Now that President Ronald Reagan has passed away, I have been thinking about his life and his legacy. When you take a close look at it, Republicans might see reason to cheer, but the average American does not.
I have been thinking why do Republicans embrace Reagan so much and make him out to be such a great human when in fact he was a very small tiny brained man?
Sadly, the reason is that Reagan is all they have.
When it comes to great Presidential leaders that Republicans can look at with respect and admiration, they come up with embarrassingly few candidates over the last 100 years. Republicans are like a poor family at Christmas time. They are lucky to have a tree, let alone any presents. Who else could Republicans place place on an altar besides Reagan?
I have been thinking why do Republicans embrace Reagan so much and make him out to be such a great human when in fact he was a very small tiny brained man.
It's all they have.
When it comes to great Presidential leaders that Republicans can look at with respect and admiration, they come up with embarrassingly few candidates over the last 100 years. Republicans are like a poor family at Christmas time. They are lucky to have a tree, let alone any presents. Who else could Republicans place place on an altar besides Reagan?
George H.W. Bush:
President Bush served three terms in office, two as Vice President and one as President. He was done in by his own rhetoric. "Read my lips, no new taxes" was his battle cry all the way up to the time he raised taxes. Despite having a 92% approval rating at the end of the first war with Iraq, he lost to Clinton because he was considered out of touch with the American people.
Gerald Ford:
This is the only man to serve a term as President that was never elected. Ford may deserve more respect than he gets because he had to work to bring the nation together after the appalling scandals involving the Nixon Administration.
Richard Nixon:
Nixon should be a man Republicans could embrace. After all, he served four Presidential terms in office. Two as Vice President, two as President. As all Americans know, he resigned in disgrace. Any good that he did is overshadowed by the Watergate Scandal.
Dwight D. Eisenhower:
He served two terms as President, where he continued aspects of the New Deal and Fair Deal. He is the last Republican to leave the office of President in as good of shape as he found it when he left office in 1961, over 45 years ago. To most of us he's an ancient fossil like the Revolutionary War or the dinosaurs.
After Eisenhower, the choices become downright spartan. Hoover, Harding, and Taft do not leave much in the way of stirring legacies people want to latch onto. Teddy Roosevelt was a great American,and a defender of the common man. Unfortunately for Republicans, it's really hard to rally around a man that entered office over 100 years ago.
In the last 100 years, Republicans have Roosevelt and Eisenhower to turn to as an inspiration and as an example of great leadership. Every other leader has been so corrupt, they are considered an embarrassment. Reagan is the only one who in almost 50 years hasn't left office with his tail between his legs. It's all the Republicans have.
The failures of Reagan as a man and as a human being are so numerous, it's embarrassing that the Republicans can conveniently forget all of them and put this person on a pedestal at all. This is a brief overview of his legacy:
He was a b actor best known for working in second rate movies with a monkey.
As the President, he worked to destroy unions. He worked to lower standards in school lunches so that ketchup could be considered a vegetable. He claimed trees created pollution. He felt that if you've seen one tree, you've seen them all. A great health crisis arose during his Presidency we now know as AIDS. A man that grew up with the viral ravages of Polio and Smallpox did next to nothing to help stop this virus before it became the worldwide epidemic it is ravaging continents.
He traded arms for hostages in Iran while at the same time chiding then President Jimmy Carter who refused to negotiate with Iranians for the release of American hostages and stating he would never do the same thing because, "... to do so would only invite more terrorism- once we head down that path there would be no end to it, no end to the suffering of innocent people, no end to the bloody ransom all civilised people must pay." Yet he authorized arms for hostages in 1985 to Iran.
Then there was the allegations that the administration which embraced the message, "just say no to drugs" sold drugs to supply illegal arms to rebels in Nicaragua.
Despite all of this and far more, Republicans rally around Reagan as the great communicator. I think they do it by following Former Vice President Walter Mondale's advice, "You have to be careful when quoting Reagan. If you do it verbatim, it's considered slander."
It seems nature has had the last vindication. Reagan cut funding for Alzheimer's research, a disease he later suffered from. At the end of his Presidency, Reagan did not gloat, he did not go to parades, parties or give great speeches about his life. Instead, he wasted away in the prison of his own body. His mind wasted away by disease.
