I'm So Glad Reagan's Dead; Now, If Only His Legacy Would Die. The big news yesterday was that Ronald Reagan, our first Pretend-President, has (finally) died. Alas, the national debt he TRIPLED and the hideous economic inequity produced by his Plutocratic Revolution have not vanished with him.
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Nor has the practice of the Republican Party of putting forward puppet Presidents, poster boys to give a face to the collective leadership — rightwing Politburo — that is the Real President, vanished. Dubya, a stupid and incompetent puppet, doesn't have Reagan's ability to memorize the lines written for him and deliver them with the phony sincerity that came as second-nature to Reagan. George Burns, the comic-turned-actor, said that "The secret of acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you've got it made." Ronnie Reagan had that down pat.
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Reagan was ridiculed as a mediocre actor. Oddly, the CBS bio shown during the evening news yesterday did not show even the briefest clip from what may be Reagan's best movie, Bedtime for Bonzo, probably out of concern that showing Reagan with a chimpanzee would be regarded as anti-Reagan bias. But that film helped establish warm feelings for Reagan in the general public.
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Ronald Reagan was not a mediocre actor. He was the greatest actor in history. Hundreds of millions of people really believed that he was President of the United States. Oh, he was, in name. But he was NEVER President in reality.
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Phil Hartman did a skit on Saturday Night Live in which he played Reagan as the kindly, bumbling old man to the public, but as soon as the door was closed, he turned into a fierce, focused, dynamic leader fully in control. It was funny because everyone knew that that was not the case.
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Reagan was the front man for a collective leadership of intelligent but vicious Republican insiders who were the Real President. Americans didn't want to believe that, so pretended that Reagan really was President, even tho it was plain to world leaders that he was not. Mikhail Gorbachev got Reagan alone in a room, with just translators, in Reykjavik, and took him to the cleaners! After Reagan emerged from that private meeting and his handlers found out what he had done, they disowned Reagan's acts and put strong words in his weak mouth. Never again was he permitted to meet privately with anyone important, just as the current Pretend-President wasn't allowed to meet privately with the 9/11 Commission, but had to be accompanied by Vice President Cheney to keep him from saying something stupid.
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Reagan was the "Teflon President". No matter how evil the things he did, the public refused to believe that that kindly old man could possibly be doing anything bad. Dubya is our second Pretend-President and, alas, our second Teflon President. The Republicans have an uncanny knack for selecting as front men people whose likability makes evil seem good.
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The Republican constituency is hopelessly naive. They listen to what Republican presidents say. They pay no attention to what they actually do.
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Ronald Reagan talked about ending Big Government, but TRIPLED the national debt thru a combination of huge budgets and huge tax cuts (that benefited mainly the rich). His equally 'conservative' successor, Bush the Elder, added another third to it by the same mechanisms, so after 12 years of 'fiscally conservative' Republicans dedicated to eliminating Big Government, the national debt had QUADRUPLED!
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The debt they produced thru the tax structure they created continued to grow even under the Clinton presidency, but by the end of Clinton's eight years in office, the U.S. was rolling in dough, and we finally had a chance to start paying down the debt — until Dubya, Reagan's spiritual son — came into office and cut taxes even further in PREFERENCE to bringing down the debt. Now the debt is growing at the rate of half a trillion dollars a year, which, with compounding, could double the national debt over the next several years.
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Many people are confused as to why Republicans who represent themselves as "fiscal conservatives" quadrupled the national debt and now threaten to double it again. If you ask the right questions, the answers jump out at you.
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Q: Who owns the national debt? A: The rich. End of inquiry. No other question is necessary.
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Oh, you COULD ask further questions, such as Q: Who PAYS the national debt? A: The rest of us. Put them together. Q: So, who benefits from a huge national debt? A: The rich. Q: Who hurts? A: The rest of us. Q: What is the net effect of the national debt? A: To take money from the poor and middle class, and give it to the rich. Q: Who are the rich? A: Mostly Republicans.
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The Republican Party is the servant of the rich, and its devotion to the rich is far more important than any silly principle or slogan like "fiscal responsibility" or "small government".
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The "Reagan Revolution" also cut taxes in such a way as to benefit the wealthy very disproportionately. The consequence is that in the past 20 years, the distribution of wealth in this country has become hugely skewed toward the rich, with everyone else stagnating or even falling behind. Consider these numbers from the Berkeley-based, liberal Jewish magazine Tikkun:

From 1983–1997, only the top five percent of U.S. households saw an increase in net worth, while wealth declined for everyone else. [Federal Reserve Bulletin, January 2000, p. 10.]

