Saint Ronald Reagan

I am so sick and tired of hearing about how Ronald Reagan was a Saint. He was without a doubt one of the worst presidents this nation has ever had, but the neocons want us to believe differently, so they praise him every chance they get and force feed the kool-aid to an unsuspecting public through the corporate media. Let's see if I can back that up with a few facts.

1. During the first two years of Reagan's presidency, the public was giving President Reagan the lowest level of approval of all modern elected presidents, later on after the Iran Contra hearings, his rating dropped to 41 percent.
   
2. He gave the richest people in the U.S. a huge tax break the first year and then raised taxes on the poor and middle class the next 7 years of his presidency, because he found out through the Congressional Budget Office that he couldn't pay for the tax break for the rich.
   
3. He claimed to be a huge opponent of big government but managed to spend more money and make the government bigger than it had ever been. He even gave us a huge deficit that caused a huge recession. And let's not forget the wonderful trickle down economic theory of St. Reagan that was a chief cause of the economic meltdown we are going through now.
   
4. He signed a law that gave amnesty to millions of illegal aliens and let them become legal. Republicans never talk about this one.
   
5. He started mandatory minimum sentences for people and now thousands of American citizens have received long prison sentences, sometimes without parole for non-violent drug related issues.
   
6. His foreign policy has done nothing but make things worse in the world and cause terrorism, i.e. Iran Contra, and Afghanistan help to fight the Soviets and helped to create the Taliban, one of the most evil, ruthless, religious maniac groups in the world. St. Reagan called them "freedom fighters," today they are called "terrorists."
   
7. He fired more than 11,000 striking air-traffic controllers and broke their union because they dared to go on strike.
   
8. He would sometimes just make things up: to wit, "Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do." Also, he said "Sulfur dioxide emitted from Mount St. Helens was greater than that emitted by cars over a 10-year period." Of course, this is not true, cars emit more than 40 times more than the volcano released in a day even during its peak output.
   
   
   I could go on for many more pages, but I think you get the point. The neocons want us to believe that Reagan was a saint because most of the nasty dirty things he did come directly from their views of the world. We have now seen where those views lead, and I hope that people are waking up to the fact that these people don't care about America, they only care about how much money they can make stealing from the American people.
   

   ¹ Taken from: "The Enduring Lies of Ronald Reagan Though the GOP continues to canonize the fortieth president, we can't forget his legacy as a liar and a foreign policy flop"
   

   By Susan J. Douglas