Reagan was not a great president

Okay. On a human level, yes. Ronald Reagan was human. He was a nice man, some say. He had a sense of humor. He was congenial. He had charisma. He loved his wife. Etc., etc., etc.

And he succumbed to a dreadful disease called Alzheimer's, which none of us would wish on anyone. His death was very sad, especially to his family and close friends, of whom he had many. So he was a lucky man. Many loved and admired him. He was also fortunate because he was a rich man. He had all the creature comforts, and he enjoyed fame. All well and good.

All right. Now for the other side of the picture. Reagan may have been a good actor and a good enough person. But he was not a good president. He presided over much harm, many deaths, and the destruction of much good in our nation. He does not deserve sainthood or the degree of glorification which has been piling up all week long ad nauseum. It has been a rough week, listening to and watching the proceedings as we participated in a post mortem coronation. Haven't we gone a little overboard?

Here are just a few reasons why we needn't rejoice in the great contributions of Ronald Reagan as president:

1.He attempted to reverse the long-standing policy of denying tax-exempt status to private schools that practice discrimination (for example, his effort to provide an exemption to Bob Jones University).

2.Reagan aligned himself with the apartheid government of Pretoria. His foreign policy had racial underpinnings, devoid of a concern for human rights.

3.Reagan attempted to dismantle domestic programs that impacted disproportionately on Blacks and the poor. He reduced the affirmative action requirements of corporate recipients of federal contracts and cutback oversight. He diminished the role of Civil Rights Division of the DOJ in filing discrimination claims. He drastically cut the federal and state welfare rolls. He supported racism with remarks like those that characterized poor Black women as "welfare queens." He reduced federal funding for school lunches, going so far as to classify ketchup as a vegetable, and cut funding to Head Start. He slashed important programs like the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act that provided needed assistance to Black people. He did away with birth control services to the poor and stopped all federal and international funding that supported family planning.

4.He appointed conservative judges, like Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the most reactionary Supreme Court justice in generations, and, as we all know, the man who appointed Dubya as our "president." And he appointed Clarence Thomas, who later became a horrible Supreme Court Justice, to the EOC.

5. He doubted the integrity of civil rights leaders, saying, "Sometimes I wonder if they really mean what they say, because some of those leaders are doing very well leading organizations based on keeping alive the feeling that they're victims of prejudice."

6.Reagan gave "aid and comfort" to many repressive regimes throughout the world--especially Saddam Hussein. The Reagan administration gave Hussein intelligence information which helped the Iraqi military use their chemical weapons against Iran- a secret activity which violated many laws. In recent months we have been reminded of Reagan's emissary Donald Rumsfeld's visit to Iraq where he was photographed shaking Saddam Hussein's hand.

7.Reagan actively supported the regimes of the worst people ever to walk the earth. Marcos, Duarte, Rios Mont, and Duvalier were embraced by the Reagan administration with passionate intensity.During the Reagan years, many were trained at the infamous "School of the Americas," AKA the "School of the Assassins." From there, graduates went to places like El Salvador where they murdered nuns and priests. In El Salvador, the right wing ARENA, armed with Reagan money, Reagan weapons, and Reagan military training, slaughtered more than 80,000 civilians in the "War on Communism." The terrible bloodshed in Central America was not some necessary evil. It was a war crime aided and abetted by the Reagan administration.

8.Reagan is trumpeted as the great cheerleader for America. He made us feel good. But it was on his watch that the Savings and Loan industry was deregulated, allowing for all the corruption and scamming that followed, which cost the American people hundreds of billions of dollars. Reagan nurtured an era where "Greed is Good." Military spending rose to astronomical heights under his leadership while social programs died, leaving millions of poor Americans with little hope.

9.Reagan could not be bothered to fund research into what he called "gay cancer." Thus the AIDS virus took hold in America, and thousands died.

10.Reagan was a friend to none other than Osama bin Laden. Throughout the entirety of Reagan's term, bin Laden and his people were armed, funded, and trained by the US. When, in 1998, two American embassies in Africa were blasted into rubble by bin Laden, it was the US who supplied the Semtex, sent to Afghanistan by the Reagan administration.

These are just a few things that we have not heard much about this week. There has been much written about the legacy of Ronald Reagan and what it will be. William Rivers Pitt posted this thought on Truthout.org:

His (Reagan's) question, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" is easy to answer. We are not better off than we were four years ago, or eight years ago, or twelve, or twenty. We are a badly damaged state, ruled today by a man who subsists off Reagan's most corrosive final gift to us all: It is the image that matters and be damned to the truth.

I am not comforted in the least these days because our "president" has brought our country to even greater horrors than Reagan. Sadly Bush is following in Reagan's footsteps.

God help us.