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You're not worthy of a President who lies?

You're not worthy of a President who gives weapons to our enemies, negotiates with terrorists, operates an illegal weapons/drugs/money-laundering ring out of the basement of the Pentagon?

You're not worthy of another banking collapse and scandal?

You're not worthy of a President with incredibly racist policies?

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From ‘Landslide – The Unmaking of the President 1984-1988,’ by Jane Mayer & Doyle McManus (Houghton Mifflin, 1988: “[Reagan’s] aides went to great lengths to conceal potentially embarrassing quirks. They were secretive about such matters as the president’s and his daughter Maureen’s apparently sincere belief that a ghost haunted the Lincoln Bedroom (Maureen claimed it had a ‘red aura’), the president’s assertion that he had seen a flying saucer, and his acquiescence to Mrs. Reagan’s reliance on astrology to determine his schedule.”

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Missing from almost all discussion of America’s dizzying rate of unemployment is the brute fact that hourly wages of people with jobs have been dropping, adjusted for inflation. In other words, Americans are keeping their jobs or finding new ones only by accepting lower wages.

Meanwhile, a much smaller group of Americans’ earnings are back in the stratosphere: Wall Street traders and executives, hedge-fund and private-equity fund managers, and top corporate executives. America’s median wage, adjusted for inflation, has barely budged for decades. Between 2000 and 2007 it actually dropped. Under these circumstances the only way the middle class could boost its purchasing power was to borrow, as it did with gusto. As housing prices rose, Americans turned their homes into ATMs.

when earnings accumulate at the top, people at the top invest their wealth in whatever assets seem most likely to attract other big investors. This causes the prices of certain assets—commodities, stocks, dot-coms or real estate—to become wildly inflated. Such speculative bubbles eventually burst, leaving behind mountains of near-worthless collateral.

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Reaganomics, VooDoo Economics, Trickle Down Economics, Black Tuesday - the Gipper's Legacy.

It was "because Reagan lowered taxes" massively for the wealthy, nearly spent the nation into oblivion pursuing an insane Arms Race & changed America from the world's biggest lender into a huge debtor, that killed the beast. Reagan began the orgy of borrowing to feed a gluttonous, bloated, Military Industrial Complex. Yes, we can "blame Reagan" for throwing gas on the fire of Borrowing Our Way Out of Debt that became the core value of the NeoCon Revolution that worshipped him.

Reagan was instrumental in begining the rout of America's middle class that ultimately lead to the stagnation & retreat of the average incomes we see today. Even "The income of college-educated younger people, adjusted for inflation, has been in decline since 2000." according to the new issue of 'Smithsonian'. It's said that over 75% of the wealthy generated this decade was scarfed up by the top 10%. Reagan was the Poster Boy for Living Beyond Your Means & Union Busting. Conservatives have Reagan's Legacy tied around their necks.

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With his superficially sunny disposition - and a ruthless political strategy of exploiting white-male resentments - Reagan convinced millions of Americans that the threats they faced were: African-American welfare queens, Central American leftists, a rapidly expanding Evil Empire based in Moscow, and the do-good federal government.

With his superficially sunny disposition - and a ruthless political strategy of exploiting white-male resentments - Reagan convinced millions of Americans that the threats they faced were: African-American welfare queens, Central American leftists, a rapidly expanding Evil Empire based in Moscow, and the do-good federal government.

The Cold War was won well before Reagan arrived in the White House. Indeed, in the 1970s, it was a common perception in the U.S. intelligence community that the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was winding down, in large part because the Soviet economic model had failed in the technological race with the West.

That was the view of many Kremlinologists in the CIA's analytical division. Also, I was told by a senior CIA's operations official that some of the CIA's best spies inside the Soviet hierarchy supported the view that the Soviet Union was headed toward collapse, not surging toward world supremacy, as Reagan and his foreign policy team insisted in the early 1980s.

The CIA analysis was the basis for the détente that was launched by Nixon and Ford, essentially seeking a negotiated solution to the most dangerous remaining aspects of the Cold War.

Though the Afghan covert operation originated with Cold Warriors in the Carter administration, especially national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, the war was dramatically ramped up under Reagan, who traded U.S. acquiescence toward Pakistan's nuclear bomb for its help in shipping sophisticated weapons to the Afghan jihadists (including a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden).

While Reagan's acolytes cite the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan as decisive in "winning the Cold War," the counter-argument is that Moscow was already in disarray - and while failure in Afghanistan may have sped the Soviet Union's final collapse - it also created twin dangers for the future of the world: the rise of al-Qaeda terrorism and the nuclear bomb in the hands of Pakistan's unstable Islamic Republic.

