He was a crook

That is the most important thing to remember about Ronald Reagan on his 100th birthday: He was every bit as vicious, venal, twisted, and crooked as Richard Nixon. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Reagan was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. He ran one of the most corrupt administrations in U.S. history -- over 138 Reagan Administration officials convicted or indicted, and his whole political career was based upon racism and the BIg Lie theory. Reagan was Limbaugh with a smile, a racist thug who would lie about his own mother's milk if that's what was necessary to attain his goals. Whether he was jibbering in 1962 about how Medicare would destroy democracy in America and turn the U.S. into a socialist hellhole of crumbling grey concrete tenements, empty store shelves, and tyranny and then later lying about it on national TV when confronted by Jimmy Carter, or blatantly pandering to racists by kicking off his Presidential campaign in a KKK strong hold and inventing fictional racial stereotypes to get racists to vote for him, Ronald Reagan was a liar of the first degree, a man who never let the truth stand in the way of getting where he wanted to be -- which was to be President of the United States. And once President, he then doubled taxes on the working class via his massive hike in the payroll tax (paid by workers) and his shifting of responsibilities once handled by the federal government to the states (which required the states to hike taxes drastically -- especially sales taxes which fall more harshly upon the poor, which went from 1% in my state to 8% by the end of the Reagan Administration) while slashing taxes for the rich, and set into play the economic dynamics of the next thirty years, where the rich got richer and the rest of us got the shaft, all the while pretending to be a "man of the people" -- while doing his best to discredit the only organization We The People can use to defend ourselves against predators -- that is, government, which, Reagan implied, was an alien imposition upon America rather than the way that We The People chose to provide ourselves with services that aren't economical or possible otherwise.

Ronald Reagan took Richard Nixon's maxim of "if the President does it, it can't be illegal" and used it to run a regime whose corruption in retrospect is astounding -- and he got away with it. He was not only a crook, but a smart crook, one who knew how to keep his own hands clean while his subordinates did his dirty work. And he set the tone for the next thirty years, by showing people like Rush Limbaugh and his ilk that they could blatantly lie and never be called on it by the media.

That, then, is Ronald Reagan and his toxic legacy. He is a man who did the most to create the environment of the past 30 years that has hollowed out the American economy and caused America's military might to become such a hollowed-out relic of its former self that a bunch of medieval asswipes with 1950's-era weapons beat it in Iraq and are beating it in Afghanistan. His anti-government anti-tax anarchist rhetoric resonated with the large number of Americans who want the benefits of living in a civilized nation but don't want to pay for it, his racist rhetoric and lies set the stage for people like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh to pollute our national discourse with hatred and lies, and we are all the poorer for it.

= Badtux the History Penguin

My own relationship with Ronald Reagan at the time was one of extreme distrust. I didn't "buy" his awe-shucks gee whiz schtick. Unfortunately these were the days prior to the Internet, and there simply was not the resources then to turn my suspicion that the man was a fraud into proof. In today's Internet era Reagan's many lies would have made his candidacy a mockery, he had too much history by the time he was elected in 1980 to survive Internet-level deep scrutiny. Unfortunately while the Internet has proven a boon for preventing experienced liars and crooks like Reagan from being elected, the result has been blank slates like George W. Bush and Barack Obama being elected, where you haven't the foggiest notion what they're going to do after election,

Blatantly inspired by Hunter S. Thompson's obituary for Richard Nixon. Too bad I'm not half the writer that Doc was...