovefest when I realized I was almost halfway through the alphabet. An hour or so later, I was done.
It's long enough that I've broken it into three parts: A-I, J-R, S-Z.
And now, without further commercial interruption:
We begin with vintage Reagan. A bipartisan majority in Congress (remember, this was twenty years ago) voted overwhelmingly to place sanctions against South Africa's brutal, racist, repressive
apartheid regime.
Reagan
vetoed the bill. Only a Congressional override made it possible for Nelson Mandela to eventually get off Robben Island.
Perhaps going to a German war cemetery wasn't such a bad idea -- but
Bitburg wasn't just any German war cemetery. It is the final resting place of members of the elite Waffen SS, who were all dedicated Nazis. It is as though a future leader were to pay his respects to the Iraqi Republican Guard!
True, our
cities were in decline before Reagan appeared on the scene -- but in the '80s, they went into free fall. During ths period, smaller cities like Bridgeport, Conn. joined the likes of Detroit and Newark as urban basket cases. But what the hey -- it meant lots of white flight, and thus lots of new "Reagan Democrats"!
Nothing new under the sun: Under Reagan, the
deficit ballooned as a result of ill-advised tax cuts plus an obscene military buildup. We went from the world's largest creditor nation to its largest debtor nation in less than a decade. We are fortunate that the repo man hasn't shown up at our door -- yet.
While the AIDS
epidemic raged through America, Reagan did nothing, and said nothing, not even when his good friend Rock Hudson died of the disease. Reagan didn't even utter the word "AIDS" until late in his final term, years after it had been plastered over every newspaper, magazine, and TV news broadcast in America.
When the
Fairness Doctrine fell victim to Reagan's deregulatory frenzy, it set the stage for the right-wing takeover of the media. At last, a fat blowhard who had been the road manager with a baseball team could sit behind a microphone and spout lies and innuendo about Democrats for three solid hours, without once having to acknowledge any such thing as an opposing view. Ah, America!
Richard Clarke has an interesting observation about Reagan's invasion of
Grenada. In "Against All Enemies", Clarke points out that the invasion happened shortly after the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, which killed 242 and forced America out of Lebanon with its tail between its legs. Clarke postulates that the invasion of Grenada was a sort of "kick the dog" attack, designed to show the world that the U.S. could still be the aggressor against
someone (remember, this was many years before Viagra).
Sure, there was
homelessness in America before Reagan -- but you had to go out of your way, down to Skid Row, to find it. In the Reagan era, homeless Americans became part of the landscape, something to step over on the way to the subway, or increasingly, even a suburban shopping mall.
What can I say about the
Iran-contra scandal? Oliver North was basically running a shadow government out of the basement of the Reagan White House, for the purpose of illegally undermining a legitimate foreign government; no one went to prison for it, not even North himself, who weaseled out on a sniveling technicality and, in classic neocon fashion, instead became an instant hero.
More to come...
Edit: Part 2 is here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x1741280and Part 3 here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x1741321
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