An Intellectuals appraisal of Reagans legacy

It was once said that if you confiscated all wealth - real estate, cash, etc. etc. - of all Americans and redistributed them evenly so that every person had exactly the same, within twenty years the distribution of that wealth would be the same that it is now.

Foxfrye, tell me how were the African Americans better off before those evil civil liberties began.

Again I will respectfully disagree Edgar. So many so-called compassionate programs have destroyed important black institutions, have decimated the black family, and have consigned a whole generation to a welfare mentality. I don't call that compassion. I call that pimping for votes. I believe that Republicans have been far less guilty of that kind of 'crime'.

robertscheer.com



A Nice Guy's Nasty Policies
For worse, Ronald Reagan was both more and less than he seemed

June 8, 2004 - I liked Ronald Reagan, despite the huge divide between us politically. Reagan was a charming old pro who gave me hours of his time in a series of interviews beginning in 1966 when he was running for governor, simply because he enjoyed the give and take. In fact, I often found myself defending the Gipper whenever I was confronted with an East Coast pundit determined to denigrate anyone, particularly actors, from my adopted state. Yet, looking back at his record, I am appalled that I warmed to the man as much as I did.

The fact is that Reagan abandoned the Roosevelt New Deal ?- which he admitted had saved his family during the Great Depression - in favor of a belief in the efficacy of massive corporate welfare inculcated in him by his paymasters at Warner Bros., General Electric and the conservative lecture circuit. Though Reagan the man was hardly mean-spirited, Reagan the politician betrayed the social programs and trade unionism he once believed in so fiercely.

Let's start with his leadership of California, where he launched attacks on the state's once-incomparable public universities and devastated its mental health system. Foreshadowing future trumped-up invasions of tiny Grenada and Nicaragua, he sent thousands of National Guardsmen to tear-gas Berkeley.

It also became increasingly clear that although the man wasn't unintelligent, his ability to mingle truth with fantasy was frightening. At different times, Reagan - who infamously said that "facts are stupid things" - falsely claimed to have ended poverty in Los Angeles; implied he was personally involved in the liberation of Europe's concentration camps; argued that trees cause most pollution; said that the Hollywood blacklist, to which he contributed names, never existed; described as "freedom fighters" the Contra thugs and the religious fundamentalists in Afghanistan who would later become Al Qaeda; and claimed that fighting a "limited" nuclear war was not an insane idea.

But to see him as only a bumpkin - as some did - was to very much underestimate him. Like Nixon, the Teflon president was a survivor who'd come up the hard way, and many journalists and politicians who didn't understand that invariably were surprised by his resiliency and savvy. Although he generally was compliant with his handlers, whenever the campaign pros or rigid ideologues got in the way of his or Nancy's instincts, they were summarily discarded.

Even when his ideas were silly, his intentions often seemed good. For example, one of his dumbest and costliest pet projects, the "Star Wars" missile defense program, which he first announced when I interviewed him for the Los Angeles Times in 1980, was touted by Reagan as a peace offering to the Soviets.

And his legendary ability to effectively project an upbeat, confident worldview managed to obscure many of the negative consequences of his policies. For example, he made the terrible mistake of willfully ignoring the burgeoning AIDS epidemic at a time when action could have saved millions. Unlike many conservatives, however, he was not driven by homophobia. Instead, Reagan allowed AIDS to spread for the same reason he pointedly savaged programs to help the poor: He was genuinely convinced that government programs exacerbated problems - unless they catered to the needs of the businessmen he had come to revere.

In the White House, he ran up more debt than any earlier president - primarily to serve the requests of what Republican President Eisenhower had, with alarm, termed the "military-industrial complex." (George W. Bush has broken that record.)

Apologists for this waste argue that throwing money at the defense industry broke the back of the Soviet Union and ended the Cold War. But the Soviet Union was already broken, as Mikhail S. Gorbachev acknowledged quite freely when he came to power in the 1980s. Rather, what Reagan does deserve considerable credit for is ignoring the dire warnings of the hawks and responding enthusiastically to Gorbachev in their historic Reykjavík summit, where the two leaders called for a nuclear-free world.

Let it be remembered, then, that in the closing scene of his presidency Reagan embraced the peacemakers, rejecting the cheerleaders of Armageddon and was then loudly castigated by the very neoconservatives - most vociferously Richard Perle - who have claimed the Reagan mantle for the post-Cold War militarism of the current administration.

But they've all lived it both ways. They've lived under segregation, they went through the reforms of the 50's and 60's, and they know how it is now. They know what they're talking about.

From everything that we can ascertain from the historical record, Reagan's religious background, feelings, or beliefs had nothing to do with his political response to the AIDS epidemic. His appalling policies led to enormous setbacks for HIV/AIDS science and research, discrimination against people with AIDS, and the lack of any comprehensive outreach for prevention or education work, all adding to the already staggering amount of mounting deaths. His policies on AIDS were a product of indifference, disdain, self-imposed ignorance, and political capitulation to a staunchly reactionary and religious Republican constituency that was to reshape not only the party, but also the state of U.S. politics.

Although AIDS was first reported in the medical and popular press in 1981, it was only in October 1987 that President Reagan publicly spoke about the epidemic. By the end of that year 59,572 AIDS cases had been reported and 27,909 of those women and men had died. How could this happen? How could Reagan not say anything? Do anything?

Throughout all of this Ronald Reagan did nothing. When Rock Hudson, a friend and colleague of the Reagan's, was diagnosed and died in 1985 (one of the 20,740 cases reported that year), Reagan still did not speak out. When family friend William F. Buckley, in a March 18, 1986 New York Times article, called for mandatory testing of HIV and said that HIV+ gay men should have this information forcibly tattooed on their buttocks (and IV drug users on their arms), Reagan said nothing. In 1986 (after five years of complete silence) when Surgeon General C. Everett Koop released a report calling for AIDS education in schools, Bennett and Bauer did everything possible to undercut and prevent funding for Koop's too-little too-late initiative. By the end of 1986, 37,061 AIDS cases had been reported; 16,301 people had died.

The most memorable Reagan AIDS moment was at the 1986 centenary rededication of the Statue of Liberty. The Reagan's were there sitting next to the French Prime Minister and his wife, Francois and Danielle Mitterrand. Bob Hope was on stage entertaining the all-star audience. In the middle of a series of one-liners, Hope quipped, "I just heard that the Statue of Liberty has AIDS, but she doesn't know if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Fairy." As the television camera panned the audience, the Mitterrands looked appalled. The Reagans were laughing. By the end of 1989, 115,786 women and men had been diagnosed with AIDS in the United States?-more then 70,000 of them had died.

"As I recall, from 1984 onward ?-?- and bear in mind that the AIDS virus was not identified until 1982 ?-?- every Reagan budget contained a large sum of money specifically earmarked for AIDS," says Peter Robinson, a former Reagan speechwriter and author of How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life. "Now, people will argue that it wasn't enough," Robinson adds. "But, of course, that's the kind of argument that takes place over every item in the federal budget. Nevertheless, the notion that he was somehow callous or had a cruel or cynical attitude towards homosexuals or AIDS victims is just ridiculous."

In February 1986, President Reagan's blueprint for the next fiscal year stated: "[T]his budget provides funds for maintaining ?-?- and in some cases expanding ?-?- high priority programs in crucial areas of national interest……including drug enforcement, AIDS research, the space program, nonmilitary research and national security." Reagan's budget message added that AIDS "remains the highest public health priority of the Department of Health and Human Services."
http://www.nationalreview.com/murdock/murdock200312030913.asp