Ronald Reagan, Agent of Change

Excuse me while I foam at the mouth. Ronald Reagan made some changes all right, while you're thinking about change, you might think about what changes you like. Charming Hollywood almost involved Presidential change isn't what I'd call greatness. The ability to charm people while you're actively screwing them isn't something I admire.

James Watt, was Ronnie's first Secretary of the Interior, advocate of slash and burn forestry and unrestricted mining. If BushCo's Secretary of Interior Gail Norton is on your fan list, consider that she was Watt's protege at Mountain State's Legal Foundation a conservative reactionary arm of the natural resources industries. Even Republicans opposed Watt, and the West suffered for his policies. Much of the over-reaction of environmentalists today is a direct result of Watt. Backlash from the obvious abuse of the environment has resulted in the unending lawsuits plaguing even reasonable forest management today. Maybe it would be piling on to mention his 1996 conviction of attempting to sway a grand jury in the '80s resulting in 5 years probation and a fine...some change.

The air traffic controllers' strike and subsequent union busting by Reagan was the beginning of government harassment of unions and the decline of union power. The slide in blue collar wages dates to Ronnie Reagan, from several sources. Reagan's amnesty of illegal immigrants cued up the blitz of illegal entries, showed business it had nothing to fear from the unenforced Federal laws regarding hiring, and pulled the unions out of the market of pulling up non-union wages.

Ronnie Reagan proved that deficits don't matter to Republicans as he presided over the largest Federal deficit to that date. Republicans tend to try to blame the Democratic legislature, though the veto was available even then. What Ronnie did do was begin the Republican tendency to hand tax breaks to the plutocrats whether the government could afford them or not.

The absolute boondoggle of Star Wars missile defence system is a remnant of the Reagan defence budget, the idea being that it is reasonable to try to shoot down a fly with a rifle. Despite being blocked repeatedly it keeps showing up in Republican administrations. For some obscure reason Republicans claim credit for Ronnie ending the Soviet Union, evidently something ending in his administration is reason enough. This despite over many years most economists, Democrats, and Republicans taking the stance that communism would eat itself economically. Calling something the Evil Empire scarcely breaks it.

The tough talk of Ronnie doesn't seem to have been backed up by any sort of action, we got the cowboy movie star heated rhetoric without any teeth. The identity and location of the group responsible for the truck bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon was known. The definitive action taken was the withdrawal of US troops. The arming of the Afghan jihadis was undertaken with no vetting of their stances, simply opposition to the Soviets was sufficient.

The list of Reagan administration malfunctions from Iran Contra through the gross influence peddling, bribery, fraud, illegal lobbying and sundry abuses that engulfed the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Justice Department, and the Pentagon, to name a few of the most notorious cases. The Reagan quote,"Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem," ought to be the defining statement regarding his administration, though it seems BushCo has taken it to new lengths. In his 1991 book "Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years," journalist Haynes Johnson came up with an unflattering statistic: "By the end of his term, 138 Reagan administration officials had been convicted, had been indicted, or had been the subject of official investigations for official misconduct and/or criminal violations."

Reagan said as he signed the Savings and Loan deregulation bill, "All in all, I think we've hit the jackpot." Some jackpot, the estimated costs of that piece of work is $1 trillion. Just get government out of the way, was the Reagan mantra. Sound real familiar today?

When a Democratic politician calls Reagan an agent of change, my head explodes. It is not an agent of change who turns the clock back to the deficit of the American people. George II has augmented the reversals of the progress of the general citizen of the US, but it was Ronnie Reagan who started the decline. I don't care if the politician is Barak Obama or Joe Blow, it is a load of hogwash promulgated for the benefit of the ignorant and Republican leaning. Thanks, but I'll take somebody who talks like and acts like a Democrat.

***Update***
Fine, make this mean something else:

Obama. "He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing." Sure, Ronnie's my hero, too.