Here's the article I wrote on this:
Rant: Greatest American, my ass
Well, the votes are in on Discovery Channel's Greatest American contest. Ronald Reagan is the Greatest American of all time. What a freaking farce. Never mind that voters had the audacity to place Bob Hope, Oprah Winfrey and Lance Armstrong in the Top 20. Never mind that the original 100 included colossal jokes such as Madonna. The fact that these names don't belong close to a Top 100 Americans of all time should be woefully obvious.
But we can see how some people may forget as Reagan fades into a revisionist-history haze. So let's revisit the man who said that trees cause pollution and whose administration designated ketchup as a vegetable, favoring the almighty dollar over the health of schoolchildren.
This is, after all, the man who illegally sold weapons to Iran and used the money to fund the fascist death squads of the Contras in Nicaragua and then claimed he could not recall anything about it. But in fairness, perhaps the Alzheimer's had begun to set in by then.
Even the Discovery Channel was at a loss to come up with positive marks for Reagan. On its Web site, www.dsc.discovery.com, it notes only that he was "The Great Communicator" and that he gave us "Reaganomics." As if those were good things. Iran-Contra, while a disgusting footnote in American history, has nothing on the bloated federal deficits we have inherited from the Reagan administration and its backward economic policies.
After Watergate, our faith in government was on a respirator when Reagan came to power. And by casting off the belief in fiscal responsibility shared by his conservative antecessors, destroying our social net with fictional tales of "welfare queens" driving Cadillacs and further eroding our faith in the ability and decency of our leaders, Reagan clenched his hands around the throat of the dying American Dream and slowly squeezed the life from it, chomping jelly beans and grinning that stupid grin all the while.
It was only after he had already tossed the American Dream's lifeless corpse into a coffin that our current administration was able to nail the casket shut. In the end, we look at Reagan not so much with hatred as with sadness, like Michael Corleone saying to his inept older brother, "I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart. You broke my heart!"
http://www.southflorida.com/citylink/sfe-cl-062905newswatch,0,6935397.story?coll=sfe-citylink-utility(scroll down to last article)
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