If You Feel Like I Feel You Want The Antidote

For those of you who can't take the treacly, disgustingly saccharine-overloaded reflections on how great Ronald Reagan really was, here are a few invaluable resources.

First, I have to cite Billmon over at the Whiskey Bar. That guy's wicked smart. He directs us to this piece in Slate that's chock-full of good stuff--by Hitchens, even (though he can't resist a couple of cheap shots at intellectuals and Kerry at the end of the piece). It deserves a few exceprts:

Ronald Reagan claimed that the Russian language had no word for "freedom." (The word is "svoboda"; it's quite well attested in Russian literature.) Ronald Reagan said that intercontinental ballistic missiles (not that there are any non-ballistic missiles—a corruption of language that isn't his fault) could be recalled once launched. Ronald Reagan said that he sought a "Star Wars" defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R. Ronald Reagan professed to be annoyed when people called it "Star Wars," even though he had ended his speech on the subject with the lame quip, "May the force be with you." Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars. Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the "End Times" foreshadowed in the Bible. In the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan told Yitzhak Shamir and Simon Wiesenthal, on two separate occasions, that he himself had assisted personally at the liberation of the Nazi death camps.

For the record, Reagan made movies during WWII. One more from Hitchens:

One could go on. I only saw him once up close, which happened to be when he got a question he didn't like. Was it true that his staff in the 1980 debates had stolen President Carter's briefing book? (They had.) The famously genial grin turned into a rictus of senile fury: I was looking at a cruel and stupid lizard.

Wow.

Then there's Geov Parrish at Working for Change, who reminds us of a few important things:

And excuse me, but Ronald Reagan did not end communism. Hundreds of thousands of courageous people, in Moscow and Gdansk and Prague and across the communist bloc, deserve the credit for risking their lives to bring down tyrannical governments, often with nothing more than the willingness to sacrifice their own bodies. They risked everything. Reagan risked nothing but an inadvertent record deficit it took a decade and a Democratic president to heal.

Yep. It's true.

Danny Schecter, writing for Mediachannel.org, compares the press coverage of Reagan's death to that of Pravda or Izvestia (not a bad comparison, actually, except that the US press coverage is far more sappy).

In the bad old days of the Cold War, we would learn that a Russian leader died when their TV screens went dark and martial music was all that we heard. Afterwards, their channels filled with non-stop accolades and tributes to a "great proletarian leader." It was this type of Cold War propaganda posing as news that was held up as an example of the kind of information control the Free World was fighting to overturn -- and had, thanks to the brilliance of our 40th President.

He goes on to talk about Sunday's 60 Minutes, as well as CBS's regular news coverage, both of which were absolutely disgusting.

60 Minutes dropped a promised segment with Sibel Edmonds, the FBI translator who claims she saw evidence that the government knew of planned terrorist attacks for a special segment by Mike Wallace who introduced himself as "Nancy's friend" before he became a journalist.

Dan Rather was called on to introduce a segment on Reagan's funniest bits, as if this was original. CNN's Jeff Greenfield had a similar report the night before. Neither bothered to interview Reagan's skilled Virginia-based joke writer who scripted his every word.

60 Minutes also had an entire segment on, as Mike Wallace put it, "That famous Reagan wit," also conveniently ignoring the fact that it wasn't "Reagan wit," but Reagan delivery.

David Corn has an excellent laundry list of five-and-a-half dozen things that you're not hearing about in the gushing over Saint Ronnie. If you're unfamiliar with any of them, that's why god invented Google. And, yes, he really did talk about recallable nuclear missiles (!), trees causing pollution, and ketchup as a vegetable.

Robert Scheer in the LA Times also helps to straighten out the real Reagan legacy. He also includes a few charitable words about Reagan, including something that should be noted. In 1986, Reagan met with Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, and made actual progress toward nuclear disarmament (Reagan's asinine and unshakable support for SDI, though, kept the two from coming to a monumental agreement).

The venerable Editor and Publisher offers the following from Joe Strupp:

And the man did win two presidential elections, the second by a landslide, and led a rebirth of a Republican party that had been rocked by Watergate and other scandals. But let's not forget, however, that the often-mocked Bill Clinton accomplished much the same for his party, and despite the Lewinsky disgrace, left office with approval ratings that beat Reagan's (and no federal budget deficit, to boot).

So the overwhelming praise for a president who plunged the nation into its worst deficit ever, ignored and cut public money for the poor, while also ignoring the AIDS crisis, is a bit tough to take. During my years at Brooklyn College, between 1984 and 1988, countless classmates had to drop out or find other ways to pay for school because of Reagan's policies, which included slashing federal grants for poor students and cutting survivor benefits for families of the disabled.

Not to mention the Iran-contra scandal, failed 'supply-side economics,' the ludicrous invasion of Grenada, 241 dead Marines in Lebanon, and a costly military buildup that may have contributed to the breakup of the Soviet Union (there were plenty of other reasons too) but also kept us closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, besides leaving us billions of dollars in debt.

And should we even mention the many senior Reagan officials, including ex-White House aide Michael Deaver and national security adviser Robert McFarlane, convicted of various offenses? What about Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger indicted but later pardoned by the first President Bush?

