A Little Less Meager Than The Other One

I love how people like to trot out the corpse of Reagan as the savior of all mankind. I actually liked the old coot till I start seeing all the hero worship going on. People love to remember how good he made them feel, but conveniently forget certain key details about his presidency. Short memories and all...

Take Guilliani in the debate the other night:

Ahmadinejad is clearly irrational. He has to understand it’s not an option. He cannot have nuclear weapons. And he has to look at an American president, and he has to see Ronald Reagan.

I've heard several websites reply to this with confusion. (This was one of the 40 times Reagan was mentioned in the 90 minute debate, btw)

Matthew Inglesias asked: "Is that the version of Ronald Reagan who sold the Iranians weapons, or it is the version that sought to check Iranian power by sending Don Rumsfeld to Baghdad to assure Saddam Hussein that the United States didn’t really mind if he used poison gas to attack the Kurdish civilian population?"

Dick Cheney seems to have better memory than most people, "If we follow Congressman Murtha’s advice and withdraw from Iraq the same way we withdrew from Beirut in 1983…we will simply validate the al Qaeda strategy and guarantee more terrorist attacks in the future."

Reagan was a great feel-good president... but he had his flaws... his own unique ways to screw things up that left us in a lurch. I'm glad he came along and inspired people to start pulling down the governmental tax brackets, but he wasn't the amazing universal god-emperor that most republicans would have you believe.

By the way, these are the questions that Crooks and Liars wanted answered in the debate the other night...and I like em:

• Should the President have power to imprison U.S. citizens without charging them with a crime and without providing them a judicial forum in which they can contest the accusations against them, as the Bush administration did to American Jose Padilla?


• Do you think the process of waterboarding — where the U.S. takes prisoners, straps them to a chair, and pours water on their face so they are in terror of drowning to death — is a practice consistent with America's moral credibility in the world?


• A recent worldwide poll showed that under the Bush presidency, America has become the third most unpopular country in the world — right behind Iran and just ahead of North Korea. Why do you believe that has happened?