Revisionist History: the Canonization of Saint Ronald

“Today history is what we say it is.” television executive speaking to the Washington Post’s Jim Hoagland

Watching last week’s coverage of the Reagan state funeral was probably one of the most disheartening things I’ve ever experienced in the media. Actually after the first couple of days I had to give up as I just couldn’t take any more of the media overdosing on coverage of every trivial aspect of the state funeral preparations or pundits trying to top each other’s efforts to canonize Reagan and rebrand him as one of the best presidents America has ever had. Even ESPN got in on the act as they interviewed NBA (I think) officials about whether they had considered postponing playoff games when Reagan was shot.

WTF? Did I miss the memo or something? I was old enough to remember the Reagan era and, as I recall, it covered one of the lower points in modern American history. This is a man who basically ended his term in near-disgrace over the Iran-Contra scandal after his administration, in violation of the law, secretly sold weapons to Iran, even though they were on the State Department’s list of terrorist states at the time, and then illegally diverted the funds to the Nicuaraguan Conatras to fund their insurgency against the Marxist (but democratically elected) Sandinista government. (Newsweek)

Here’s some other highlights from his two terms as president for those who either missed it or don’t remember:

– Reagan infamously thought trees created the greenhouse gases that caused global warming thereby wasting valuable time and diverting funds and resources away from research efforts that could have helped head off this problem years earlier.

– he spent billions on his Strategic Defense Initiative (aka the “Star Wars” missile defense system), which was never completed (or even proven to work), based on the premise of not only defending the US from Soviet missile attacks but also on his sincere belief that it would protect the US from alien attack (I am not making this up).

– he took about six years to acknowledge that AIDS was a serious public health problem that needed to be addressed and researched and not just an issue to pander to the “moral majority” conservatives with by baiting gays and denouncing the homosexual “lifestyle choice.”

And, as reported in Newsweek:

– he failed to shrink big government, contrary to one of his supposed claims to fame. The number of federal employees actually grew by 7 percent during his two terms.

– federal spending also increased as a proportion of national output.

and

– while, committed to balancing the budget, he ran the largest peacetime deficits in American history and tripled the national debt. (more…)