Paying respect is one thing, and well deserved, but the way the press is gushing over Reagan is too much to take, sparking renewed talk of putting him on the $10 bill or Mount Rushmore.

Don't worry; we're almost done.

Juan Cole (see link to the right for more of Professor Cole's ruminations) gives us these gems:

In foreign policy, Reagan abandoned containment of the Soviet Union as a goal and adopted a policy of active roll-back. Since the Soviet Union was already on its last legs and was not a system that could have survived long, Reagan's global aggressiveness was simply unnecessary. The argument that Reagan's increases in military funding bankrupted the Soviets by forcing them to try to keep up is simply wrong. Soviet defense spending was flat in the 1980s.

Reagan's aggression led him to shape our world in most unfortunate ways. Although it would be an exaggeration to say that Ronald Reagan created al-Qaeda, it would not be a vast exaggeration. The Carter administration began the policy of supporting the radical Muslim holy warriors in Afghanistan who were waging an insurgency against the Soviets after their invasion of that country. But Carter only threw a few tens of millions of dollars at them. By the mid-1980s, Reagan was giving the holy warriors half a billion dollars a year. His officials strong-armed the Saudis into matching the U.S. contribution, so that Saudi Intelligence chief Faisal al-Turki turned to Usamah Bin Laden to funnel the money to the Afghans. This sort of thing was certainly done in coordination with the Reagan administration. Even the Pakistanis thought that Reagan was a wild man, and balked at giving the holy warriors ever more powerful weapons. Reagan sent Orrin Hatch to Beijing to try to talk the Chinese into pressuring the Pakistanis to allow the holy warriors to receive stingers and other sophisticated ordnance. The Pakistanis ultimately relented, even though they knew there was a severe danger that the holy warriors would eventually morph into a security threat in their own right.

Reagan's officials so hated the Sandinista populists in Nicaragua that they shredded the Constitution. Congress cut off money for the rightwing death squads fighting the Sandinistas. Reagan's people therefore needed funds to continue to run the rightwing insurgency. They came up with a complicated plan of stealing Pentagon equipment, shipping it to Khomeini in Iran, illegally taking payment from Iran for the weaponry, and then giving the money to the rightwing guerrillas in Central America. At the same time, they pressured Khomeini to get US hostages in Lebanon, taken by radical Shiites there, released. It was a criminal cartel inside the US government, and Reagan allowed it, either through collusion or inattention. It is not a shining legacy, to have helped Khomeini and then used the money he gave them to support highly unsavory forces in Central America. (Some of those forces were involved after all in killing leftwing nuns.)

Makes Watergate look like a freakin' picnic, doesn't it?

Finally, the most damning thing I've read recently is this piece by Colin Shea. He doesn't pull any punches at all (though he is wrong about that highest approval rating at the end of a presidency thing--that record belongs to Bill Clinton). Read all three pages.

Ronald Reagan is dead, and the world is no worse off for it. At the best of times, he was an ineffectual dunce. At the worst, he was a dangerous madman who threatened humanity’s very survival. He destroyed any residual respect for the presidency left over from Nixon, his moral predecessor. He created unprecedented deficits while simultaneously gutting the principles of the New Deal and the Great Society. He presided over a White House famously unable to govern properly because of his abysmal ignorance and tolerance of a Byzantine mess of corrupt internal fiefdoms. His endless rotation of advisers was a contemptible assortment of thieves, quacks, hypocrites and imbeciles who regularly broke the law of the land, lied shamelessly to Congress and the American people, and hopelessly ensnared themselves in ugly webs of shady and illicit dealings. Reagan claimed to be leading a conservative revolution, but he left the presidency with America mired in debt, more authoritarian, militarized and centralized than ever before, and with a foreign policy that was the laughing-stock of the civilized world.

It was morning in America, but the dawn was black indeed. A black dawn where Christian greed was celebrated over Commie compassion, where a family man could now walk out of church and taunt a homeless family, secure in the knowledge that their poverty was their own fault. A black dawn where a lie, repeated five times, could become a simple truth. A black dawn where the Attorney General could commit crime after crime without consequence, where the National Security Advisor could sell weapons to terrorists in order to finance more terrorists, where B-grade science fiction movies served as policy papers and C-grade farce served as the script for governance in the halls of power of the mightiest nation the world has ever known.

--snip--

Ronald Reagan was not a great man. He was a dangerous and incompetent president who brought dishonor and disgrace to his office and to his country. The adulation and reverence being heaped on him today is an obscene affront to truth, history, and the millions who are worse off today because of him. The modern Republican Party’s new “muscular conservatism” - with its nutty imperial dreams, voodoo economics, a worldwide gulag archipelago, contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law, and blind and bumbling ignorance of fact and history - is his creation. And so in this time of crisis, we must not let our memory of Reagan be shrouded in sentimentalism and glory. He takes with him to his grave ineluctable responsibilities he would never accept during his tenure, or indeed his life. The seeds he sowed so long ago have come to monstrous fruition. Let us use this poignant moment not to create a false and unworthy idol in the pantheon of American democracy, but to carefully consider how we have come to this dreadful pass, and whether and how we may yet turn back.

I know I couldn't say that any better.