There's a foul little piece in the WAPO today entitled 'Five myths about Ronald Reagan's Legacy'...proof that the obscene weasels on the Left can always be counted on to use outright lies and deconstructionism to try and pervert the narrative and advance the socialist agenda.
The first thing one notices about the piece is that it's written by one Will Bunch, a Soros tool employed by Media Matters to write this sort of tripe and probably to clean the latrines in between his stints at the computer.
It's rife with cute phrases like 'several polls found' and 'many experts say', a variation on the old Soviet line 'everyone knows'. And it cites Lou Cannon's fact-challenged hatchet job 'The Role of a Lifetime' as merely a 'Reagan biographer', in an attempt to create some faux legitimacy.
The piece starts out by attacking Reagan's popularity, believe it or not. Yes, I know...two land slide victories and record approval numbers after he left office mean nothing. I mean, all he did in his re-election bid was to carry everything but Mondale's home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia, and if Reagan's campaign manager Ed Rollins is to be believed, the Republicans could have taken Minnesota as well with a bit more effort.
Because the Left doesn't understand these things, this rancid tool Bunch can't figure out why Reagan is so revered by his countrymen. He can't fathom why this man from humble origins so impressed us with his grace, love of country,humor, eloquence and courage.
That courage came into play on a number of occasions. After he was shot, President Reagan's one question to his top aides as he was being wheeled into the operating room was “Who’s minding the store?”
Even James Reston from Pravda-on-the-Hudson, hardly a fan of the president, wrote afterwards “Everybody knows that people seldom act in the margin between life and death with such light-hearted valor as they do in the movies. Yet Ronald Reagan did.”
The next thing Bunch attempts to attack is Reagan's legacy as a tax cutter. He glibly blames the recession on Reagan's 1981 tax cut, conveniently forgetting what kind of mess Jimmy Carter left when Reagan walked into the White House. He also leaves out the pertinent fact that Reagan had to deal with a Democrat-dominated Congress, who fought him at every turn.
In spite of that, President Reagan's policies cured the nation's economic ills, and of course Bunch can't deny that so he simply makes up something, saying that Reagan's 1982 Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act was a 'tax increase' - a claim that anyone with an elementary knowledge of mathematics would find difficult to understand. Oh well, maybe if you're a Leftist Keynesian...
He also mentions Reagan's later payroll tax increase, again conveniently leaving out that it was a necessity to keep the program solvent because Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats had raided the Social Security Trust Fund to pay for the Great Society, and faced with picking the lesser of two evils President Reagan chose a modest and temporary payroll tax that he could get through Congress.
Bunch also counts on people forgetting how well Reagan's fiscal policy actually worked, crediting 'deficits' with making George HW Bush a one term president 'as many experts say.' Of course, he's not going to mention that what really doomed Bush was his failure to follow up on Reagan's legacy, which meant that a giddy little gunsel like Ross Perot was able siphon off enough conservative votes to allow Bill Clinton to slither into the White House as a minority president.
The most inadvertently funny part was Bunch's attack on Reagan's foreign policy.Remember, President Reagan was the man who, for the first time, called the Soviet Union what it was, an Evil Empire and inspired dissidents and freedom lovers all over the world. Moreover, he knew they could be beaten, and with allies like Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II he stopped the rot and the retreat of the free world.
It's worth remembering that in the early 1980s, prominent Lefties like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and John K. Galbraith were lauding the economic accomplishments of the Soviet Union in the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. Just like today, the 'capitalism has failed' contingent were out in full force.
President Reagan saw it differently. He had the wisdom to foresee that what he called a “global campaign for freedom” would prevail over the Commies and in that same speech to the British Parliament, reminded them that “the Soviet Union itself is not immune to this reality.”
Who woulda thunk it? The 'neanderthal', the 'B-picture actor' was right! Just as he predicted, by the end of the decade the Evil Empire was history.
Unlike the current occupant of the White House, Reagan understood that the only real peace comes from strength, not disarmament.
At the Reykjavik summit, when both sides were very close to a far-ranging agreement on nuclear weapons and various foreign policy establishment types were pressuring the Gipper to sign on the dotted line, President Reagan had the strength to walk away from the table when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev pushed him to curtail SDI. As Gorby related in his memoirs, he was astounded at Reagan's strength and adherence to principle, which he never expected.
The arms race Reagan manipulated the Soviets into not only helped our own economy and refurbished our armed forces, it bankrupted the Russians and accelerated the fall of the Soviet system, something the Left has never really forgiven Reagan for and never will.
Ronald Reagan also understood how to deal with terrorism. When Moamar Khadaffi of Libya bombed a disco in Berlin and murdered a number of US servicemen and civilians, President Reagan didn't write any silly statements condemning a 'man-made disaster.' He sent in the Phantoms to remind Khaddaffi of whom we were and what kind of vermin Khadaffi was, with the result that nothing more was heard out of him until Reagan was safely out of office.
Ditto elsewhere. Reagan made a practice of assisting anti-communist forces all over the globe, to the point where National security analyst Peter Schweizer estimates that the cash-strapped Soviets were spending $8 billion a year in 1980's dollars that they couldn't afford to combat them. Unfortunately, one of those places was Afghanistan and it laid the groundwork for problems a decade or so later when a very different kind of man was in the White House, one who demonstrably took his eye off the ball and refused custody of an enemy of America like Osama bin-Laden even when he was offered to him on a silver platter. But a president deals with problems he faces at the time he's in office, and Reagan did.
He wasn't perfect, but he left the nation richer, more secure and infinitely better off than he found it. Moreover, he gave Americans back pride in ourselves and our country and put an end to the 'malaise' Jimmy Carter bequeathed us.
He was a builder who served his country well and a man of honor, courage, faith and honesty. The weasels never understand such men, because ideas like duty, honor and patriotism are foreign to them.
Res Ipsa Loquiter.
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