Reagan at 100
Today is Sunday, 6 February 2011.
I believe that it was when Gerald Ford died, and I wrote a scathing analysis of his long life of political wickedness, that I was excoriated for speaking ill of the dead. Piffle. Public wickedness, in particular, must continue to be denounced. Otherwise, we should all forget the “Jew” thing, and instead remember and thank Mr. Hitler for that cute little car.
I never saw any evidence that Ronald Reagan thought deeply about much of anything, nor had any interest in introspection or self-understanding. He appears to have carried through life a small cluster of prejudices (such as white supremacist racism) and was fortunate, when his minor career in Hollywood was fading, to be taken up by political operatives who shared those prejudices, and realized that Ronnie had an unusually large measure of the skills of the sophist: “to make the worse appear the better”.
Thus, Reagan could roundly denounce Big Government spending and deficits, while his regime nearly tripled the national debt. “Tax and spend” was bad, but “borrow and spend” was good, as if taxation would never be required for repayment of borrowed monies. Thus, Reagan could denounce tyrants and deify “freedom”, while his regime allied with Iraq to kill hundreds of thousands in a bootless attempt to conquer Iranian oil fields.
As are many non-reflective movie actors, Reagan was good at taking direction and loved being flattered. Thus, when told that regulating greed in the financial markets was bad, and that he could be a hero by “freeing the markets”, he threw his weight behind de-regulation, and his minions and myrmidons in the Republican Partea enacted the laws which would result in the Great Crash of ’08.
But, at day’s end, what matters his degree of knowledge and sources of motivation? Reagan was a long-time supporter and practitioner of state terror, complicit in the deaths of millions in Indochina, Latin America, Africa …
For that alone, as the Good Book says, he would have been better off with a millstone tied around his neck, and flung into the depths of the seas.
I pity the vast majority of those Americans who venerate Ronald Reagan on this, the 100th anniversary of his birth. Only a minority profited from the policies and scams for which he fronted. The majority got screwed, and still they revel in the falsehoods. And drag the rest of us down.
A plague on Reagan, as well as on his brother, Mubarak.
I believe that it was when Gerald Ford died, and I wrote a scathing analysis of his long life of political wickedness, that I was excoriated for speaking ill of the dead. Piffle. Public wickedness, in particular, must continue to be denounced. Otherwise, we should all forget the “Jew” thing, and instead remember and thank Mr. Hitler for that cute little car.
I never saw any evidence that Ronald Reagan thought deeply about much of anything, nor had any interest in introspection or self-understanding. He appears to have carried through life a small cluster of prejudices (such as white supremacist racism) and was fortunate, when his minor career in Hollywood was fading, to be taken up by political operatives who shared those prejudices, and realized that Ronnie had an unusually large measure of the skills of the sophist: “to make the worse appear the better”.
Thus, Reagan could roundly denounce Big Government spending and deficits, while his regime nearly tripled the national debt. “Tax and spend” was bad, but “borrow and spend” was good, as if taxation would never be required for repayment of borrowed monies. Thus, Reagan could denounce tyrants and deify “freedom”, while his regime allied with Iraq to kill hundreds of thousands in a bootless attempt to conquer Iranian oil fields.
As are many non-reflective movie actors, Reagan was good at taking direction and loved being flattered. Thus, when told that regulating greed in the financial markets was bad, and that he could be a hero by “freeing the markets”, he threw his weight behind de-regulation, and his minions and myrmidons in the Republican Partea enacted the laws which would result in the Great Crash of ’08.
But, at day’s end, what matters his degree of knowledge and sources of motivation? Reagan was a long-time supporter and practitioner of state terror, complicit in the deaths of millions in Indochina, Latin America, Africa …
For that alone, as the Good Book says, he would have been better off with a millstone tied around his neck, and flung into the depths of the seas.
I pity the vast majority of those Americans who venerate Ronald Reagan on this, the 100th anniversary of his birth. Only a minority profited from the policies and scams for which he fronted. The majority got screwed, and still they revel in the falsehoods. And drag the rest of us down.
A plague on Reagan, as well as on his brother, Mubarak.
posted by HH at 7:14 PM
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