Ronald Reagan: Worst President Ever?

[Zummie]

Ronald Reagan: Worst President Ever?
By Robert Parry

There’s been talk that George W. Bush was so inept that he should trademark the phrase “Worst President Ever,” though some historians would bestow that title on pre-Civil War President James Buchanan. Still, a case could be made for putting Ronald Reagan in the competition.

Granted, the very idea of rating Reagan as one of the worst presidents ever will infuriate his many right-wing acolytes and offend Washington insiders who have made a cottage industry out of buying some protection from Republicans by lauding the 40th President.

But there’s a growing realization that the starting point for many of the catastrophes confronting the United States today can be traced to Reagan’s presidency. There’s also a grudging reassessment that the “failed” presidents of the 1970s – Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter – may deserve more credit for trying to grapple with the problems that now beset the country.

Nixon, Ford and Carter won scant praise for addressing the systemic challenges of America’s oil dependence, environmental degradation, the arms race, and nuclear proliferation – all issues that Reagan essentially ignored and that now threaten America’s future.

Nixon helped create the Environmental Protection Agency; he imposed energy-conservation measures; he opened the diplomatic door to communist China. Nixon’s administration also detected the growing weakness in the Soviet Union and advocated a policy of détente (a plan for bringing the Cold War to an end or at least curbing its most dangerous excesses).

After Nixon’s resignation in the Watergate scandal, Ford continued many of Nixon’s policies, particularly trying to wind down the Cold War with Moscow. However, confronting a rebellion from Reagan’s Republican Right in 1976, Ford abandoned “détente.”

Ford also let hard-line Cold Warriors (and a first wave of young intellectuals who became known as neoconservatives) pressure the CIA’s analytical division, and he brought in a new generation of hard-liners, including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

After defeating Ford in 1976, Carter injected more respect for human rights into U.S. foreign policy, a move some scholars believe put an important nail in the coffin of the Soviet Union, leaving it hard-pressed to justify the repressive internal practices of the East Bloc. Carter also emphasized the need to contain the spread of nuclear weapons, especially in unstable countries like Pakistan.

Domestically, Carter pushed a comprehensive energy policy and warned Americans that their growing dependence on foreign oil represented a national security threat, what he famously called “the moral equivalent of war.”

However, powerful vested interests – both domestic and foreign – managed to exploit the shortcomings of these three presidents to sabotage any sustained progress. By 1980, Reagan had become a pied piper luring the American people away from the tough choices that Nixon, Ford and Carter had defined.

Cruelty with a Smile

With his superficially sunny disposition – and a ruthless political strategy of exploiting white-male resentments – Reagan convinced millions of Americans that the threats they faced were: African-American welfare queens, Central American leftists, a rapidly expanding Evil Empire based in Moscow, and the do-good federal government.

In his First Inaugural Address in 1981, Reagan declared that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

When it came to cutting back on America’s energy use, Reagan’s message could be boiled down to the old reggae lyric, “Don’t worry, be happy.” Rather than pressing Detroit to build smaller, fuel-efficient cars, Reagan made clear that the auto industry could manufacture gas-guzzlers without much nagging from Washington.

The same with the environment. Reagan intentionally staffed the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department with officials who were hostile toward regulation aimed at protecting the environment. George W. Bush didn’t invent Republican hostility toward scientific warnings of environmental calamities; he was just picking up where Reagan left off.

Reagan pushed for deregulation of industries, including banking; he slashed income taxes for the wealthiest Americans in an experiment known as “supply side” economics, which held falsely that cutting rates for the rich would increase revenues and eliminate the federal deficit.

Over the years, “supply side” would evolve into a secular religion for many on the Right, but Reagan’s budget director David Stockman once blurted out the truth, that it would lead to red ink “as far as the eye could see.”

While conceding that some of Reagan’s economic plans did not work out as intended, his defenders – including many mainstream journalists – still argue that Reagan should be hailed as a great President because he “won the Cold War,” a short-hand phrase that they like to attach to his historical biography.

However, a strong case can be made that the Cold War was won well before Reagan arrived in the White House. Indeed, in the 1970s, it was a common perception in the U.S. intelligence community that the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was winding down, in large part because the Soviet economic model had failed in the technological race with the West.

That was the view of many Kremlinologists in the CIA’s analytical division. Also, I was told by a senior CIA’s operations official that some of the CIA’s best spies inside the Soviet hierarchy supported the view that the Soviet Union was headed toward collapse, not surging toward world supremacy, as Reagan and his foreign policy team insisted in the early 1980s.

The CIA analysis was the basis for the détente that was launched by Nixon and Ford, essentially seeking a negotiated solution to the most dangerous remaining aspects of the Cold War.

