The modern Republican Party lives by a myth, a deification of the 40th President, Ronald Reagan.
Based on the mean spirit of the Republican Party today and their ignorance of history, Ronald Reagan could NOT be nominated for President in 2016.
Ronald Reagan signed abortion bills as California Governor.
Ronald Reagan had an “11th Commandment”, not attack fellow Republicans, and he was willing to work with a Congress controlled by the opposition Democrats.
Ronald Reagan raised taxes multiple times, in 1982, 1983, and 1986, and made it harder for middle class people, while benefiting the wealthy elite.
Ronald Reagan made a deal with Democratic Speaker of the House Thomas “Tip” O’Neill to save Social Security, not destroy it.
Ronald Reagan signed an amnesty for three million undocumented or illegal immigrants in 1986.
Ronald Reagan tripled the national debt from about $900 million to $2.6 trillion in his eight years in office.
Ronald Reagan increased the federal bureaucracy by 325,000 workers, after saying he would cut the work force.
Ronald Reagan gave in to terrorism by withdrawing troops from Lebanon after the Beirut bombing of the Marine barracks killed 241 Americans in 1983.
Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire”, and then negotiated arms agreements with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Ronald Reagan worked with Saddam Hussein, and hailed the freedom fighters fighting Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, including a guerrilla fighter named Osama Bin Laden.
You can be sure that most Republican voters and most Republican officeholders either do not know the truth about Ronald Reagan, or do not care, but if Reagan was running for office now with these parts of his record in office, he could not be nominated!
MoveOn.org has a petition for more Democratic debates. http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/allowdebate
I hear that Scott Walker is dropping out and the next Republican debate will only have the top tier. No more kiddie table.
Goodbye and good riddance to Scott Walker, who was the Koch Brothers favorite and set out to destroy labor rights, a horrible crime against ordinary middle class and working class citizens.
Walker was a terrible, mean spirited person, and he should not pause in saying goodbye or the door will hit him on the way out!
Gilmore might as well drop out too. He can’t even make it to the kiddie debates.
HAHA, yes on Gilmore and really on most of the candidates, a bunch of losers for the most part, sad to say!
Sometimes by just making a statement as an assertion of fact while leaving out half of the story if not more is terribly misleading to say the least. And unfortunately I see more than one example of that in this very interesting (though biased) post.
1. Ronald Reagan signed abortion bills as California Governor.
Facts: When the issue surfaced in the first months of his governorship, Reagan was unsure how to react. Surprising as it may seem today, in 1967 abortion was not the great public issue that it is today. Reagan later admitted that abortion had been “a subject I’d never given much thought to.†Moreover, his aides were divided on the question.
Nonetheless, he signed the bill. Reagan and his staff calculated that if he vetoed the bill, his veto would be overridden by the state legislature. Therefore, he decided to do what he could to make the bill less harmful, arguing for the insertion of certain language that eliminated its worst features and allowed for abortion only in rare cases — such as rape or incest, or where pregnancy would gravely impair the physical or mental health of the mother.
The Therapeutic Abortion Act became law. And as would happen with nearly every abortion law in the years ahead, the mental-health provision was abused by patient and doctor alike.
Thus, from a total of 518 legal abortions in California in 1967, the number of abortions would soar to an annual average of 100,000 in the remaining years of Reagan’s two terms — more abortions than in any U.S. state prior to the advent of Roe v. Wade.
Reagan was shocked at the unintended consequences of his action and was left with an “undefinable sense of guilt†after watching abortions skyrocket. This was probably the only time as governor or president that Reagan acknowledged a mistake on major legislation (the other one being the 1986 amnesty of illegal aliens) and was perhaps Reagan’s greatest disappointment in public life.
2. Ronald Reagan worked with Saddam Hussein, and hailed the freedom fighters fighting Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, including a guerrilla fighter named Osama Bin Laden.
Facts:The USSR, it will be recalled, invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 1979. The Soviets proceeded to brutalize a country that, though still very poor, had made surprising progress since the 1950s. How would the United States respond? In January 1980, then Presidential candidate Reagan urged Washington to provide Stinger antiaircraft missiles to Afghans fighting the Red Army. He called specifically for supplying the rebels with “shoulder-launched, heat-seeking missiles that can shoot down Soviet helicopter gunships.”
In due course, the Carter administration did aid the mujahedeen. Then in November 1980, Reagan was elected president, and throughout his eight years in office he continued assisting the Afghan rebels. Those American Stingers ultimately became the bullet to the chest of the Soviet campaign, central to the Kremlin’s devastating withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, and a vital contribution to the demise of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. The mujahedeen–literally, “strugglers”–were a force specific to the Soviet war in Afghanistan. They comprised an assortment of factions. There were Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns, fundamentalist Sunnis and moderate Sunnis, Shiites, clerics and non-clerics, Wahhabis, Islamists with links to madrassas in Iran and Islamists connected to madrassas in Pakistan, extremists who came out of Hezbollah and extremists with roots in the Muslim Brotherhood. There were even religious reformers who favored a secular state–the polar opposite of the theocracy the Taliban would one day impose on Afghanistan.
While it is true that many of these mujahedeen would later make up the Taliban, others would oppose it and help to drive it from power. In particular, many former mujahedeen joined the Northern Alliance, the Afghan coalition that fought alongside U.S. troops in October and November 2001 to overthrow the Taliban.
Today, some former members of the mujahedeen are part of the democratic movement trying to move Afghanistan back to the days of promise and modernization that preceded the Soviet ruination of the country. That said, it is true that we do not know precisely the percentages of mujahedeen who subsequently joined al Qaeda, the Taliban, the Northern Alliance, and the small but growing band of liberal democrats inside Afghanistan.
But this we do know: To assume that every member of the mujahedeen resembled the 9/11 hijackers is to engage in stereotyping of a kind that usually enrages liberals. Afghans were intimately familiar with the vicious nature of the Marxist regime that the militantly atheist Soviet Union had tried to prop up in Kabul, just as they knew the egregious tactics employed by the Red Army, from the deployment of chemical weapons to the use of booby-trapped toys. It is understandable that many Afghans–not all of them reactionary Islamic extremists–fought for freedom from these killers. The mujahedeen would have existed irrespective of U.S. policy–ditto for Osama bin Laden. The Afghan resistance coalesced without us. Our objective was to help it win, and thereby further undermine the Soviet Union at a desperate time in its history. It was the Soviet invasion that drew Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan, not U.S. aid to the resistance. Finally, anyone who would blame Reagan for supporting the mujahedeen must also point the finger at Democrats: As noted above, it was Jimmy Carter who first began aiding the mujahedeen, at the urging of top advisers like Zbigniew Brzezinski and with the support of a Democratic Congress. And many Democratic congressmen and senators continued to vote to authorize the aid through the Reagan years. Helping the mujahedeen was a no-brainer: It was the right thing to do.
The Republicans’ memories of Ronald Reagan do not match with everything he did throughout his presidency. They look to him, with their deep admiration, because of his two landslide presidential elections.