Post by Captain Snark on Mar 26, 2015 20:50:01 GMT -5
I'm a half-assed agnostic, what some people would call a "soft atheist." (I'd rather lack seriousness about the next world than about the present world we're living in.) The "hard" atheists tend to emphasize that they don't believe in the Devil or in hell. Do I?
Well, I believe that the Devil is within us, so in that sense I guess I believe in the Devil. And I suppose I believe in hell too, since I believe that Ronald Reagan is burning there.
Ronald Wilson Reagan did greater long-term harm to the United States of America than any other president in American history. And he did far greater damage than increasing the national debt: his biggest legacy was unanswerable official lawlessness. Some Republican fundamentalist recently wished that Reagan would come back from the dead, and so do I: he might then be prosecuted for his war crimes. The Iran-Contra scandals were far more important than the Watergate scandals, because they showed how much a crooked administration could get away with if Congress and the press didn't do their job. It would be convenient to just blame Congress and their halfway measures, but don't forget that in the spring of 1987 the Fourth Estate decided that the Democratic presidential candidates were a safer target.
As ignorant as the right-wing praise for Reagan tends to be, what really bugs me is the cowardly deference he still receives from some "balanced" liberals. Consider the British newspaper The Guardian, which somehow got a "leftist" reputation. In late 1988 and early 1989, as the Reagan presidency finally ended, the editorial writers in that newspaper kept insisting, firstly, that Reagan was very, very popular (as if popularity were its own justification); and secondly, that he had proved "benign." Tell it to the people of Central America! Such pieces tell you far more about the editors' obtuse, desperate conformism than it does about the president in question.
I remember the sentimental gushing a decade ago after Reagan entered hell. Consider the time of McCarthyism, when Ronald Reagan was president of the Screen Actors Guild. At a time when actors were being blacklisted right and left and desperately needed their union's support, Reagan was being a stool pigeon for the McCarthyites! (He also negotiated a sweetheart contract with the big studios.) How did Vanity Fair deal with this? They printed a chapter from Bob Colacello's biography about how he cleared Nancy Davis from accusations of communist sympathy, and they fell in love and married. How sweet. How sentimental. How obscene. Shame on Bob Colacello! Shame on Vanity Fair!
These days some too-clever-by-half liberals have taken to repeating the Reagan the Moderate talking point, seeking to show how extremist today's Republicans are by saying that Reagan was more moderate than they were. That's just pitiful. The extreme Republican policies that Obama still hasn't decisively broken with--from robber baron capitalism to Middle East aggression--are the legacy of Reagan more than any other individual.
As the priests would say, pray for Reagan's worthless soul.