The Afghan Debacle

In that view, Soviet military operations, including sending troops into Afghanistan in 1979, were mostly defensive in nature. In Afghanistan, the Soviets hoped to prop up a pro-communist government that was seeking to modernize the country but was beset by opposition from Islamic fundamentalists who were getting covert support from the U.S. government.

Though the Afghan covert operation originated with Cold Warriors in the Carter administration, especially national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, the war was dramatically ramped up under Reagan, who traded U.S. acquiescence toward Pakistan’s nuclear bomb for its help in shipping sophisticated weapons to the Afghan jihadists (including a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden).

While Reagan’s acolytes cite the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan as decisive in “winning the Cold War,” the counter-argument is that Moscow was already in disarray – and while failure in Afghanistan may have sped the Soviet Union’s final collapse – it also created twin dangers for the future of the world: the rise of al-Qaeda terrorism and the nuclear bomb in the hands of Pakistan’s unstable Islamic Republic.

Trade-offs elsewhere in the world also damaged long-term U.S. interests. In Latin America, for instance, Reagan’s brutal strategy of arming right-wing militaries to crush peasant, student and labor uprisings left the region with a legacy of anti-Americanism that is now resurfacing in the emergence of populist leftist governments.

In Nicaragua, for instance, Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega (whom Reagan once denounced as a “dictator in designer glasses”) is now back in power. In El Salvador, the leftist FMLN won the latest elections. Indeed, across the region, hostility to Washington is now the rule, creating openings for China, Iran, Cuba and other American rivals.

In the early 1980s, Reagan also credentialed a young generation of neocon intellectuals, who pioneered a concept called “perception management,” the shaping of how Americans saw, understood and were frightened by threats from abroad.

Many honest reporters saw their careers damaged when they resisted the lies and distortions of the Reagan administration. Likewise, U.S. intelligence analysts were purged when they refused to bend to the propaganda demands from above.

To marginalize dissent, Reagan and his subordinates stoked anger toward anyone who challenged the era’s feel-good optimism. Skeptics were not just honorable critics, they were un-American defeatists or – in Jeane Kirkpatrick’s memorable attack line – they would “blame America first.”

Under Reagan, a right-wing infrastructure also took shape, linking media outlets (magazines, newspapers, books, etc.) with well-financed think tanks that churned out endless op-eds and research papers. Plus, there were attack groups that went after mainstream journalists who dared disclose information that poked holes in Reagan’s propaganda themes.

In effect, Reagan’s team created a faux reality for the American public. Civil wars in Central America between impoverished peasants and wealthy oligarchs became East-West showdowns. U.S.-backed insurgents in Nicaragua, Angola and Afghanistan were transformed from corrupt, brutal (often drug-tainted) thugs into noble “freedom-fighters.”

With the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan also revived Richard Nixon’s theory of an imperial presidency that could ignore the nation’s laws and evade accountability through criminal cover-ups. That behavior also would rear its head again in the war crimes of George W. Bush. [For details on Reagan’s abuses, see Robert Parry’s Lost History and Secrecy & Privilege.]

Wall Street Greed

The American Dream also dimmed during Reagan’s tenure.

While he played the role of the nation’s kindly grandfather, his operatives divided the American people, using “wedge issues” to deepen grievances especially of white men who were encouraged to see themselves as victims of “reverse discrimination” and “political correctness.”

Yet even as working-class white men were rallying to the Republican banner (as so-called “Reagan Democrats”), their economic interests were being savaged. Unions were broken and marginalized; “free trade” policies shipped manufacturing jobs abroad; old neighborhoods were decaying; drug use among the young was soaring.

Meanwhile, unprecedented greed was unleashed on Wall Street, fraying old-fashioned bonds between company owners and employees.

Before Reagan, corporate CEOs earned less than 50 times the salary of an average worker. By the end of the Reagan-Bush-I administrations in 1993, the average CEO salary was more than 100 times that of a typical worker. (At the end of the Bush-II administration, that CEO-salary figure was more than 250 times that of an average worker.)

Many other trends set during the Reagan era continued to corrode the U.S. political process in the years after Reagan left office. After 9/11, for instance, the neocons reemerged as a dominant force, reprising their “perception management” tactics, depicting the “war on terror” – like the last days of the Cold War – as a terrifying conflict between good and evil.

The hyping of the Islamic threat mirrored the neocons’ exaggerated depiction of the Soviet menace in the 1980s – and again the propaganda strategy worked. Many Americans let their emotions run wild, from the hunger for revenge after 9/11 to the war fever over invading Iraq.

Arguably, the descent into this dark fantasyland – that Ronald Reagan began in the early 1980s – reached its nadir in the flag-waving early days of the Iraq War. Only gradually did reality begin to reassert itself as the death toll mounted in Iraq and the Katrina disaster reminded Americans why they needed an effective government.

