Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Dear Ronald Reagan: Thanks for Wrecking America

Charles P. Pierce at his best.-SS

Dear Ronald Reagan: Thanks for Wrecking America:

Turns out yesterday would have been Ronald Reagan's 101st birthday. In all the excitement over the tsunami of Santorum that engulfed the country, it plumb got right by me. So, let me say, in my own belated way, and because behind-the-times was the basis for Reagan's entire career, happy birthday, ya silly old coot.

How do you like your party now, Ronnie? A Mormon everyone hates, a world-historical balloon animal 10 years past his sell-by date, a survivalist crank from Texas, and a guy who is pretty much a dick. That's the party you and your boys created. That's the end product of the "conservative movement" of which you were the amiable and occasionally coherent figurehead, a prop in your own life. You know how you know that's the case, Ronnie? Look how hard they're trying to memorialize you in concrete and marble. They stuck your name on National Airport, and on the biggest and ugliest building in Washington, D.C., to celebrate your devotion to smaller government. What was it that Bogart said in that detective movie?

The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.

You taught us that "deficits don't matter." (Dick Cheney himself reminded us of that.) You sold missiles to the terrorist-sponsoring mullahs in Iran so you could sponsor our own priest-slaughtering terrorists in Central America, thereby laying the groundwork for all the secret deceptions in foreign policy that led to the Iraq war, which was designed and launched by some of your own old Iran-Contra hands, and thereby also laying the groundwork for the destructive increase in presidential power that continues (alas) to this day, under a Democratic president.

Go read the whole thing!

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