• The financial wealth of the top one percent of U.S. households now exceeds the combined household financial wealth of the bottom 95 percent. [Edward N. Wolff, "Recent Trends in Wealth Ownership," a paper for the conference on "Benefits and Mechanisms for Spreading Asset Ownership in the United States," New York University, December 10–12, 1998.]

Making things worse is that the Reagan Revolution also abolished the deductibility of consumer interest and weakened or destroyed usury laws. The consequence has been a huge rise in personal debt among the poor and middle class. Scores of millions of Americans are so deep in debt, and their debt is increasing at usurious rates (perhaps an average of 20%) that they cannot ever get out of debt. Debt has become a palpable, profound oppression in the lives of uncountable millions.
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That debt too is owned by the rich, who, thru interest payments on the national debt and personal debt are taking enormous amounts of money from the poor and middle class to become ever more obscenely rich themselves.
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Reagan is falsely credited with having destroyed the Soviet Empire, which was presented by Republicans as a Republican triumph. In reality, every President from the end of World War II to the end of the Soviet Empire was staunchly anti-Communist, and it is only decades of encirclement and opposition that brought Kremlin Communism to its knees. (Communism is still doing fine in China, however, and is indeed being subsidized to the tune of $124 billion a year by the U.S. trade deficit with Communist China, thanks to a hardline Republican devotion to "free trade" because it puts pressure on American workers to accept low wages and reduced benefits lest their jobs be sent abroad.)
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Harry Truman started U.S. opposition to Communist imperialism with the Marshall Plan, Truman Doctrine, NATO, and Korean War. Eisenhower focused on containment, presided over by the zealous John Foster Dulles. Kennedy stared down Khrushchev in the Cuban Missile Crisis and started U.S. defense of Vietnam. Johnson escalated the Vietnam War, as did Nixon during his first term. Only in his second term did Nixon pull out of Vietnam and seek accommodation with world Communism. Indeed, the only President "soft on Communism" was a Republican! Carter boycotted the Moscow Olympics and helped the mujahedeen defeat Communism is Afghanistan, a defeat that was critical in demoralizing the empire-builders in the Kremlin.
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Reagan came to office only after the U.S. had already spent 34 years containing Communism. The triumph is not his but ours, and the Soviet people's, because it is they who ended it. Soviet Communism had just gone on too long without ever working, and the people were tired of being miserable.
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Reagan was the first major champion of the modern Republican crusade for "family values". But he was DIVORCED! How is a man who threw over his first wife (the actress Jane Wyman) supposed to be a defender of traditional values? "What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder." (Jesus' own words, according to Matthew 19:6) Again, we are to do as he said, not as he did. Teflon President. It's sad to see that so many people are so easily fooled.
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There are also rumors that in his younger days (at least) Ronald Reagan was actively homosexual. Perhaps he was just using the "casting couch" to get ahead. A friend of mine declaimed, when Reagan won his first gubernatorial campaign, "I know for a fact that the Governor of California is a [sexually-explicit term for a homosexual man]". My friend, gay himself, was well placed in show-biz/cultural circles, as to be "in" on Hollywood "dope" (or "dirt", if you prefer).
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Well, Ronald Reagan's days of playing the people for fools are over. Thank goodness. Now, if only Dubya would die, we'd have two Teflon Pretend-Presidents no longer conning the people, and we might address the horrendous problems that the Republican cabal behind their smiling faces of evil have produced.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:50 PM