Still, the disasters – set in motion by Ronald Reagan – continued to roll in. Bush’s Reagan-esque tax cuts for the rich blew another huge hole in the federal budget and the Reagan-esque anti-regulatory fervor led to a massive financial meltdown that threw the nation into economic chaos.

Love Reagan; Hate Bush

Ironically, George W. Bush has come in for savage criticism, but the Republican leader who inspired Bush’s presidency – Ronald Reagan – remained an honored figure, his name attached to scores of national landmarks including Washington’s National Airport.

Even leading Democrats genuflect to Reagan. Early in Campaign 2008, when Barack Obama was positioning himself as a bipartisan political figure who could appeal to Republicans, he bowed to the Reagan mystique, hailing the GOP icon as a leader who “changed the trajectory of America.”

Though Obama’s chief point was that Reagan in 1980 “put us on a fundamentally different path” – a point which may be historically undeniable – Obama went further, justifying Reagan's course correction because of “all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s, and government had grown and grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability.”

While Obama later clarified his point to say he didn't mean to endorse Reagan's conservative policies, Obama seemed to suggest that Reagan's 1980 election administered a needed dose of accountability to the United States when Reagan actually did the opposite. Reagan’s presidency represented a dangerous escape from accountability – and reality.

Still, Obama and congressional Democrats continue to pander to the Reagan myth. On Tuesday, as the nation approached the fifth anniversary of Reagan’s death, Obama welcomed Nancy Reagan to the White House and signed a law creating a panel to plan and carry out events to honor Reagan’s 100th birthday in 2011.

Obama hailed the right-wing icon. “President Reagan helped as much as any President to restore a sense of optimism in our country, a spirit that transcended politics — that transcended even the most heated arguments of the day,” Obama said. [For more on Obama’s earlier pandering about Reagan, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Obama’s Dubious Praise for Reagan.”]

It’s a sure thing that the Reagan Centennial Committee won't do much more than add to the hagiography surrounding the 40th President.

Despite the grievous harm that Reagan’s presidency inflicted on the American Republic and the American people, it may take many more years before a historian has the guts to put this deformed era into a truthful perspective and rate Reagan where he belongs -- near the bottom of the presidential list.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/060309.html

[seapower]

A mind is a terrible thing to waste! Frank

[Artson D]

The worst president ever...is in office now!!!! My father did suffer when Regan was in office as he was a air traffic controller after he worked at the Grumman plant on LI. I think every year they get worse than the year before yet im sure its not easy dealing with all the B.S left from the previous years. It will never be the way it should be......... ever!

[Zummie]

We know that most repubs like to ignore facts that conflict with their delusions but try disputing some of these........


Ronald Reagan: An Over-rated, Under-criticized President

I have never understood why the neocons deify Reagan and act as if he were God incarnate while on earth. As has been pointed out quite correctly, Ronald Reagan was a disaster on just about every front. The people in his administration would come to create the most infamous reactionary reich-wing cabal in U.S. history, with many of them spawning destructive ideas such as "no new taxes ever" and "American military force is our God-given right to use whenever we dont like another government" and "the poor are all welfare bums" and "feed the rich and they will create jobs for everyone" and "smaller government(aka cut the poor)"...all toxic ideas taken up by Grover Norquist and Karl Rove, Rex Reed, et al, who under GW Bush were the the ideological descendants of his Daddy George H.W. Bush's slander-monger protege, Lee Atwater. Reagan employed a whole host of reactionaries from Oliver North to the young fascists (at the time) Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfelt who as we know became major war mongers under George W. Bush.

So, yes, Ronald Reagan is the most OVER-rated, UNDER-criticized president in recent American history and he was the granddaddy in most ways of the current economic meltdown, banking scandals and severe divide between 'haves' and 'have nots' that we see today. His "laissez-faire "free" market knows best" hogwash and his undoing of Federal supervision of social programs via 'block grants' back to the states, allowed for much of the subsequent unravelling of FDR's and Lyndon Johnson's and Jimmy Carter's improvements in the social safety net and evironmental laws. Clinton was a mixed bag who cooperated with the conservatives a little more than his predecessors and his biggiest mistakes were to continue to OK deregulation and to bow to the 'welfare reform' championed by fascists like Newt Gingrich, which stripped a whole generation of Americans from a chance at belonging to the middle class and put many more in the street because the goverment ended welfare but reneged on its promise to replace welfare with 'jobs for everyone once people were kicked off the welfare rolls". The jobs never materialized, wages remained stagnant and minimum wage hikes continued for years to be stymied, as was health care reform attempts which under Bill Clinton were shot down by a Republican Congress headed by Newt Gingrich and his Contract On America (not Contract with America) which was a master plan to undo the social safety net even further. In 1995 Gingrich even tried to shut down the Federal Government so he could attempt to destroy Social Security and Medicare. Clinton prevented him from achieving all of what he wanted, but the conservatives, ever since FDR put in the New Deal have dreamed of destroying any and all spending on lower income Americans.. The bottom half of the US population never recovered its former independence. Unions were busted under Ronald Reagan,legal safeguards for workers were removed by conservative Supreme Court 'justices' appointed by George H.W. Bush, Reagan's Vice President who later was president.

