"Honk, If You Think He's Senile"
The Beatification of Ronald Reagan
By CHARLES R. LARSON
The excess of emotion expressed in the nation over the hundredth anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth might lead one to conclude that he wasn't the 40th President of the United States, but God. Ronald Reagan was the last president whom many Americans say they feel good about but--in a culture devoted entirely to making one feel happy and building up one's self-esteem--that is understandable. Regrettably, we haven't seen anything yet about the beatification of the country's first trickster president (George W. Bush was the second).
When President Reagan was running for re-election, as a long-time Washington resident and commentator, I felt duty-bound to place a bumper sticker on my automobile that said "Honk If You Think He's Senile." Plenty of people honked their horns or waved from passing vehicles, and there were also the people who kept trying to remove the sticker from my bumper. My point was simple: the evidence was already there well before the second inauguration that Reagan was suffering from senility and should never have been reelected. Were people simply not paying any attention to his pronouncements and those silly movie lines that crept into his speeches? Were they that infatuated by his engaging smile? The people around him knew what was happening, but what could possibly have driven them to think of the country first? Still, I have to confess that senility started to look positively desirable when W Bush entered the White House.
It's questionable how history will judge Ronald Reagan, but two facts are indisputable. First, he rang up the fastest and the largest deficit in the country's history up to that time, which conservatives still won't admit. And second, it took the foresight of Bill Clinton to begin to correct the problem. All for naught, of course, since they were wiped out by W Bush and his cheerleader, Vice President Cheney, and his audacious remark: "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter." Republicans today want Americans to believe that the entire debt of the country has been amassed by Barak Obama, forgetting that our current economic morass had its foundations during the Reagan and Bush years. I'd call Republican attitudes toward the country's deficit a case of selective amnesia.
More here:
http://counterpunch.org/larson02082011.html
The Beatification of Ronald Reagan
By CHARLES R. LARSON
The excess of emotion expressed in the nation over the hundredth anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth might lead one to conclude that he wasn't the 40th President of the United States, but God. Ronald Reagan was the last president whom many Americans say they feel good about but--in a culture devoted entirely to making one feel happy and building up one's self-esteem--that is understandable. Regrettably, we haven't seen anything yet about the beatification of the country's first trickster president (George W. Bush was the second).
When President Reagan was running for re-election, as a long-time Washington resident and commentator, I felt duty-bound to place a bumper sticker on my automobile that said "Honk If You Think He's Senile." Plenty of people honked their horns or waved from passing vehicles, and there were also the people who kept trying to remove the sticker from my bumper. My point was simple: the evidence was already there well before the second inauguration that Reagan was suffering from senility and should never have been reelected. Were people simply not paying any attention to his pronouncements and those silly movie lines that crept into his speeches? Were they that infatuated by his engaging smile? The people around him knew what was happening, but what could possibly have driven them to think of the country first? Still, I have to confess that senility started to look positively desirable when W Bush entered the White House.
It's questionable how history will judge Ronald Reagan, but two facts are indisputable. First, he rang up the fastest and the largest deficit in the country's history up to that time, which conservatives still won't admit. And second, it took the foresight of Bill Clinton to begin to correct the problem. All for naught, of course, since they were wiped out by W Bush and his cheerleader, Vice President Cheney, and his audacious remark: "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter." Republicans today want Americans to believe that the entire debt of the country has been amassed by Barak Obama, forgetting that our current economic morass had its foundations during the Reagan and Bush years. I'd call Republican attitudes toward the country's deficit a case of selective amnesia.
More here:
http://counterpunch.org/larson02082011.html
