Excellent article about the real legacy of Ronald Reagan…
This is exactly how I remember it…
Hat tip to PamsHouseBlend.com for originally posting this….
America is gushing Sunday over former President Ronald Reagan in recognition of what would have been his 100th birthday. Produced by Reagan groupies, the long-weekend celebrations at the newly primped Reagan Library and Museum in Simi Valley are glitzy and reverent evocations of an imagined man.
In this white-washed version of history, Reagan, not Soviet Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev (remember “glasnost,” “perestroika,” and the impact of Levis, Coke and “Dynasty”?) is credited with “tearing down” the Berlin Wall; the trillion dollars in debt Reagan wracked up during his “conservative” presidency is ignored; “supply-side” or “trickle-down” economics” still works, even though theory-originator David Stockman says it doesn’t; the Reagan-approved secret Iran-Contra scandal was patriotic, not subversive; and he is still the “Great Communicator” – who conned working-class “Reagan Democrats” while catering to the rich, creating a huge surge in homelessness, reveling in unchecked deregulation and extolling union-busting with the mass firing of the over-worked, striking PATCO flight controllers – even before there were trained replacements.
AND:
For LGBT people, Ronald Reagan’s presidency was the far different “mourning in America.” And unlike Nixon who was forced to resign for covering up the political Watergate scandal, Reagan didn’t even bother covering up his cold disdain, his deliberate neglect, his abject refusal to help gay men stricken in 1981 by a strange new communicable disease that turned out to be AIDS. But there was no “AIDSgate” for Reagan; the White House agreed with the Religious Right that gays deserved what they got – they deserved to die.
Rev. Jerry Falwell, head of the Moral Majority, said, “AIDS is the wrath of God upon homosexuals.” Patrick Buchanan, Reagan’s Press Secretary, said AIDS was “nature’s revenge on gay men.” Antigay Gary Bauer, Reagan’s domestic policy advisor, kept Surgeon General C. Everett Koop (selected because he was an anti-abortion Christian fundamentalist) away from Reagan:
”[In 1986] President Reagan asked the surgeon general to prepare a report on AIDS as the United States confirmed its ten-thousandth case. Leaders of the evangelical movement did not want Koop to write the report, nor did senior White House staffers who shared Koop’s evangelical convictions. As Dr. Koop related to me, “Gary Bauer [Reagan’s chief advisor on domestic policy] … was my nemesis in Washington because he kept me from the president. He kept me from the cabinet and he set up a wall of enmity between me and most of the people that surrounded Reagan because he believed that anybody who had AIDS ought to die with it. That was God’s punishment for them.”
via Ronald Reagan’s Real Legacy: Death, Heartache and Silence Over AIDS : LGBT | POV.
Lost in the 21st Century 
Gas crisis, stock market crisis, AIDS, Iran- Contra, high unemployment, etcera, etcera, and on infinitum, Ronald Reagan’s bravado, charisma, and “star” quality kept him in office for 8 long horrible years. He was not a very popular U.S. President, or at least not well liked but he was able to charm the American people to a 2nd term, and the right wing didn’t think Michael Dukakis name was very American..it didn’t roll off your tongue! With Nancy’s astrology at work, and strong-arming her husband’s cabinet to make sure they protected him at all costs, it’s no wonder the country suffered the way it did during the 80’s. I don’t wish ill will on anyone, but if he had been assassinated then would have left us with G.H.W.Bush, and maybe we would have been better off…,but not by much. Reagan should have been impeached, but he was the “teflon Don” because nothing ever stuck to his character or to endanger his presidency. He was the worse POTUS in my lifetime,…until George W.Bush came a long. Thanks Barbara! NOT. I will say this as an addendum, a Reagan Republican was infinitely better than the mutations that followed. There was not the mean-spirited rancor of today’s Republicans.
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Just a correction to my earlier post. It was Walter “Fritz” Mondale who ran against Reagan in 1984, and Dukakis who ran against G.H.W.Bush in 1988.
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