If you ask me, Ronald Reagan was absolutely the worst president this country has elected to date.
These are solid, and make a lot of sense.
For a long time, I’ve believed that the conservative obsession with making Reagan into some kind of mythical god is so the generation that’s just about to be able to vote for the first time (and subsequent generations) will just hear “Reagan was the greatest president, ever” so much, that it’ll create enough confusion, when confronted with actual facts, that a lot of people won’t notice that a lot of the massive problems that we struggle with today (weak and collapsing unions, Islamic terrorism, a regressive tax policy that is destroying the middle class) exist specifically because of things Reagan did.
The fact that he was not impeached for Iran/Contra, and the fact that the people involved in that did not all go to jail for the rest of their lives, is just astonishing to me.
There are young’uns who follow me who need to read this.
I was a kid when this man was in office. He was a grade-A dick who was also suffering from severe Alheizmers before he even left office. He should have been replaced by the VP for medical reasons a year into his second term and…nope, didn’t happen.
(Granted, then we would have had to deal with even MORE Bush the First, and bleah.)
ronald reagan is the devil.
I’m surprised the article didn’t mention what he did to higher education funding as well.
We went from a system where you could work a part time job and go to college and usually graduate with little to no debt.
Reagan’s policies changed that too.
Ronald Reagan is the literal devil I’m so glad he’s dead.
It is utterly incredible that the Iran-Contra affair did not result in an impeachment or fucking jail for Reagan.
Quick recap for peeps who don’t know about the Iran-Contra affair. About the time Reagan came into office, Nicaragua had a democratically elected government comprised of a group of people called the Sandinistas. Reagan was fucking obsessed with removing them from power because they were a leftist group. I say obsessed because every adviser he had at the time told him to focus on the Middle East because there was some serious shit happening there. Literally no one else in the government thought Central America was crucial geographical area at the time. But Reagan was seriously paranoid of countries turning communist in South America. So he starts selling weapons large-scale to right wing, bordering fascist, counter-revolutionaries in Nicaragua or “Contras”. The Contras aren’t strong enough with their low numbers to confront the Sandinista government directly so they targeted their US weapons at civilians. That’s right, the US was legitimately a state sponsor of terrorism in the 1980′s (but we’ll never admit that). Congress was pissed. So they quickly pass the Boland Amendment that forbade Reagan from selling more weaponry to the Contras. But ho-ho guess what? He fucking did it anyway, by secretly selling weapons to Iran which was also super sketchy at the time because the US had declared Iran a state sponsor of terrorism and could not be trusted with advanced weaponry!! He took the money he made off of selling the weapons to Iran at ridiculous markups to the buy more weapons for the Contras in Nicaragua, who continued mine the country killing thousands of innocent civilians along the way.
Let’s do a tally: not only was he actively sponsoring terrorism in not one, but two countries, he was straight up ignoring the law while doing so. So next time someone starts talking about how wonderful Ronald Reagan’s was, ask them if 70,000 dead Nicaraguans would say the same thing.