I've always maintained that there is an ideological unbroken line of succession from Joe McCarthy to the communist-baiting, Imperial Presidency of Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush to finally George W.Bush. There is also a honing of what would become standard operating practice for the GOP of winning elections by way of fear mongering, lying, slandering opponents, war-mongering and sloganeering pushing two-tiered economic class warfare against the poor and styming of sorely needed reform

The GOP's growing dominance during the 1980s and 1990s in national decision making made sure that Ronald Reagan's plans and ideas put us back 30 to 50 years from where we as a country would be and ought to be today in terms of energy independence, health care reform, environmental soundness, global warming, political backlash overseas ageinst US meddling....the list goes on and on of the evil that conservatives, then neo-conservatives have foisted on the country. And the Republicans even had the gall to call those who opposed their malfeasance 'unpatriotic' and managed to turn the American peoples' psyche to buy the now much repeated idea that being 'progressive' amounts to being weak on national defense, a moral pervert, a traitor if not an all out communist and a giant money grabbing tax-and-spender. All of which of course are lies but stuck under the constant repetition of the Reagan and both Bushes. As it turns out, the conservatives actually became the biggest practitioners of all the negatives they tried to pin on the Democrats. The hypocrisy we see today as their hallmark can easily be traced back to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. And these bait-and-switch artists can easily be shown to be ten times guiltier of the so-called "liberal" negatives THEMSELVES, while they point at Barack Obama and the Democrats for "excessive spending". We all know what happened when George W. Bush and the GOP turned the Clinton Surplus into a huge multi-trillion dollar national debt, which they are now trying to blame on Barack Obama.

Right up to the present moment we see the Republicans trying to recycle their same tried-and-failed mantras taken from their same old hackneyed play book as they attempt to derail Barack Obama. They haven't changed a bit except to hone their sneakiness and dirty tricks and get better and better at partnering up with the mainstream media to continue to try to drive wedge issues into the political debate with a drumbeat of falsehoods.

The GOP's tactics are greatly helped in this, because we no longer have the Fairness Doctrine with which to force the media to be even handed and objective in their treatment of national issues.

The Fairness Doctrine was also removed during the tenure of Ronald Reagan. And you will just be sure to see the Republicans fight tooth and nail in case it ever came up that the Fairness Doctrine might be re-considered to be restored. The GOP depends on their talking points, which derive from the same Ronald Reagan ideology they always espouse, will be endlessly repeated in nightly newscasts, unchallenged by the "reporters" who appear to every night to repeat GOP talking points while holding Democrats to a different standard of parsing and micro-analysis. Our communities have lost their local independente reporting and our nation has been subjected to nothing less than propaganda and brainwashing of the public. So the GOP, the heirs of Ronald Reagan's reactionary policies, will see to it that Fairness is never restored if they can help it. I hope Obama changes his mind and stops opposing the re-instituting of the Fairness Doctrine. As it is said "he who controls the past, controls the future". If the media keep up the lies that Ronald Reagan started, then the GOP will continue to control our national dialog and thus our future.

Reagan was a terrible president. And we are still paying dearly for his toxic ideology.

http://www.opednews.com/Diary/Ronald...90401-611.html

[seapower]

Just curious, I see you almost alway's "cut and paste" your arguement's. I know you're an intelligent guy, try speaking for yourself. You may find some will listen abit more if you express your own idea's. But then again maybe not. Frank

[Zummie]

I just back up my opinions with facts and provide the citations to back up the facts; unlike so many here that pull their facts and opinions out of their azzes.

[seapower]

to bet that many citizen's behind the former "Wall" think he was a pretty good guy. Trouble is over here, we've got a bunch of whiner's, that never seem to have completely their way. Of course, if the shoe fit's........ you know the rest. Frank

[Zummie]

A lot of historians feel that Reagan's actions delayed the fall of Communism.

[obxfish]

I'm sorry, I started to take your thread seriously until I glanced down and saw where you started singing Jimmy Carters praises, I laughed and moved right on!

[Big Fish Billy]

If I went down the graveyard and dug Ronnie up....he'd still be better than anything else around.....