Trade-offs elsewhere in the world also damaged long-term U.S. interests. In Latin America, for instance, Reagan's brutal strategy of arming right-wing militaries to crush peasant, student and labor uprisings left the region with a legacy of anti-Americanism that is now resurfacing in the emergence of populist leftist governments.

In Nicaragua, for instance, Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega (whom Reagan once denounced as a "dictator in designer glasses") is now back in power. In El Salvador, the leftist FMLN won the latest elections. Indeed, across the region, hostility to Washington is now the rule, creating openings for China, Iran, Cuba and other American rivals.

In the early 1980s, Reagan also credentialed a young generation of neocon intellectuals, who pioneered a concept called "perception management," the shaping of how Americans saw, understood and were frightened by threats from abroad.

Many honest reporters saw their careers damaged when they resisted the lies and distortions of the Reagan administration. Likewise, U.S. intelligence analysts were purged when they refused to bend to the propaganda demands from above.

To marginalize dissent, Reagan and his subordinates stoked anger toward anyone who challenged the era's feel-good optimism. Skeptics were not just honorable critics, they were un-American defeatists or - in Jeane Kirkpatrick's memorable attack line - they would "blame America first."

Under Reagan, a right-wing infrastructure also took shape, linking media outlets (magazines, newspapers, books, etc.) with well-financed think tanks that churned out endless op-eds and research papers. Plus, there were attack groups that went after mainstream journalists who dared disclose information that poked holes in Reagan's propaganda themes.

In effect, Reagan's team created a faux reality for the American public. Civil wars in Central America between impoverished peasants and wealthy oligarchs became East-West showdowns. U.S.-backed insurgents in Nicaragua, Angola and Afghanistan were transformed from corrupt, brutal (often drug-tainted) thugs into noble "freedom-fighters."

With the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan also revived Richard Nixon's theory of an imperial presidency that could ignore the nation's laws and evade accountability through criminal cover-ups. That behavior also would rear its head again in the war crimes of George W. Bush.

The American Dream also dimmed during Reagan's tenure.

While he played the role of the nation's kindly grandfather, his operatives divided the American people, using "wedge issues" to deepen grievances especially of white men who were encouraged to see themselves as victims of "reverse discrimination" and "political correctness."

Yet even as working-class white men were rallying to the Republican banner (as so-called "Reagan Democrats"), their economic interests were being savaged. Unions were broken and marginalized; "free trade" policies shipped manufacturing jobs abroad; old neighborhoods were decaying; drug use among the young was soaring.

Meanwhile, unprecedented greed was unleashed on Wall Street, fraying old-fashioned bonds between company owners and employees.

Before Reagan, corporate CEOs earned less than 50 times the salary of an average worker. By the end of the Reagan-Bush-I administrations in 1993, the average CEO salary was more than 100 times that of a typical worker. (At the end of the Bush-II administration, that CEO-salary figure was more than 250 times that of an average worker.)

Many other trends set during the Reagan era continued to corrode the U.S. political process in the years after Reagan left office. After 9/11, for instance, the neocons reemerged as a dominant force, reprising their "perception management" tactics, depicting the "war on terror" - like the last days of the Cold War - as a terrifying conflict between good and evil.

The hyping of the Islamic threat mirrored the neocons' exaggerated depiction of the Soviet menace in the 1980s - and again the propaganda strategy worked. Many Americans let their emotions run wild, from the hunger for revenge after 9/11 to the war fever over invading Iraq.

Arguably, the descent into this dark fantasyland - that Ronald Reagan began in the early 1980s - reached its nadir in the flag-waving early days of the Iraq War. Only gradually did reality begin to reassert itself as the death toll mounted in Iraq and the Katrina disaster reminded Americans why they needed an effective government.

Still, the disasters - set in motion by Ronald Reagan - continued to roll in. Bush's Reagan-esque tax cuts for the rich blew another huge hole in the federal budget and the Reagan-esque anti-regulatory fervor led to a massive financial meltdown that threw the nation into economic chaos.

Despite the grievous harm that Reagan's presidency inflicted on the American Republic and the American people, it may take many more years before a historian has the guts to put this deformed era into a truthful perspective.

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Originally posted by Wulfenstar:
I read what you write. I just know the source and know the spin.

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Then PLEASE, BE one of them. Stop with the worship. See the faults in ANY venue, even your own.

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